Sign language is an essential means of communication for individuals with hearing disabilities. However, there is a significant shortage of sign language interpreters in some languages, especially in Saudi Arabia. This shortage results in a large proportion of the hearing-impaired population being deprived of services, especially in public places. This paper aims to address this gap in accessibility by leveraging technology to develop systems capable of recognizing Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) using deep learning techniques. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model to capture the spatio-temporal aspects of sign language (i.e., letters and words). The hybrid model consists of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier to extract spatial features from sign language data and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) classifier to extract spatial and temporal characteristics to handle sequential data (i.e., hand movements). To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed hybrid model, we created a dataset of 20 different words, resulting in 4000 images for ArSL: 10 static gesture words and 500 videos for 10 dynamic gesture words. Our proposed hybrid model demonstrates promising performance, with the CNN and LSTM classifiers achieving accuracy rates of 94.40% and 82.70%, respectively. These results indicate that our approach can significantly enhance communication accessibility for the hearing-impaired community in Saudi Arabia. Thus, this paper represents a major step toward promoting inclusivity and improving the quality of life for the hearing impaired.

In the age of social media, the spread of rumors is becoming easier due to the proliferation of communication and information dissemination platforms. Detecting rumors is a major problem with significant consequences for the economy, democracy, and public safety. Deep learning approaches were used to classify rumors and have yielded state-of-the-art results. Nevertheless, the majority of techniques do not attempt to explain why or how decisions are made. This paper introduces a hybrid attention neural network (HANN) to identify rumors from social media. The advantage of HANN is that it will allow the main user to capture the relative and important features between different classes as well as provide an explanation of the model’s decisions. Two deep neural networks are included in the proposal: CNNs and Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) networks with attention modules. In this paper, the model is trained using a benchmark dataset containing 3612 distinct tweets crawled from Twitter include several types of rumors related to COVID-19. Each subset of data has a balanced label distribution with 1480 rumors tweets (46.87% ) and 1677 non-rumors tweets (53.12% ). The experimental results demonstrate that the new approach (HANN model) performs better results in terms of performance and accuracy (about 0.915% ) than many contemporary models (AraBERT, MARBEART, PCNN, LSTM, LSTM-PCNN and Attention LSTM). Moreover, a number of software engineering features such as followers, friends, and registration age are used to enhance the model’s accuracy.

Crimes have clearly had a detrimental impact on a nation’s development, prosperity, reputation, and economy. The issue of crime has become one of the most pressing concerns in societies, thus reducing the crime rate has become an increasingly critical task. Recently, several studies have been proposed to identify the causes and occurrences of crime in order to identify ways to reduce crime rates. However, few studies have been conducted in Saudi Arabia technological solutions based on crime analysis. The analysis of crime can help governments identify hotspots of crime and monitor crime distribution. This study aims to investigate which Saudi Arabian areas will experience increased crime rates in the coming years. This research helps law enforcement agencies to effectively utilize available resources in order to reduce crime rates. This paper proposes SARIMA model which focuses on identifying factors that affect crimes in Saudi Arabia, estimating a reasonable crime rate, and identifying the likelihood of crime distribution based on various locations. The dataset used in this study is obtained from Saudi Arabian official government channels. There is detailed information related to time and place along with crime statistics pertaining to different types of crimes. Furthermore, the new proposed method performs better than other traditional classifiers such as Linear Regression, XGB, and Random Forest. Finally, SARIMA model has an MAE score of 0.066559, which is higher than the other models.

With the world population growing exponentially reaching 7.8 billion people in 2020, the issue of crowd management has become more difficult especially when the situation requires social distancing (e.g. due to COVID-19). The Internet of Things (IoT) technology can help in tackling such issues. In this article, we propose a behavior analysis-based IoT services architecture for crowd management. We propose to use a behavior analysis approach based on using generative model as Hidden Markov Model to help crowd managers to make good decisions in invoking IoT services. The proposed approach is based on sectioning video segments captured from surveillance cameras of locations that require crowd management into spatio-temporal flow-blocks for marginalization of arbitrarily dense flow field. Then, each flow-block is classified as normal and abnormal. To demonstrate our approach, we used a real case study where crowd management is required namely, Muslim’s pilgrimage (i.e. Hajj and Umrah), where real dataset is used for experimenting. The results of the experiments we have conducted are promising in real-time performance. Such results are expected to compare favorably to those found in the literature by other researchers.

Ambulance vehicles face a challenging issue in minimizing the response time for an emergency call due to the high volume of traffic and traffic signal delays. Several research works have proposed ambulance vehicle detection approaches and techniques to prioritize ambulance vehicles by turning the traffic light to green for saving patients’ lives. However, the detection of ambulance vehicles is a challenging issue due to the similarities between ambulance vehicles and other commercial trucks. In this paper, we chose a machine learning (ML) technique, namely, YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once), for ambulance vehicle detection by synchronizing it with the traffic camera and sending an open signal to the traffic system for clearing the way on the road. This will reduce the amount of time it takes the ambulance to arrive at the traffic light. In particular, we managed to gather our own dataset from 10 different countries. Each country has 300 images of its own ambulance vehicles (i.e., 3000 images in total). Then, we trained our YOLOv8 model on these datasets with various techniques, including pre-trained vs. non-pre-trained, and compared them. Moreover, we introduced a layered system consisting of a data acquisition layer, an ambulance detection layer, a monitoring layer, and a cloud layer to support our cloud-based ambulance detection system. Last but not least, we conducted several experiments to validate our proposed system. Furthermore, we compared the performance of our YOLOv8 model with other models presented in the literature including YOLOv5 and YOLOv7. The results of the experiments are quite promising where the universal model of YOLOv8 scored an average of 0.982, 0.976, 0.958, and 0.967 for the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively.