Quality of Context in Context-Aware Systems

Context-aware Systems (CASs) are becoming increasingly popular and can be found in the areas of wearable computing, mobile computing, robotics, adaptive and intelligent user interfaces. Sensors are the corner stone of context capturing however, sensed context data are commonly prone to imperfection due to the technical limitations of sensors, their availability, dysfunction, and highly dynamic nature of environment. Consequently, sensed context data might be imprecise, erroneous, conflicting, or simply missing. To limit the impact of context imperfection on the behavior of a context-aware system, a notion of Quality of Context (QoC) is used to measure quality of any information that is used as context information. Adaptation is performed only if the context data used in the decision-making has an appropriate quality level. This paper reports an analytical review for state of the art quality of context in context-aware systems and points to future research directions

Enhancing the quality of service for real time traffic over optical burst switching (OBS) networks with ensuring the fairness for other traffics

Optical burst switching (OBS) networks have been attracting much consideration as a promising approach to build the next generation optical Internet. A solution for enhancing the Quality of Service (QoS) for high priority real time traffic over OBS with the fairness among the traffic types is absent in current OBS ’ QoS schemes. In this paper we present a novel Real Time Quality of Service with Fairness Ratio (RT-QoSFR) scheme that can adapt the burst assembly parameters according to the traffic QoS needs in order to enhance the real time traffic QoS requirements and to ensure the fairness for other traffic. The results show that RT-QoSFR scheme is able to fulfill the real time traffic requirements (end to end delay, and loss rate) ensuring the fairness for other traffics under various conditions such as the type of real time traffic and traffic load. RT-QoSFR can guarantee that the delay of the real time traffic packets does not exceed the maximum packets transfer delay value. Fur- thermore, it can reduce the real time traffic packets loss, at the same time guarantee the fair- ness for non real time traffic packets by determining the ratio of real time traffic inside the burst to be 50 – 60%, 30 – 40%, and 10 – 20% for high, normal, and low traffic loads respectively

Tuning Deep Neural Networks for Predicting Energy Consumption in Arid Climate Based on Buildings Characteristics

The dramatic growth in the number of buildings worldwide has led to an increase interest in predicting energy consumption, especially for the case of residential buildings. As the heating and cooling system highly affect the operation cost of buildings; it is worth investigating the development of models to predict the heating and cooling loads of buildings. In contrast to the majority of the existing related studies, which are based on historical energy consumption data, this study considers building characteristics, such as area and floor height, to develop prediction models of heating and cooling loads. In particular, this study proposes deep neural networks models based on several hyper-parameters: the number of hidden layers, the number of neurons in each layer, and the learning algorithm. The tuned models are constructed using a dataset generated with the Integrated Environmental Solutions Virtual Environment (IESVE) simulation software for the city of Buraydah city, the capital of the Qassim region in Saudi Arabia. The Qassim region was selected because of its harsh arid climate of extremely cold winters and hot summers, which means that lot of energy is used up for cooling and heating of residential buildings. Through model tuning, optimal parameters of deep learning models are determined using the following performance measures: Mean Square Error (MSE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Regression (R) values, and coefficient of determination (R2 ). The results obtained with the five-layer deep neural network model, with 20 neurons in each layer and the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm, outperformed the results of the other models with a lower number of layers. This model achieved MSE of 0.0075, RMSE 0.087, R and R2 both as high as 0.99 in predicting the heating load and MSE of 0.245, RMSE of 0.495, R and R2 both as high as 0.99 in predicting the cooling load. As the developed prediction models were based on buildings characteristics, the outcomes of the research may be relevant to architects at the pre-design stage of heating and cooling energy-efficient buildings.Qassim University, represented by the Deanship of Scientific Research, (coc-2019-2-2-I-5422

The use of statistical and machine learning tools to accurately quantify the energy performance of residential buildings

open access articlePrediction of building energy consumption is key to achieving energy efficiency and sustainability. Nowadays, the analysis or prediction of building energy consumption using building energy simulation tools facilitates the design and operation of energy-efficient buildings. The collection and generation of building data are essential components of machine learning models; however, there is still a lack of such data covering certain weather conditions. Such as those related to arid climate areas. This paper fills this identified gap with the creation of a new dataset for energy consumption of 3,840 records of typical residential buildings of the Saudi Arabia region of Qassim, and investigates the impact of residential buildings’ eight input variables (Building Size, Floor Height, Glazing Area, Wall Area, window to wall ratio (WWR), Win Glazing U-value, Roof U-value, and External Wall U-value) on the heating load (HL) and cooling load (CL) output variables. A number of classical and non-parametric statistical tools are used to uncover the most strongly associated input variables with each one of the output variables. Then, the machine learning Multiple linear regression (MLR) and Multilayer perceptron (MLP) methods are used to estimate HL and CL, and their results compared using the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and coefficient of determination (R2) performance measures. The use of the IES simulation software on the new dataset concludes that MLP accurately estimates both HL and CL with low MAE, RMSE, and R2, which evidences the feasibility and accuracy of applying machine learning methods to estimate building energy consumption

