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A dendritic neuron model (DNM) is a deep neural network model with a unique dendritic tree structure and activation function. Effective initialization of its model parameters is crucial for its learning performance. This work proposes a novel initialization method specifically designed to improve the performance of DNM in classifying high-dimensional data, notable for its simplicity, speed, and straightforward implementation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms traditional and recent initialization methods, particularly in datasets consisting of high-dimensional data. In addition, valuable insights into the behavior of DNM during training and the impact of initialization on its learning performance are provided. This research contributes to the understanding of the initialization problem in deep learning and provides insights into the development of more effective initialization methods for other types of neural network models. The proposed initialization method can serve as a reference for future research on initialization techniques in deep learning.

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Over a billion people around the world are disabled, among whom 253 million are visually impaired or blind, and this number is greatly increasing due to ageing, chronic diseases, and poor environments and health. Despite many proposals, the current devices and systems lack maturity and do not completely fulfill user requirements and satisfaction. Increased research activity in this field is required in order to encourage the development, commercialization, and widespread acceptance of low-cost and affordable assistive technologies for visual impairment and other disabilities. This paper proposes a novel approach using a LiDAR with a servo motor and an ultrasonic sensor to collect data and predict objects using deep learning for environment perception and navigation. We adopted this approach using a pair of smart glasses, called LidSonic V2.0, to enable the identification of obstacles for the visually impaired. The LidSonic system consists of an Arduino Uno edge computing device integrated into the smart glasses and a smartphone app that transmits data via Bluetooth. Arduino gathers data, operates the sensors on the smart glasses, detects obstacles using simple data processing, and provides buzzer feedback to visually impaired users. The smartphone application collects data from Arduino, detects and classifies items in the spatial environment, and gives spoken feedback to the user on the detected objects. In comparison to image-processing-based glasses, LidSonic uses far less processing time and energy to classify obstacles using simple LiDAR data, according to several integer measurements. We comprehensively describe the proposed system's hardware and software design, having constructed their prototype implementations and tested them in real-world environments. Using the open platforms, WEKA and TensorFlow, the entire LidSonic system is built with affordable off-the-shelf sensors and a microcontroller board costing less than USD 80. Essentially, we provide designs of an inexpensive, miniature green device that can be built into, or mounted on, any pair of glasses or even a wheelchair to help the visually impaired. Our approach enables faster inference and decision-making using relatively low energy with smaller data sizes, as well as faster communications for edge, fog, and cloud computing.

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A basic question in network community detection is how modular a given network is. This is usually addressed by evaluating the quality of partitions detected in the network. The Girvan-Newman (GN) modularity function is the standard way to make this assessment, but it has a number of drawbacks. Most importantly, it is not clearly interpretable, given that the measure can take relatively large values on partitions of random networks without communities. Here we propose a measure based on the concept of robustness: modularity is the probability to find trivial partitions when the structure of the network is randomly perturbed. This concept can be implemented for any clustering algorithm capable of telling when a group structure is absent. Tests on artificial and real graphs reveal that robustness modularity can be used to assess and compare the strength of the community structure of different networks. We also introduce two other quality functions: modularity difference, a suitably normalized version of the GN modularity, and information modularity, a measure of distance based on information compression. Both measures are strongly correlated with robustness modularity, but have lower time complexity, so they could be used on networks whose size makes the calculation of robustness modularity too costly.

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In recent times, organisations in a variety of businesses, such as healthcare, education, and others, have been using the Internet of Things (IoT) to produce more competent and improved services. The widespread use of IoT devices makes our lives easier. On the other hand, the IoT devices that we use suffer vulnerabilities that may impact our lives. These unsafe devices accelerate and ease cybersecurity attacks, specifically when using a botnet. Moreover, restrictions on IoT device resources, such as limitations in power consumption and the central processing unit and memory, intensify this issue because they limit the security techniques that can be used to protect IoT devices. Fortunately, botnets go through different stages before they can start attacks, and they can be detected in the early stage. This research paper proposes a framework focusing on detecting an IoT botnet in the early stage. An empirical experiment was conducted to investigate the behaviour of the early stage of the botnet, and then a baseline machine learning model was implemented for early detection. Furthermore, the authors developed an effective detection method, namely, Cross CNN_LSTM, to detect the IoT botnet based on using fusion deep learning models of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM). According to the conducted experiments, the results show that the suggested model is accurate and outperforms some of the state-of-the-art methods, and it achieves 99.7 accuracy. Finally, the authors developed a kill chain model to prevent IoT botnet attacks in the early stage.

