Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, and research resources provided under the Creative Commons (CC) licenses and can be freely used, shared, and modified. However, OER adoption is not widespread, and various barriers remain in the way of its growing emphasis. This article is aimed to investigate OER adoption in higher institutions by using Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory. 422 responses to an online survey from faculty are gathered and analyzed, where adaptive attributes of DOI are adopted. The results of the descriptive method confirmed that relative advantage has a positive impact on faculty OER adoption. Indeed, positive impacts of observability and complexity are also shown. Ultimately, the findings from the structural model used, indicated that there is a positive correlation between trialability and respectively complexity and compatibility. Whereas relative advantage of OER impacts positively complexity and negatively compatibility. This study showed that it is not enough that faculty agree on OER benefits for teaching and research, the OER adoption rate must increase. Decision-makers in higher institutions are asked to perform additional OER initiatives to overcome challenges related to OER trialability, complexity, and compatibility.

Oral cancer is a deadly form of cancerous tumor that is widely spread in low and middle-income countries. An early and affordable oral cancer diagnosis might be achieved by automating the detection of precancerous and malignant lesions in the mouth. There are many research attempts to develop a robust machine-learning model that can detect oral cancer from images. However, these are still lacking high precision in oral cancer detection. Therefore, this work aims to propose a new approach capable of detecting oral cancer in medical images with higher accuracy. In this work, a novel and robust oral cancer detection based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) and optimized deep belief network (DBN). The design parameters of CNN and DBN are optimized using a new optimization algorithm, which is developed as a hybrid of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Al-Biruni Earth Radius (BER) Optimization algorithms and is denoted by (PSOBER). Using a standard biomedical images dataset available on the Kaggle repository, the proposed approach shows promising results outperforming various competing approaches with an accuracy of 97.35%. In addition, a set of statistical tests, such as One-way analysis-of-variance (ANOVA) and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, are conducted to prove the significance and stability of the proposed approach. The proposed methodology is solid and efficient, and specialists can adopt it. However, additional research on a larger scale dataset is required to confirm the findings and highlight other oral features that can be utilized for cancer detection.

The Industrial Internet of Things has gained more attention because of the self-governing nature of system configuration with interoperable application connectivity. In the E-Healthcare environment, it cooperates with medical sensors to capture, examine, analyze, preserve, and document day-to-day transactions of patients in real-time. The integration of E-healthcare and IIoT provides an analytical platform to handle a large amount of data with a low cost of cloud-enabling scalable storage. Throughout the transformation, patients’ personal information is at risk while exchanging records over centralized server-based systems. Thus, the rate of node connectivity, failure of parallel data sharing, and deliverance-related issues increase. In this paper, we present solutions in three folds. First, the paper proposes a novel and secure architecture for E-healthcare data security using a blockchain-distributed ledger technology named BHIIoT. Second, the transformation in the lifecycle of medical wireless sensor networks for data management and optimization with a distributed layered hierarchy is developed, which enhances the network resources and increases trust in the blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer environment. Third, the proposed BHIIoT uses the NuCypher threshold re-encryption mechanism for data encryption and protects shared resources in the form of blocks preserved in a blockchain immutable storage. For instance, chain codes are deployed to automate authentication, logging, index information deliverance, and trace transactions to resist illegal activities in the E-Healthcare distributed-application. The customized lightweight blockchain multi-proof-of-work and multi-proof-of-stake are designed with a digital signature for improving the consumption of resources and reducing the load of storage while the transaction process of E-healthcare IIoT is scheduled.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a widely used technology in automated network systems across the world. The impact of the IoT on different industries has occurred in recent years. Many IoT nodes collect, store, and process personal data, which is an ideal target for attackers. Several researchers have worked on this problem and have presented many intrusion detection systems (IDSs). The existing system has difficulties in improving performance and identifying subcategories of cyberattacks. This paper proposes a deep-convolutional-neural-network (DCNN)-based IDS. A DCNN consists of two convolutional layers and three fully connected dense layers. The proposed model aims to improve performance and reduce computational power. Experiments were conducted utilizing the IoTID20 dataset. The performance analysis of the proposed model was carried out with several metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. A number of optimization techniques were applied to the proposed model in which Adam, AdaMax, and Nadam performance was optimum. In addition, the proposed model was compared with various advanced deep learning (DL) and traditional machine learning (ML) techniques. All experimental analysis indicates that the accuracy of the proposed approach is high and more robust than existing DL-based algorithms.

The Lemur Optimizer (LO) is a novel nature-inspired algorithm we propose in this paper. This algorithm’s primary inspirations are based on two pillars of lemur behavior: leap up and dance hub. These two principles are mathematically modeled in the optimization context to handle local search, exploitation, and exploration search concepts. The LO is first benchmarked on twenty-three standard optimization functions. Additionally, the LO is used to solve three real-world problems to evaluate its performance and effectiveness. In this direction, LO is compared to six well-known algorithms: Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), Bat Algorithm (BA), Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA), and JAYA algorithm. The findings show that the proposed algorithm outperforms these algorithms in fourteen standard optimization functions and proves the LO’s robust performance in managing its exploration and exploitation capabilities, which significantly leads LO towards the global optimum. The real-world experimental findings demonstrate how LO may tackle such challenges competitively.

During the pandemic of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), statistics showed that the number of affected cases differed from one country to another and also from one city to another. Therefore, in this paper, we provide an enhanced model for predicting COVID-19 samples in different regions of Saudi Arabia (high-altitude and sea-level areas). The model is developed using several stages and was successfully trained and tested using two datasets that were collected from Taif city (high-altitude area) and Jeddah city (sea-level area) in Saudi Arabia. Binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) is used in this study for making feature selections using three different machine learning models, i.e., the random forest model, gradient boosting model, and naive Bayes model. A number of predicting evaluation metrics including accuracy, training score, testing score, F-measure, recall, precision, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve were calculated to verify the performance of the three machine learning models on these datasets. The experimental results demonstrated that the gradient boosting model gives better results than the random forest and naive Bayes models with an accuracy of 94.6% using the Taif city dataset. For the dataset of Jeddah city, the results demonstrated that the random forest model outperforms the gradient boosting and naive Bayes models with an accuracy of 95.5%. The dataset of Jeddah city achieved better results than the dataset of Taif city in Saudi Arabia using the enhanced model for the term of accuracy.