Since a high dropout rate for university students is a significant risk to local communities and countries, a dropout prediction model using machine learning is an active research domain to prevent students from dropping out. However, it is challenging to fulfill the needs of consulting institutes and the office of academic affairs. To the consulting institute, the accuracy in the prediction is of the utmost importance; to the offices of academic affairs and other offices, the reason for dropping out is essential. This paper proposes a Student Dropout Prediction (SDP) system, a hybrid model to predict the students who are about to drop out of the university. The model tries to increase the dropout precision and the dropout recall rate in predicting the dropouts. We then analyzed the reason for dropping out by compressing the feature set with PCA and applying K-means clustering to the compressed feature set. The SDP system showed a precision value of 0.963, which is 0.093 higher than the highest-precision model of the existing works. The dropout recall and F1 scores, 0.766 and 0.808, respectively, were also better than those of gradient boosting by 0.117 and 0.011, making them the highest among the existing works; Then, we classified the reasons for dropping out into four categories: “Employed”, “Did Not Register”, “Personal Issue”, and “Admitted to Other University.” The dropout precision of “Admitted to Other University” was the highest, at 0.672. In post-verification, the SDP system increased counseling efficiency by accurately predicting dropouts with high dropout precision in the “High-Risk” group while including more dropouts in total dropouts. In addition, by predicting the reasons for dropouts and presenting guidelines to each department, the students could receive personalized counseling.

Digital twins can be defined as a virtual representation of a physical object that can replicate its behavior in a virtual environment. This concept involves the integration of three distinct components: the physical space, the virtual space, and the communication between these two spaces. Digital twins are recognized as one of the key driving forces in various industries, and a comprehensive understanding is necessary to utilize them. A thorough review of the advantages and disadvantages of digital twins, including their value, characteristics, applications, and challenges, is essential to analyze their growth potential and investment value. This paper comprehensively reviews the digital twin applications being studied across industries. To this end, we propose three research questions and address them through a structured literature review. First, we examine the core technologies of digital twins and find that they form an integrated framework combining modeling, sensing, and real-time data processing. Second, we analyze their adoption across industries and observe widespread use in aerospace and aeronautics, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and urban systems with domain-specific objectives. Third, we explore life-cycle applications and identify digital twins as enablers of continuity from design to operation and evolution. These findings offer a broad perspective on the current state and future potential of digital twin applications.

In this paper, we propose a model-based bandwidth prediction scheme for variable-bit-rate (VBR) video traffic with regular group of pictures (GOP) pattern. Multiplicative ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving-average) process called GOP ARIMA (ARIMA for GOP) is used as a base stochastic model, which consists of two key ingredients: prediction and model validity check. For traffic prediction, we deploy a Kalman filter over GOP ARIMA model, and confidence interval analysis for validity determination. The GOP ARIMA mPodel explicitly models inter and intra-GOP frame size correlations and the Kalman filter-based prediction maintains ?state? across the prediction rounds. Synergy of the two successfully addresses a number of challenging issues, such as a unified framework for frame type dependent prediction, accurate prediction, and robustness against noise. With few exceptions, a single video session consists of several scenes whose bandwidth process may exhibit different stochastic nature, which hinders recursive adjustment of parameters in Kalman filter, because its stochastic model structure is fixed at its deployment. To effectively address this issue, the proposed prediction scheme harbors a statistical hypothesis test in the prediction framework. By formulating the confidence interval of a prediction in terms of Kalman filter components, it not only predicts the frame size but also determines validity of the stochastic model. Based upon the results of the model validity check, the proposed prediction scheme updates the structures of the underlying GOP ARIMA model. We perform a comprehensive performance study using publicly available MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 traces. We compare the prediction accuracy of four different prediction schemes. In all traces, the proposed model yields superior prediction accuracy than the other prediction schemes. We show that confidence interval analysis effectively detects the structural changes in the sample sequence and that properly updating the model results in more accurate prediction. However, model update requires a certain length of observation period, e.g., 60 frames (2 s). Due to this learning overhead, the advantage of model update becomes less significant when scene length is short. Through queueing simulation, we examine the effect of prediction accuracy over user perceivable QoS. The proposed bandwidth prediction scheme allocates less 50% of the queue(buffer) compared to the other bandwidth prediction schemes, but still yields better packet loss behavior.

