Hospitals are facing a wide variety of challenges in terms of quality and efficiency of healthcare. Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology used by organisations to increase efficiency and quality by recording measurements for historic analysis. The data thus produced can then go on to inform future decisions and predictions. Unfortunately, the benefits provided for by a successful IoT adoption are currently out of reach for many hospitals. The lack of a maturity model for IoT adoption in hospitals aggravates this situation. The goal of defining and applying such a model is to assist hospitals in reaching a higher level of IoT maturity and thereby improving the quality of services delivered. This paper develops an IoT maturity model that is tailored to the healthcare industry with an emphasis on Belgian hospitals. The developed maturity model is grounded in scientific literature and industry expert opinions. Experts found the maturity model to be relevant, clear, and helpful for the hospitals' road to IoT adoption.

Alzheimer's dementia (AD) is characterized by memory loss, which is one of the earliest symptoms to develop. In this study, we investigated audio transcript data of patients with Alzheimer's dementia. The study involved the use of three intelligent computational approaches: conventional machine learning (Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Decision Tree), sequential deep learning (LSTM, bidirectional LSTM, CNN-LSTM), and transfer learning (BERT, XLNet) models for automatic detection of linguistic indicators for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's dementia. These models were trained on the DementiaBank clinical transcript dataset. The grid search tuning approach is used for tuning the values of the hyperparameters. Text vectorization is done using the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) information retrieval approach. TF-IDF is based on the Bag of Words (BoW) paradigm, which deals with the less and more relevant words in a transcript. Results were evaluated and compared using several performance metrics. The state-of-the-art techniques implemented on DementiaBank dataset in our methodology achieved better performance in terms of accuracy. Transfer learning models showed better classification results in comparison to sequential deep learning models. However, sequential deep learning models outperformed traditional machine learning models. Overall, in terms of accuracy, BERT and XLNet were the most accurate, with accuracy of 93 % and 92 %, respectively.

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematical framework which can also support critical activities for the development of the Semantic Web. One of them is represented by Similarity Reasoning, i.e., the identification of different concepts that are semantically close, that allows users to retrieve information on the Web more efficiently. In order to model uncertainty information, in this paper FCA with many-valued contexts is addressed, where attribute values are intervals, which is referred to as FCA with Interordinal scaling (IFCA). In particular, a method for evaluating concept similarity in IFCA is proposed, which is a problem that has not been adequately investigated, although the increasing interest in the literature in this topic.

Extracting the facts, namely entities and relations, from unstructured sources is an essential step in any knowledge base construction. At the same time, it is also necessary to ensure the completeness of the knowledge base by incrementally extracting the new facts from various sources. To date, the knowledge base completion is studied as a problem of knowledge refinement where the missing facts are inferred by reasoning about the information already present in the knowledge base. However, facts missed while extracting the information from multilingual sources are ignored. Hence, this work proposed a generic framework for knowledge base completion to enrich a knowledge base of crime-related facts extracted from online news articles in the English language, with the facts extracted from low resourced Indian language Hindi news articles. Using the framework, information from any low-resourced language news articles can be extracted without using language-specific tools like POS tags and using an appropriate machine translation tool. To achieve this, a clustering algorithm is proposed, which explores the redundancy among the bilingual collection of news articles by representing the clusters with knowledge base facts unlike the existing Bag of Words representation. From each cluster, the facts extracted from English language articles are bootstrapped to extract the facts from comparable Hindi language articles. This way of bootstrapping within the cluster helps to identify the sentences from a low-resourced language that are enriched with new information related to the facts extracted from a high-resourced language like English. The empirical result shows that the proposed clustering algorithm produced more accurate and high-quality clusters for monolingual and cross-lingual facts, respectively. Experiments also proved that the proposed framework achieves a high recall rate in extracting the new facts from Hindi news articles.

The requirements specification phase is one of the most important during software development. In many cases, its outcome takes a form of a use-case model, which consists of use-case diagrams and supplementary use-case specifications. The requirements specification document is used by various stakeholders, starting from customers or their representatives, through architects, developers to testers. Each role may have specific preferences for the form of requirements specification. To solve this problem, we propose a template for writing use-cases based on the existing guidelines and a transformation method that creates an activity diagram from the use-case textual specification consistent with the proposed template. There are several tools that can generate activity diagrams based on textual specification, but none of them fully meets the requirements for the form of template or resulting diagram, which should be correct (textual specification semantics preserved), UML 2.5 syntax compliant and contain necessary data. The proposed transformation method is supported by a tool that transforms models at the same level of abstraction. The transformation itself is defined at the meta-model level. The general idea of model-to-model transformation is not new, but the meta-models are original and fit for purpose. The application of the method is demonstrated by several examples. Due to the frequent potential changes in created specifications, the automation of the process will save time. Moreover, a graphical representation of a use-case is easier to analyze and find errors or inconsistencies compared to a textual specification.

