COVID-19 (also known as SARS-COV-2) pandemic has spread in the entire world. It is a contagious disease that easily spreads from one person in direct contact to another, classified by experts in five categories: asymptomatic, mild, moderate, severe, and critical. Already more than 66 million people got infected worldwide with more than 22 million active patients as of 5 December 2020 and the rate is accelerating. More than 1.5 million patients (approximately 2.5% of total reported cases) across the world lost their life. In many places, the COVID-19 detection takes place through reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests which may take longer than 48 h. This is one major reason of its severity and rapid spread. We propose in this paper a two-phase X-ray image classification called XCOVNet for early COVID-19 detection using convolutional neural Networks model. XCOVNet detects COVID-19 infections in chest X-ray patient images in two phases. The first phase pre-processes a dataset of 392 chest X-ray images of which half are COVID-19 positive and half are negative. The second phase trains and tunes the neural network model to achieve a 98.44% accuracy in patient classification.

Recommendation systems suggest relevant items to a user based on the similarity between users or between items. In a collaborative filtering approach for generating recommendations, there is a symmetry between the users. That is, if user A has similar interests with user B, then an item liked by B can be recommended to A and vice versa. To provide optimal and fast recommendations, a recommender system may generate and keep clusters of existing users/items. In this research work, a hybrid sparrow clustered (HSC) recommender system is developed, and is applied to the MovieLens dataset to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. The proposed method (HSC) is also compared to other methods, and the results are compared. Precision, mean absolute error, recall, and accuracy metrics were used to figure out how well the movie recommender system worked for the HSC collaborative movie recommender system. The results of the experiment on the MovieLens dataset show that the proposed method is quite promising when it comes to scalability, performance, and personalized movie recommendations.

Software needs modifications and requires revisions regularly. Owing to these revisions, retesting software becomes essential to ensure that the enhancements made, have not affected its bug-free functioning. The time and cost incurred in this process, need to be reduced by the method of test case selection and prioritization. It is observed that many nature-inspired techniques are applied in this area. African Buffalo Optimization is one such approach, applied to regression test selection and prioritization. In this paper, the proposed work explains and proves the applicability of the African Buffalo Optimization approach to test case selection and prioritization. The proposed algorithm converges in polynomial time (O(n2)). In this paper, the empirical evaluation of applying African Buffalo Optimization for test case prioritization is done on sample data set with multiple iterations. An astounding 62.5% drop in size and a 48.57% drop in the runtime of the original test suite were recorded. The obtained results are compared with Ant Colony Optimization. The comparative analysis indicates that African Buffalo Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization exhibit similar fault detection capabilities (80%), and a reduction in the overall execution time and size of the resultant test suite. The results and analysis, hence, advocate and encourages the use of African Buffalo Optimization in the area of test case selection and prioritization.

The current pronunciation scoring based on Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) uses posterior probabilities of the Acoustic Models. Such algorithms suffer from generalization since they are utilized to determine a score metric for each phoneme rather than on the completeness or comparison with the ideal utterance of the words. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for computing scores calculated using combined scores of prosodic, fluency, completeness, and accuracy. This is achieved using context-aware GOP in conjugation with dynamic time warping (DTW) matching of the pitch contours of a weighted average of the context tokens found in the audio file that is rich in mispronounced phonemes. The proposed work gives flexibility in tuning the results according to different speech aspects based on a single hyperparameter. The results achieved are encouraging and have been validated on the speechocean762 dataset, where Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model has been trained on the Librispeech dataset. The resultant mean error of the proposed approach is 3.38% and the value of the correlation coefficient achieved is 0.652.

In today’s global context, the escalation of air pollution stands out as an immensely critical environmental challenge that has attained a worldwide magnitude. This pressing issue not only impacts every living organism on our planet but is also intricately linked to the phenomenon of climate change. The significant increase in vehicular traffic, rapid urbanization, and infrastructure development have indirectly contributed to a higher concentration of harmful gaseous and particulate pollutants in the atmosphere, posing serious risks to human health. Extensive research has thoroughly documented the adverse effects of these air pollutants, with mortality and morbidity rates varying depending on the type of pollutant and the duration of exposure. However, amidst this crisis, green plants emerge as a cost-effective and promising solution to combat environmental pollution, presenting several additional benefits. Specifically, pollutiontolerant plant species are crucial in reducing ambient air pollution and the urban heat island effect. To assess a plant’s tolerance towards air pollution, experts use the air pollution tolerance index (APTI), which calculates crucial factors such as ascorbic acid, total chlorophyll, pH, and relative water content in the plant. This determination provides a reliable method for categorizing plants into either tolerant or sensitive types in the face of air pollution. Moreover, the morphological characteristics of leaves, such as stomata distribution and density, cuticle thickness, and trichome density, play an essential role in adsorbing and absorbing particulate matter from the air. These inherent qualities further enhance plants’ potential to combat air pollution in a sustainable manner, making them valuable assets for the future. In light of this, the present review highlights the impressive capacity of plants to remediate air pollutants and explores the various strategies employed in this crucial endeavor. By leveraging the remarkable capabilities of green plants, we have the opportunity to address the air pollution crisis and embrace a sustainable path for the times to come. These remarkable organisms could be the sustainable saviors we need to protect our environment and secure a healthier future for all.