This paper presents improved methods to detect cracks and thermal leakage in building envelopes using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) (i.e., drones) with video camcorders and/or infrared cameras. Three widely used contour detectors of Sobel, Laplacian, and Canny algorithms were compared to find a better solution with low computational overhead. Furthermore, a scheme using frame-based location identification was developed to effectively utilize the existing approach by finding the current location of the drone-assisted image frame. The results showed a simplified drone-assisted scheme along with automation, higher accuracy, and better speed while using lower battery energy. Furthermore, this paper found that the cost-effective drone with the attached equipment generated accurate results without using an expensive drone. The new scheme of this paper will contribute to automated anomaly detection, energy auditing, and commissioning for sustainably built environments.

Visual acuity (VA) is a measure of the ability to distinguish shapes and details of objects at a given distance and is a measure of the spatial resolution of the visual system. Vision is one of the basic health indicators closely related to a person’s quality of life. It is one of the first basic tests done when an eye disease develops. VA is usually measured by using a Snellen chart or E-chart from a specific distance. However, in some cases, such as the unconsciousness of patients or diseases, i.e., dementia, it can be impossible to measure the VA using such traditional chart-based methodologies. This paper provides a machine learning-based VA measurement methodology that determines VA only based on fundus images. In particular, the levels of VA, conventionally divided into 11 levels, are grouped into four classes and three machine learning algorithms, one SVM model and two CNN models, are combined into an ensemble method in order to predict the corresponding VA level from a fundus image. Based on a performance evaluation conducted using randomly selected 4000 fundus images, we confirm that our ensemble method can estimate with 82.4% of the average accuracy for four classes of VA levels, in which each class of Class 1 to Class 4 identifies the level of VA with 88.5%, 58.8%, 88%, and 94.3%, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper on VA measurements based on fundus images using deep machine learning.

In this work, we develop the Orchestrated File System (OrcFS) for Flash storage. OrcFS vertically integrates the log-structured file system and the Flash-based storage device to eliminate the redundancies across the layers. A few modern file systems adopt sophisticated append-only data structures in an effort to optimize the behavior of the file system with respect to the append-only nature of the Flash memory. While the benefit of adopting an append-only data structure seems fairly promising, it makes the stack of software layers full of unnecessary redundancies, leaving substantial room for improvement. The redundancies include (i) redundant levels of indirection (address translation), (ii) duplicate efforts to reclaim the invalid blocks (i.e., segment cleaning in the file system and garbage collection in the storage device), and (iii) excessive over-provisioning (i.e., separate over-provisioning areas in each layer). OrcFS eliminates these redundancies via distributing the address translation, segment cleaning (or garbage collection), bad block management, and wear-leveling across the layers. Existing solutions suffer from high segment cleaning overhead and cause significant write amplification due to mismatch between the file system block size and the Flash page size. To optimize the I/O stack while avoiding these problems, OrcFS adopts three key technical elements. First, OrcFS uses disaggregate mapping , whereby it partitions the Flash storage into two areas, managed by a file system and Flash storage, respectively, with different granularity. In OrcFS, the metadata area and data area are maintained by 4Kbyte page granularity and 256Mbyte superblock granularity. The superblock-based storage management aligns the file system section size, which is a unit of segment cleaning, with the superblock size of the underlying Flash storage. It can fully exploit the internal parallelism of the underlying Flash storage, exploiting the sequential workload characteristics of the log-structured file system. Second, OrcFS adopts quasi-preemptive segment cleaning to prohibit the foreground I/O operation from being interfered with by segment cleaning. The latency to reclaim the free space can be prohibitive in OrcFS due to its large file system section size, 256Mbyte. OrcFS effectively addresses this issue via adopting a polling-based segment cleaning scheme. Third, the OrcFS introduces block patching to avoid unnecessary write amplification in the partial page program. OrcFS is the enhancement of the F2FS file system. We develop a prototype OrcFS based on F2FS and server class SSD with modified firmware (Samsung 843TN). OrcFS reduces the device mapping table requirement to 1/465 and 1/4 compared with the page mapping and the smallest mapping scheme known to the public, respectively. Via eliminating the redundancy in the segment cleaning and garbage collection, the OrcFS reduces 1/3 of the write volume under heavy random write workload. OrcFS achieves 56% performance gain against EXT4 in varmail workload.