Redocumentation is an approach that is used to recover knowledge from raw software artifacts by using alternative presentations. Several legacy systems have been developed based on event-driven programming which require redocumentation. However, these existing repository and query techniques emphasize only on lexical and syntactical based queries which come with limitations in providing the semantic relationship for program understanding. We are using ontology based approach that uses both ontology reasoning and querying techniques to generate software documentation from the knowledge repository. We present a controlled experiment for the empirical evaluation on the proposed ontology based approach and implemented in a tool called Ontology Based Software Redocumentation (OBSR). In this experiment, two existing tools namely Universal Report (UR) and Microsoft Visual Studio specifically for Visual Basic (VB) programming environment have been selected to be compared with the OBSR tool. The goal is to provide experimental evidence of the viability of our approach in the context of program understanding using HTML based semantic software documentation. The experiment shows that the software maintainers are able to understand and provide significant improvement in program understanding to accomplish the maintenance task easily. We describe in detail the experiment performed, discuss its results and reflect the lesson learned from the experiment.

In aged people, the central vision is affected by Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD). From the digital retinal fundus images, AMD can be recognized because of the existence of Drusen, Choroidal Neovascularization (CNV), and Geographic Atrophy (GA). It is time-consuming and costly for the ophthalmologists to monitor fundus images. A monitoring system for automated digital fundus photography can reduce these problems. In this paper, we propose a new macula detection system based on contrast enhancement, top-hat transformation, and the modified Kirsch template method. Firstly, the retinal fundus image is processed through an image enhancement method so that the intensity distribution is improved for finer visualization. The contrast-enhanced image is further improved using the top-hat transformation function to make the intensities level differentiable between the macula and different sections of images. The retinal vessel is enhanced by employing the modified Kirsch's template method. It enhances the vasculature structures and suppresses the blob-like structures. Furthermore, the OTSU thresholding is used to segment out the dark regions and separate the vessel to extract the candidate regions. The dark region and the background estimated image are subtracted from the extracted blood vessels image to obtain the exact location of the macula. The proposed method applied on 1349 images of STARE, DRIVE, MESSIDOR, and DIARETDB1 databases and achieved the average sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predicted value, F1 score, and area under curve of 97.79 %, 97.65 %, 97.60 %, 97.38 %, 97.57 %, and 96.97 %, respectively. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method attains better performance, in terms of visual quality and enriched quantitative analysis, in comparison with eminent state-of-the-art methods.

Over the past few years, data has been growing significantly due to the advent of new connected devices, availability of bandwidth, and the emergence of new applications which utilize cloud computing infrastructure in the data centers. This increased amount of data faces many problems in terms of storage, transmission, management, and processing, etc. Therefore, the term big data has gained significant attention from researchers in recent years. The rapidly growing quantity, velocity, and variety of data require more probable and logical tools for its storage. For this purpose, the industry is highly emphasizing the development of more viable tools for the storage of big data. The traditional big data storage tools are unsuccessful in storing an enormous amount of data. Hence, the structural modifications of management mechanisms of conventional storage systems such as SQL databases to NoSQL databases technology are necessary to cope up with drastically increasing requirements of big data storage. The primary objective of this paper is to concentrate exclusively on designing a road map for NoSQL big data storage technologies, evaluate current evidence, research progresses in NoSQL data storage systems and their applications in various domains. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of various studies published in recent years. We propose a framework to classify selected articles on the basis of various factors such as motivations behind big data storage, NoSQL techniques used for storing big data, and significant applications of big data in different domains. Furthermore, we also discuss research issues and define an outline for future research in the big data storage domain for NoSQL databases.

Smart Grids (SG) have smart meters and advance metering infrasturutre (AMI) which generates huge data. This data can be used for predicting energy consumption using big data analytics. A very limited work has been carried out in the literature which shows the utilization of big data in energy consumption prediction. In this paper, the proposed method is based on Genetic Algorithm - Long Short Term Memory (GA-LSTM). LSTM memorises values over an arbitrary interval that manages time series data very effictively while GA is an evolutionary process that is used for optimization. GA combines with LSTM to process hyperparameters such as hidden layers, epochs, data intervals, batchsize and activation functions. Hence, GA creates a new vector for optimum solution that provides minimum error. These methods provide the best performance when compared with existing benchmarks. Moreover, GA-LSTM is used in a multi-threaded environment which increases the speed of convergence. Here, the multi-core platform is operated for solving one-dimensional GA-based inverse scattering problems. The result shows that GA-LSTM provides better convergence as compared to random approach techniques. For validating the results, Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection (PJM) energy consumption data has been used while adopting different performance evaluation metrics.

Solving the deadlocks avoidance problem in Resource Allocation Systems (RAS) in Discrete-Event Systems (DES) is a rife problem, especially in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS), alias Automated Manufacturing Systems (AMS). Petri Nets (PN) are an effectual tool often used at this procedure. In principle, there are two basic approaches how to deal with deadlocks in RAS based on PN. They are listed and illustrated here. First of the approaches is realized by means of the supervisor based on P-invariants of PN, while the second one is realized by means of the supervisor based on PN siphons. While the first approach needs to know the reachability graph/tree (RG/RT) expressing the causality of the development of the PN model of RAS, in order to find (after its thorough analysis) the deadlocks, the second approach needs the thorough analysis of the PN model structure by means of finding siphons and traps. Next, both approaches will be applied on the same PN model of RAS and the effectiveness of the achievement of their results will be compared and evaluated. Several simple illustrative examples will be introduced. For the in-depth analysis of the problem of deadlock avoiding, next Part 2 of this paper is prepared, where the newest research will be introduced and illustrated on more complicated examples. If necessary (because of the limited length of particular papers), also the third part – Part 3, will be prepared.