Mawidi: Smart Appointments Booking System for Social Distancing

In traditional systems of banks, the booking process requires the client to be in the same place, the client withdraws a numbered paper from an electronic device and then sits in the waiting area until his/her number appears on the screen. However, these systems may cause many problems such as wasting clients’ time, overcrowding in the waiting area, slow workflow, etc. In this paper, a smart appointment booking system is developed to solve the problems of traditional booking systems of banks and achieve social distancing. The proposed system applies Quick Response (QR) code, Global Positioning System (GPS), and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technologies to improve workflow and achieve social distancing in banks. The proposed system is developed on two sides. On the client-side, a mobile application is developed, a QR is generated for the user, which contains booking information, and GPS is used to determine the location of the client as it is only possible to book if he/she is within 100 meters from the bank. Due to the restrictions imposed caused by the spread of COVID-19, BLE technology works to ensure social distancing between clients. On the employee side, a website is created to enable the employee to deal with the client. The proposed system is expected to reduce problems related to traditional systems, gain client satisfaction, facilitate workflow for employees, and contribute to reduce the spread of COVID-19

Energy-aware virtual machine consolidation for cloud data centers

One of the issues in virtual machine consolidation (VMC) in cloud data centers is categorizing different workloads to classify the state of physical servers. In this paper, we propose a new scheme of host's load categorization in energy-performance VMC framework to reduce energy consumption while meeting the quality of service (QoS) requirement. Specifically the under loaded hosts are classified into three further states, i.e., Under loaded, normal and critical by applying the under load detection algorithm. We also design overload detection and virtual machine (VM) selection policies. The simulation results show that the proposed policies outperform the existing policies in Cloud Sim in terms of both energy and service level agreements violation (SLAV) reduction

Predicting the Epidemiological Outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Saudi Arabia

The coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak continues to spread rapidly across the world and has been declared as pandemic by World Health Organization (WHO). Saudi Arabia was among the countries that was affected by the deadly and contagious virus. Using a real-time data from 2 March 2020 to 15 May 2020 collected from Saudi Ministry of Health, we aimed to give a local prediction of the epidemic in Saudi Arabia. We used two models: the Logistic Growth and the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered for real-time forecasting the confirmed cases of COVID-19 across Saudi Arabia. Our models predicted that the epidemics of COVID-19 will have total cases of 69,000 to 79,000 cases. The simulations also predicted that the outbreak will entering the final-phase by end of June 2020

Smart information desk system with voice assistant for universities

This article aims to develop a smart information desk system through a smart mirror for universities. It is a mirror with extra capabilities of displaying answers for academic inquiries such as asking about the lecturers’ office numbers and hours, exams dates and times on the mirror surface. In addition, the voice recognition feature was used to answer spoken inquiries in audio responds to serve all types of users including disabled ones. Furthermore, the system showed general information such as date, weather, time and the university map. The smart mirror was connected to an outdoor camera to monitor the traffics at the university entrance gate. The system was implemented on a Raspberry Pi 4 model B connected to a two-way mirror and an infrared (IR) touch frame. The results of this study helped to overcome the problem of the information desk absence in the university. Therefore, it helped users to save their time and effort in making requests for important academic information