Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely available in the current market to be used either for recreation as a hobby or to serve specific industrial requirements, such as agriculture and construction. However, illegitimate and criminal usage of UAVs is also on the rise which introduces their effective identification and detection as a research challenge. This paper proposes a novel machine learning-based for efficient identification and detection of UAVs. Specifically, an improved UAV identification and detection approach is presented using an ensemble learning based on the hierarchical concept, along with pre-processing and feature extraction stages for the Radio Frequency (RF) data. Filtering is applied on the RF signals in the detection approach to improve the output. This approach consists of four classifiers and they are working in a hierarchical way. The sample will pass the first classifier to check the availability of the UAV, and then it will specify the type of the detected UAV using the second classifier. The last two classifiers will handle the sample that is related to Bebop and AR to specify their mode. Evaluation of the proposed approach with publicly available dataset demonstrates better efficiency compared to existing detection systems in the literature. It has the ability to investigate whether a UAV is flying within the area or not, and it can directly identify the type of UAV and then the flight mode of the detected UAV with accuracy around 99%.

Traffic management challenges in peak seasons for popular destinations such as Madinah city have accelerated the need for and introduction of autonomous vehicles and Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to assist in communication and alleviation of traffic congestions. The primary goal of this study is to evaluate the performance of communication routing protocols in VANETs between autonomous and human-driven vehicles in Madinah city in varying traffic conditions. A simulation of assorted traffic distributions and densities were modeled in an extracted map of Madinah city and then tested in two application scenarios with three ad hoc routing protocols using a combination of traffic and network simulation tools working in tandem. The results measured for the average trip time show that opting for a fully autonomous vehicle scenario reduces the trip time of vehicles by approximately 7.1% in high traffic densities and that the reactive ad hoc routing protocols induce the least delay for network packets to reach neighboring VANET vehicles. From these observations, it can be asserted that autonomous vehicles provide a significant reduction in travel time and that either of the two reactive ad hoc routing protocols could be implemented for the VANET implementation in Madinah city. Furthermore, we perform an ANOVA test to examine the effects of the factors that are considered in our study on the variation of the results.

Parking in heavily populated areas has been considered one of the main challenges in the transportation systems for the past two decades given the limited parking resources, especially in city centres. Drivers often waste long periods of time hunting for an empty parking spot, which causes congestion and consumes energy during the process. Thus, finding an optimal parking spot depends on several factors such as street traffic congestion, trip distance/time, the availability of a parking spot, the waiting time on the lot gate, and the parking fees. Designing a parking spot allocation algorithm that takes those factors into account is crucial for an efficient and high-availability parking service. We propose a smart routing and parking algorithm to allocate an optimal parking space given the aforementioned limiting factors. This algorithm supports choosing the appropriate travel route and parking lot while considering the real-time street traffic and candidate parking lots. A multi-objective function is introduced, with varying weights of the five factors to produce the optimal parking spot with the least congested route while achieving a balanced utilization for candidate parking lots and a balanced traffic distribution. A queueing model is also developed to investigate the availability rate in candidate parking lots while considering the arrival rate, departure rate, and the lot capacity. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, simulation scenarios have been performed for different cases of high and low traffic intensity rates. We have tested the algorithm on in-city parking facility in the city of Al Madinah as a case study. The results show that the proposed algorithm is effective in achieving a balanced utilization of the parking lots, reducing traffic congestion rates on all routes to candidate parking lots, and minimizing the driving time to the assigned parking spot. Additionally, the proposed algorithm outperforms the MADM algorithm in terms of the selected three metrics for the five periods.

The spread of the Coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic. The false information that is embedded in the infodemic affects people’s ability to have access to safety information and follow proper procedures to mitigate the risks. This research aims to target the falsehood part of the infodemic, which prominently proliferates in news articles and false medical publications. Here, we present NeoNet, a novel supervised machine learning algorithm that analyzes the content of a document (news article, a medical publication) and assigns a label to it. The algorithm was trained by Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) bigram features, which contribute a network training model. The algorithm was tested on two different real-world datasets from the CBC news network and COVID-19 publications. In five different fold comparisons, the algorithm predicted a label of an article with a precision of 97–99%. When compared with prominent algorithms such as Neural Networks, SVM, and Random Forests NeoNet surpassed them. The analysis highlighted the promise of NeoNet in detecting disputed online contents, which may contribute negatively to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Religious studies are a rich land for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The reason is that all religions have their instructions as written texts. In this paper, we apply NLP to Islamic Hadiths, which are the written traditions, sayings, actions, approvals, and discussions of the Prophet Muhammad, his companions, or his followers. A Hadith is composed of two parts: the chain of narrators (Sanad) and the content of the Hadith (Matn). A Hadith is transmitted from its author to a Hadith book author using a chain of narrators. The problem we solve focuses on the classification of Hadiths based on their origin of narration. This is important for several reasons. First, it helps determine the authenticity and reliability of the Hadiths. Second, it helps trace the chain of narration and identify the narrators involved in transmitting Hadiths. Finally, it helps understand the historical and cultural contexts in which Hadiths were transmitted, and the different levels of authority attributed to the narrators. To the best of our knowledge, and based on our literature review, this problem is not solved before using machine/deep learning approaches. To solve this classification problem, we created a novel Author-Based Hadith Classification Dataset (ABCD) collected from classical Hadiths’ books. The ABCD size is 29 K Hadiths and it contains unique 18 K narrators, with all their information. We applied machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) approaches. ML was applied on Sanad and Matn separately; then, we did the same with DL. The results revealed that ML performs better than DL using the Matn input data, with a 77% F1-score. DL performed better than ML using the Sanad input data, with a 92% F1-score. We used precision and recall alongside the F1-score; details of the results are explained at the end of the paper. We claim that the ABCD and the reported results will motivate the community to work in this new area. Our dataset and results will represent a baseline for further research on the same problem.