In December 2019, a novel coronavirus, called COVID-19, was discovered in Wuhan, China, and has spread to different cities in China as well as to 24 other countries. The number of confirmed cases is increasing daily and reached 34,598 on 8 February 2020. In the current study, we present a new forecasting model to estimate and forecast the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the upcoming ten days based on the previously confirmed cases recorded in China. The proposed model is an improved adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) using an enhanced flower pollination algorithm (FPA) by using the salp swarm algorithm (SSA). In general, SSA is employed to improve FPA to avoid its drawbacks (i.e., getting trapped at the local optima). The main idea of the proposed model, called FPASSA-ANFIS, is to improve the performance of ANFIS by determining the parameters of ANFIS using FPASSA. The FPASSA-ANFIS model is evaluated using the World Health Organization (WHO) official data of the outbreak of the COVID-19 to forecast the confirmed cases of the upcoming ten days. More so, the FPASSA-ANFIS model is compared to several existing models, and it showed better performance in terms of Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Root Mean Squared Relative Error (RMSRE), Root Mean Squared Relative Error (RMSRE), coefficient of determination ( $R^2$ ), and computing time. Furthermore, we tested the proposed model using two different datasets of weekly influenza confirmed cases in two countries, namely the USA and China. The outcomes also showed good performances.

The great advancements in communication, cloud computing, and the internet of things (IoT) have opened critical challenges in security. With these developments, cyberattacks are also rapidly growing since the current security mechanisms do not provide efficient solutions. Recently, various artificial intelligence (AI) based solutions have been proposed for different security applications, including intrusion detection. In this paper, we propose an efficient AI-based mechanism for intrusion detection systems (IDS) in IoT systems. We leverage the advancements of deep learnings and metaheuristics (MH) algorithms that approved their efficiency in solving complex engineering problems. We propose a feature extraction method using the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract relevant features. Also, we develop a new feature selection method using a new variant of the transient search optimization (TSO) algorithm, called TSODE, using the operators of differential evolution (DE) algorithm. The proposed TSODE uses the DE to improve the process of balancing between exploitation and exploration phases. Furthermore, we use three public datasets, KDDCup-99, NSL-KDD, BoT-IoT, and CICIDS-2017 to assess the performance of the developed method, which achieved higher accuracy compared to several existing approaches.

Currently, we witness the severe spread of the pandemic of the new Corona virus, COVID-19, which causes dangerous symptoms to humans and animals, its complications may lead to death. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is considered the current state-of-the-art image classification technique, it needs massive computational cost for deployment and training. In this paper, we propose an improved hybrid classification approach for COVID-19 images by combining the strengths of CNNs (using a powerful architecture called Inception) to extract features and a swarm-based feature selection algorithm (Marine Predators Algorithm) to select the most relevant features. A combination of fractional-order and marine predators algorithm (FO-MPA) is considered an integration among a robust tool in mathematics named fractional-order calculus (FO). The proposed approach was evaluated on two public COVID-19 X-ray datasets which achieves both high performance and reduction of computational complexity. The two datasets consist of X-ray COVID-19 images by international Cardiothoracic radiologist, researchers and others published on Kaggle. The proposed approach selected successfully 130 and 86 out of 51 K features extracted by inception from dataset 1 and dataset 2, while improving classification accuracy at the same time. The results are the best achieved on these datasets when compared to a set of recent feature selection algorithms. By achieving 98.7%, 98.2% and 99.6%, 99% of classification accuracy and F-Score for dataset 1 and dataset 2, respectively, the proposed approach outperforms several CNNs and all recent works on COVID-19 images.