Applied Computational Intelligence and Soft Computing

Covid-19 has been a life-changer in the sphere of online education. With complete lockdown in various countries, there has been a tumultuous increase in the need for providing online education, and hence, it has become mandatory for examiners to ensure that a fair methodology is followed for evaluation, and academic integrity is met. A plethora of literature is available related to methods to mitigate cheating during online examinations. A systematic literature review (SLR) has been followed in our article which aims at introducing the research gap in terms of the usage of soft computing techniques to combat cheating during online examinations. We have also presented state-of-the-art methods followed, which are capable of mitigating online cheating, namely, face recognition, face expression recognition, head posture analysis, eye gaze tracking, network data traffic analysis, and detection of IP spoofing. A discussion on improvement of existing online cheating detection systems has also been presented.

The discrete differential evolution (DDE) algorithm is an evolutionary algorithm (EA) that has effectively solved challenging optimization problems. However, like many other EAs, it still faces problems such as premature convergence and stagnation during the iterative process. To address these concerns in the DDE algorithm, this work aims to achieve the following objectives: (i) investigate the causes of premature convergence and stagnation in the DDE algorithm; (ii) propose techniques to prevent premature convergence and stagnation in DDE, including a quantitative measurement of premature convergence based on the level of mismatching between the population solutions and then divide the population into individual groups based on the level of mismatching between the population solutions and the best solution; and applying the roulette wheel selection (RWS) approach to determine whether a higher degree of nonmatching is more suitable for choosing a population of separate groups to be able to produce a new solution with more options to prevent the occurrence of premature convergence; (iii) evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques through employing the DDE algorithm to solve the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) as a standard to evaluate our results and their effect on avoiding premature convergence and stagnation issues, which led to the enhancement of the algorithm’s accuracy. Our comparative study based on the statistical analysis shows that the DDE algorithm that uses the proposed techniques is more efficient than the traditional DDE algorithm and the state-of-the-art methods.

This study aims to develop a hybridized deep learning model for generating semantically meaningful image captions in Amharic Language. Image captioning is a task that combines both computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) domains. However, existing studies in the English language primarily focus on visual features to generate captions, resulting in a gap between visual and textual features and inadequate semantic representation. To address this challenge, this study proposes a hybridized attention-based deep neural network (DNN) model. The model consists of an Inception-v3 convolutional neural network (CNN) encoder to extract image features, a visual attention mechanism to capture significant features, and a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) with attention decoder to generate the image captions. The model was trained on the Flickr8k and BNATURE datasets with English captions, which were translated into Amharic Language with the help of Google Translator and Amharic Language experts. The evaluation of the model showed improvement in its performance, with a 1G-BLEU score of 60.6, a 2G-BLEU score of 50.1, a 3G-BLEU score of 43.7, and a 4G-BLEU score of 38.8. Generally, this study highlights the effectiveness of the hybrid approach in generating Amharic Language image captions with better semantic meaning.

To improve power quality in power systems vulnerable to current disturbances and unbalanced loads, a hybrid control scheme is proposed in the present paper. A hybrid adaptive robust control strategy is devised for an SMIB power system equipped with a static VAR compensator to ensure robust transient stability and voltage regulation (SVC). High-order sliding mode control is combined with a dynamic adaptive backstepping algorithm to form the basis of this technique. To create controllers amenable to practical implementation, this method uses a high-order SMIB-SVC model and introduces dynamic constraints, in contrast to prior approaches. Improved transient and steady-state performances of the turbine steam-valve system are the goals of the dynamic backstepping controller. A Lyapunov-based adaptation law is developed to address the ubiquitous occurrence of parametric and nonparametric uncertainty in electrical power transmission systems due to the damping coefficient, unmodeled dynamics, and external disturbance. High-order sliding mode (HOSM) control is used for generator excitation and SVC devices to construct finite-time controllers. The necessary derivatives for HOSM control are calculated using high-order numerical differentiators to prevent simulation instability and convergence issues. Simulations demonstrate that the suggested method outperforms conventionally coordinated and hybrid adaptive control schemes regarding actuation efficiency and stability.

The explosive growth in the amount of available digital information in higher education has created a potential challenge of information overload, which hampers timely access to items of interest. The recommender systems are applied in different domains such as recommendations film, tourist advising, webpages, news, songs, and products. But the recommender systems pay less attention to university library services. The most users of university library are students. These users have a lack of ability to search and select the appropriate materials from the large repository that meet for their needs. A lot of work has been done on recommender system, but there are technical gaps observed in existing works such as the problem of constant item list in using web usage mining, decision tree induction, and association rule mining. Besides, it is observed that there is cold start problem in case-based reasoning approach. Therefore, this research work presents matrix factorization collaborative filtering with some performance enhancement to overcome cold start problem. In addition, it presents a comparative study among memory-based and model-based approaches. In this study, researchers used design science research method. The study dataset, 5189 records and 76,888 ratings, was collected from the University of Gondar student information system and online catalogue system. To develop the proposed model, memory-based and model-based approaches have been tested. In memory-based approach, matrix factorization collaborative filtering with some performance enhancements has been implemented. In model-based approach, K-nearest neighbour (KNN) and singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithms are also assessed experimentally. The SVD model is trained on our dataset optimized with a scored RMSE 0.1623 compared to RMSE 0.1991 before the optimization. The RMSE for a KNN model trained using the same dataset was 1.0535. This indicates that the matrix factorization performs better than KNN models in building collaborative filtering recommenders. The proposed SVD-based model accuracy score is 85%. The accuracy score of KNN model is 53%. So, the comparative study indicates that matrix factorization technique, specifically SVD algorithm, outperforms over neighbourhood-based recommenders. Moreover, using hyperparameter tuning with SVD also has an improvement on model performance compared with the existing SVD algorithm.

The current business environment has no room for inefficiency as it can cause companies to lose out to their competitors, to lose customer trust, and to experience cost overruns. Business processes within the company continue to grow and cause them to run more complex. The large scale and complexity of business processes pose a challenge in improving the quality of process model because the effectiveness of time and the efficiency of existing resources are the biggest challenges. In the context of optimizing business processes with a process mining approach, most current process models are optimized with a trace clustering approach to explore the model and to perform analysis on the resulting process model. Meanwhile, in the event log data, not only the activities but also the other resources, such as records of employee or staff working time, process service time, and processing costs, are recorded. This article proposes a mechanism alternative to optimize business processes by exploring the resources that occur in the process. The mechanism is carried out in three stages. The first stage is optimizing the job shop scheduling method from the generated event log. Scheduling the time becomes a problem in the job shop. Utilizing the right time can increase the effectiveness of performance in order to reduce costs. Scheduling can be defined as the allocation of multiple jobs in a series of machines, in which each machine only does one job at a time. In general, scheduling becomes a problem when sequencing the operations and allocating them into specific time slots without prolonging the technical and capacity constraints. The second stage is generating the resource value that is recorded in the event log from the results of analysis of the previous stage, namely, job shop scheduling. The resource values are multivariate and then clustered to determine homogeneous clusters. The last stage is optimizing the nonlinear multipolynomials in the homogeneous cluster formed by using the Hessian solution. The results obtained are analyzed to get recommendations on business processes that are appropriate for the company’s needs. The impact of long waiting times will increase service costs, but by improving workload, costs can be reduced. The process model and the value of service costs resulting from the mechanism in the research can be a reference for process owners in evaluating and improving ongoing processes.