A Multi-Layer Framework for Quality of Context in Ubiquitous Context-Aware Systems

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper proposes a novel framework for Quality of Context (QoC) in context-aware systems. The main innovative features include: (1) a new definition that generalizes the notion of QoC; (2) a novel multilayer context model; (3) a novel model of QoC that introduces new quality parameters; (4) a novel mechanism to define QoC policy by assigning weights to QoC parameters using a multi-criteria decision-making technique; (5) and a novel quality control algorithm that handles context conflicts, context missing values, and context erroneous values. Our frameworkis implemented in MatLab and evaluated using a case study of a flood forecast system

Machine learning for the detection of social anxiety disorder using effective connectivity and graph theory measures

IntroductionThe early diagnosis and classification of social anxiety disorder (SAD) are crucial clinical support tasks for medical practitioners in designing patient treatment programs to better supervise the progression and development of SAD. This paper proposes an effective method to classify the severity of SAD into different grading (severe, moderate, mild, and control) by using the patterns of brain information flow with their corresponding graphical networks.MethodsWe quantified the directed information flow using partial directed coherence (PDC) and the topological networks by graph theory measures at four frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, and beta). The PDC assesses the causal interactions between neuronal units of the brain network. Besides, the graph theory of the complex network identifies the topological structure of the network. Resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded for 66 patients with different severities of SAD (22 severe, 22 moderate, and 22 mild) and 22 demographically matched healthy controls (HC).ResultsPDC results have found significant differences between SAD groups and HCs in theta and alpha frequency bands (p < 0.05). Severe and moderate SAD groups have shown greater enhanced information flow than mild and HC groups in all frequency bands. Furthermore, the PDC and graph theory features have been used to discriminate three classes of SAD from HCs using several machine learning classifiers. In comparison to the features obtained by PDC, graph theory network features combined with PDC have achieved maximum classification performance with accuracy (92.78%), sensitivity (95.25%), and specificity (94.12%) using Support Vector Machine (SVM).DiscussionBased on the results, it can be concluded that the combination of graph theory features and PDC values may be considered an effective tool for SAD identification. Our outcomes may provide new insights into developing biomarkers for SAD diagnosis based on topological brain networks and machine learning algorithms

Enhancing the Quality of Service for Real Time Traffic over Optical Burst Switching (OBS) Networks with Ensuring the Fairness for Other Traffics.

Optical burst switching (OBS) networks have been attracting much consideration as a promising approach to build the next generation optical Internet. A solution for enhancing the Quality of Service (QoS) for high priority real time traffic over OBS with the fairness among the traffic types is absent in current OBS' QoS schemes. In this paper we present a novel Real Time Quality of Service with Fairness Ratio (RT-QoSFR) scheme that can adapt the burst assembly parameters according to the traffic QoS needs in order to enhance the real time traffic QoS requirements and to ensure the fairness for other traffic. The results show that RT-QoSFR scheme is able to fulfill the real time traffic requirements (end to end delay, and loss rate) ensuring the fairness for other traffics under various conditions such as the type of real time traffic and traffic load. RT-QoSFR can guarantee that the delay of the real time traffic packets does not exceed the maximum packets transfer delay value. Furthermore, it can reduce the real time traffic packets loss, at the same time guarantee the fairness for non real time traffic packets by determining the ratio of real time traffic inside the burst to be 50-60%, 30-40%, and 10-20% for high, normal, and low traffic loads respectively

Dynamic Sign Language Recognition Based on Real-Time Videos

Sign language is the main communication tool for the deaf and hard of hearing. Deaf people cannot interact with others without a sign language interpreter. Accordingly, sign language recognition automation has become an important application in artificial intelligence and deep learning. Specifically, the recognition of Arabic sign language has been studied using many smart and traditional methods. This research provides a system to recognize dynamic Saudi sign language based on real time videos to solve this problem. We constructed a dataset for Saudi sign language in terms of videos in the proposed system. The dataset was then used to train a deep learning model using convolutional long short-term memory (convLSTM) to recognize the dynamic signs. Implementing such a system provides a platform for deaf people to interact with the rest of the world without an interpreter to reduce deaf isolation in society