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Several factors are motivating the development of preventive, personalized, connected, virtual, and ubiquitous healthcare services. These factors include declining public health, increase in chronic diseases, an ageing population, rising healthcare costs, the need to bring intelligence near the user for privacy, security, performance, and costs reasons, as well as COVID-19. Motivated by these drivers, this paper proposes, implements, and evaluates a reference architecture called Imtidad that provides Distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a Service (DAIaaS) over cloud, fog, and edge using a service catalog case study containing 22 AI skin disease diagnosis services. These services belong to four service classes that are distinguished based on software platforms (containerized gRPC, gRPC, Android, and Android Nearby) and are executed on a range of hardware platforms (Google Cloud, HP Pavilion Laptop, NVIDIA Jetson nano, Raspberry Pi Model B, Samsung Galaxy S9, and Samsung Galaxy Note 4) and four network types (Fiber, Cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth). The AI models for the diagnosis include two standard Deep Neural Networks and two Tiny AI deep models to enable their execution at the edge, trained and tested using 10,015 real-life dermatoscopic images. The services are evaluated using several benchmarks including model service value, response time, energy consumption, and network transfer time. A DL service on a local smartphone provides the best service in terms of both energy and speed, followed by a Raspberry Pi edge device and a laptop in fog. The services are designed to enable different use cases, such as patient diagnosis at home or sending diagnosis requests to travelling medical professionals through a fog device or cloud. This is the pioneering work that provides a reference architecture and such a detailed implementation and treatment of DAIaaS services, and is also expected to have an extensive impact on developing smart distributed service infrastructures for healthcare and other sectors.

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Digital societies could be characterized by their increasing desire to express themselves and interact with others. This is being realized through digital platforms such as social media that have increasingly become convenient and inexpensive sensors compared to physical sensors in many sectors of smart societies. One such major sector is road transportation, which is the backbone of modern economies and costs globally 1.25 million deaths and 50 million human injuries annually. The cutting-edge on big data-enabled social media analytics for transportation-related studies is limited. This paper brings a range of technologies together to detect road traffic-related events using big data and distributed machine learning. The most specific contribution of this research is an automatic labelling method for machine learning-based traffic-related event detection from Twitter data in the Arabic language. The proposed method has been implemented in a software tool called Iktishaf+ (an Arabic word meaning discovery) that is able to detect traffic events automatically from tweets in the Arabic language using distributed machine learning over Apache Spark. The tool is built using nine components and a range of technologies including Apache Spark, Parquet, and MongoDB. Iktishaf+ uses a light stemmer for the Arabic language developed by us. We also use in this work a location extractor developed by us that allows us to extract and visualize spatio-temporal information about the detected events. The specific data used in this work comprises 33.5 million tweets collected from Saudi Arabia using the Twitter API. Using support vector machines, naïve Bayes, and logistic regression-based classifiers, we are able to detect and validate several real events in Saudi Arabia without prior knowledge, including a fire in Jeddah, rains in Makkah, and an accident in Riyadh. The findings show the effectiveness of Twitter media in detecting important events with no prior knowledge about them.

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Graph embedding methods are becoming increasingly popular in the machine learning community, where they are widely used for tasks such as node classification and link prediction. Embedding graphs in geometric spaces should aid the identification of network communities as well because nodes in the same community should be projected close to each other in the geometric space, where they can be detected via standard data clustering algorithms. In this paper, we test the ability of several graph embedding techniques to detect communities on benchmark graphs. We compare their performance against that of traditional community detection algorithms. We find that the performance is comparable, if the parameters of the embedding techniques are suitably chosen. However, the optimal parameter set varies with the specific features of the benchmark graphs, like their size, whereas popular community detection algorithms do not require any parameter. So, it is not possible to indicate beforehand good parameter sets for the analysis of real networks. This finding, along with the high computational cost of embedding a network and grouping the points, suggests that, for community detection, current embedding techniques do not represent an improvement over network clustering algorithms.

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Today's societies are connected to a level that has never been seen before. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of such an unprecedently connected world. As of 19 November 2020, over 56 million people have been infected with nearly 1.35 million deaths, and the numbers are growing. The state-of-the-art social media analytics for COVID-19-related studies to understand the various phenomena happening in our environment are limited and require many more studies. This paper proposes a software tool comprising a collection of unsupervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) machine learning and other methods for the analysis of Twitter data in Arabic with the aim to detect government pandemic measures and public concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tool is described in detail, including its architecture, five software components, and algorithms. Using the tool, we collect a dataset comprising 14 million tweets from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for the period 1 February 2020 to 1 June 2020. We detect 15 government pandemic measures and public concerns and six macro-concerns (economic sustainability, social sustainability, etc.), and formulate their information-structural, temporal, and spatio-temporal relationships. For example, we are able to detect the timewise progression of events from the public discussions on COVID-19 cases in mid-March to the first curfew on 22 March, financial loan incentives on 22 March, the increased quarantine discussions during March-April, the discussions on the reduced mobility levels from 24 March onwards, the blood donation shortfall late March onwards, the government's 9 billion SAR (Saudi Riyal) salary incentives on 3 April, lifting the ban on five daily prayers in mosques on 26 May, and finally the return to normal government measures on 29 May 2020. These findings show the effectiveness of the Twitter media in detecting important events, government measures, public concerns, and other information in both time and space with no earlier knowledge about them.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken us by storm, helping us to make decisions in everything we do, even in finding our "true love" and the "significant other". While 5G promises us high-speed mobile internet, 6G pledges to support ubiquitous AI services through next-generation softwarization, heterogeneity, and configurability of networks. The work on 6G is in its infancy and requires the community to conceptualize and develop its design, implementation, deployment, and use cases. Towards this end, this paper proposes a framework for Distributed AI as a Service (DAIaaS) provisioning for Internet of Everything (IoE) and 6G environments. The AI service is "distributed" because the actual training and inference computations are divided into smaller, concurrent, computations suited to the level and capacity of resources available with cloud, fog, and edge layers. Multiple DAIaaS provisioning configurations for distributed training and inference are proposed to investigate the design choices and performance bottlenecks of DAIaaS. Specifically, we have developed three case studies (e.g., smart airport) with eight scenarios (e.g., federated learning) comprising nine applications and AI delivery models (smart surveillance, etc.) and 50 distinct sensor and software modules (e.g., object tracker). The evaluation of the case studies and the DAIaaS framework is reported in terms of end-to-end delay, network usage, energy consumption, and financial savings with recommendations to achieve higher performance. DAIaaS will facilitate standardization of distributed AI provisioning, allow developers to focus on the domain-specific details without worrying about distributed training and inference, and help systemize the mass-production of technologies for smarter environments.

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Algorithms for community detection are usually stochastic, leading to different partitions for different choices of random seeds. Consensus clustering has proven to be an effective technique to derive more stable and accurate partitions than the ones obtained by the direct application of the algorithm. However, the procedure requires the calculation of the consensus matrix, which can be quite dense if (some of) the clusters of the input partitions are large. Consequently, the complexity can get dangerously close to quadratic, which makes the technique inapplicable on large graphs. Here, we present a fast variant of consensus clustering, which calculates the consensus matrix only on the links of the original graph and on a comparable number of additional node pairs, suitably chosen. This brings the complexity down to linear, while the performance remains comparable as the full technique. Therefore, our fast consensus clustering procedure can be applied on networks with millions of nodes and links.

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Road transportation is the backbone of modern economies, albeit it annually costs 1.25 million deaths and trillions of dollars to the global economy, and damages public health and the environment. Deep learning is among the leading-edge methods used for transportation-related predictions, however, the existing works are in their infancy, and fall short in multiple respects, including the use of datasets with limited sizes and scopes, and insufficient depth of the deep learning studies. This paper provides a novel and comprehensive approach toward large-scale, faster, and real-time traffic prediction by bringing four complementary cutting-edge technologies together: big data, deep learning, in-memory computing, and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We trained deep networks using over 11 years of data provided by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the largest dataset that has been used in deep learning studies. Several combinations of the input attributes of the data along with various network configurations of the deep learning models were investigated for training and prediction purposes. The use of the pre-trained model for real-time prediction was explored. The paper contributes novel deep learning models, algorithms, implementation, analytics methodology, and software tool for smart cities, big data, high performance computing, and their convergence.