The rice leaves related diseases often pose threats to the sustainable production of rice affecting many farmers around the world. Early diagnosis and appropriate remedy of the rice leaf infection is crucial in facilitating healthy growth of the rice plants to ensure adequate supply and food security to the rapidly increasing population. Therefore, machine-driven disease diagnosis systems could mitigate the limitations of the conventional methods for leaf disease diagnosis techniques that is often time-consuming, inaccurate, and expensive. Nowadays, computer-assisted rice leaf disease diagnosis systems are becoming very popular. However, several limitations ranging from strong image backgrounds, vague symptoms’ edge, dissimilarity in the image capturing weather, lack of real field rice leaf image data, variation in symptoms from the same infection, multiple infections producing similar symptoms, and lack of efficient real-time system mar the efficacy of the system and its usage. To mitigate the aforesaid problems, a faster region-based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) was employed for the real-time detection of rice leaf diseases in the present research. The Faster R-CNN algorithm introduces advanced RPN architecture that addresses the object location very precisely to generate candidate regions. The robustness of the Faster R-CNN model is enhanced by training the model with publicly available online and own real-field rice leaf datasets. The proposed deep-learning-based approach was observed to be effective in the automatic diagnosis of three discriminative rice leaf diseases including rice blast, brown spot, and hispa with an accuracy of 98.09%, 98.85%, and 99.17% respectively. Moreover, the model was able to identify a healthy rice leaf with an accuracy of 99.25%. The results obtained herein demonstrated that the Faster R-CNN model offers a high-performing rice leaf infection identification system that could diagnose the most common rice diseases more precisely in real-time.

The paradigm shift towards Smart Grids, Smart Buildings, Smart Monitoring, and Operation has driven researchers to propose innovative solutions for designing and maintaining energy systems. Although the integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) supports sustainability goals, it also introduces vulnerabilities to unpredictable challenges such as grid stability, energy storage requirements, and infrastructure modernization. Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a transformative tool to address these challenges, offering opportunities to enhance energy efficiency, and system design in alignment with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The emphasis on these goals necessitates the study of new system designs that prioritize energy efficiency. Building on its proven success, researchers are increasingly adopting ML-driven approaches to accelerate advances in energy systems. This work presents a detailed review of current ML-driven research trends in energy systems, outlines the associated challenges, and provides potential research directions and recommendations. Unlike the existing literature, which focuses primarily on ML applications in the RES domain, this study offers a holistic perspective on ML-driven approaches across various aspects of energy systems, including energy policy and sustainability. It aims to serve as a comprehensive resource, bridging the gap between research advancements and practical implementations in energy systems through ML-driven innovation.

Electromyography (EMG) signal is one of the extensively utilised biological signals for predicting human motor intention, which is an essential element in human-robot collaboration platforms. Studies on motion intention prediction from EMG signals have often been concentrated on either classification and regression models of muscle activity. In this study, we leverage the information from the EMG signals, to detect the subject’s intentions in generating motion commands for a robot-assisted upper limb rehabilitation platform. The EMG signals are recorded from ten healthy subjects’ biceps muscle, and the movements of the upper limb evaluated are voluntary elbow flexion and extension along the sagittal plane. The signals are filtered through a fifth-order Butterworth filter. A number of features were extracted from the filtered signals namely waveform length (WL), mean absolute value (MAV), root mean square (RMS), standard deviation (SD), minimum (MIN) and maximum (MAX). Several different classifiers viz. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN) were investigated on its efficacy to accurately classify the pre-intention and intention classes based on the significant features identified (MIN and MAX) via Extremely Randomised Tree feature selection technique. It was observed from the present investigation that the DT classifier yielded an excellent classification with a classification accuracy of 100%, 99% and 99% on training, testing and validation dataset, respectively based on the identified features. The findings of the present investigation are non-trivial towards facilitating the rehabilitation phase of patients based on their actual capability and hence, would eventually yield a more active participation from them.