Developmental domains like physical, verbal, cognitive, and social-emotional skills are crucial for monitoring a child’s growth. However, identifying neurodevelopmental deficiencies can be challenging due to the high level of variability and overlap. Early detection is essential, and digital procedures can assist in the process. This study leverages the current advances in artificial intelligence to address the prediction of neurodevelopmental disorders through a comprehensive machine learning approach. A novel and recently developed serious game dataset, collecting various data on children’s speech and linguistic responses, was used. The initial dataset comprised 520 instances, reduced to 473 participants after rigorous data preprocessing. Cluster analysis revealed distinct patterns and structures in the data, while reliability analysis ensured measurement consistency. A robust prediction model was developed using logistic regression. Applied to a subset of 184 participants with an average age of 7 years, the model demonstrated high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, effectively distinguishing between instances with and without neurodevelopmental disorders. In conclusion, this research highlights the effectiveness of the machine learning approach in diagnosing neurodevelopmental disorders based on cognitive features, and offers new opportunities for decision making, classification, and clinical assessment, paving the way for early and personalized interventions for at-risk individuals.

Electroencephalography is one of the most commonly used methods for extracting information about the brain’s condition and can be used for diagnosing epilepsy. The EEG signal’s wave shape contains vital information about the brain’s state, which can be challenging to analyse and interpret by a human observer. Moreover, the characteristic waveforms of epilepsy (sharp waves, spikes) can occur randomly through time. Considering all the above reasons, automatic EEG signal extraction and analysis using computers can significantly impact the successful diagnosis of epilepsy. This research explores the impact of different window sizes on EEG signals’ classification accuracy using four machine learning classifiers. The machine learning methods included a neural network with ten hidden nodes trained using three different training algorithms and the k-nearest neighbours classifier. The neural network training methods included the Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno algorithm, the multistart method for global optimization problems, and a genetic algorithm. The current research utilized the University of Bonn dataset containing EEG data, divided into epochs having 50% overlap and window lengths ranging from 1 to 24 s. Then, statistical and spectral features were extracted and used to train the above four classifiers. The outcome from the above experiments showed that large window sizes with a length of about 21 s could positively impact the classification accuracy between the compared methods.

Wildlife conservationists have traditionally relied on manual identification and tracking of bird species to monitor populations and identify potential threats. However, many of these techniques may prove to be time-consuming. With the advancement of computer vision techniques, automated bird detection and recognition have become possible. In this manuscript, we present an application of an object-detection model for identifying and tracking wild bird species in natural environments. We used a dataset of bird images captured in the wild and trained the YOLOv4 model to detect bird species with high accuracy. We evaluated the model’s performance on a separate set of test images and achieved an average precision of 91.28%. Our method surpassed the time-consuming nature of manual identification and tracking, allowing for efficient and precise monitoring of bird populations. Through extensive evaluation on a separate set of test images, we demonstrated the performance of our model. Furthermore, our results demonstrated the potential of using YOLOv4 for automated bird detection and monitoring in the wild, which could help conservationists better understand bird populations and identify potential threats.

In this paper, the transfer functions related to one-dimensional (1-D) and two-dimensional (2-D) filters have been theoretically and numerically investigated. The finite impulse response (FIR), as well as the infinite impulse response (IIR) are the main 2-D filters which have been investigated. More specifically, methods like the Windows method, the bilinear transformation method, the design of 2-D filters from appropriate 1-D functions and the design of 2-D filters using optimization techniques have been presented.

The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method is a global optimization technique based on the gradual evolution of a population of solutions called particles. The method evolves the particles based on both the best position of each of them in the past and the best position of the whole. Due to its simplicity, the method has found application in many scientific areas, and for this reason, during the last few years, many modifications have been presented. This paper introduces three modifications to the method that aim to reduce the required number of function calls while maintaining the accuracy of the method in locating the global minimum. These modifications affect important components of the method, such as how fast the particles change or even how the method is terminated. The above modifications were tested on a number of known universal optimization problems from the relevant literature, and the results were compared with similar techniques.