Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has created significant obstacles for education, driving people to discover workarounds to maintain education. Because of the excellent benefit of cheap-cost information distribution brought about by the advent of the Internet, some offline instructional activity started to go online in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. How to guarantee the quality of teaching and promote the steady progress of education has become more and more important. Currently, one of the ways to guarantee the quality of online learning is to use independent online learning behavior data to build learning performance predictors, which can provide real-time monitoring and feedback during the learning process. This method, however, ignores the internal correlation between e-learning behaviors. In contrast, the e-learning behavior classification model (EBC model) can reflect the internal correlation between learning behaviors. Therefore, this study proposes an online learning performance prediction model, SA-FEM, based on adaptive feature fusion and feature selection. The proposed method utilizes the relationship among features and fuses features according to the category that achieved better performance. Through the analysis of experimental results, the feature space mined by the fine-grained differential evolution algorithm and the adaptive fusion of features combined with the differential evolution algorithm can better support online learning performance prediction, and it is also verified that the adaptive feature fusion strategy based on the EBC model proposed in this paper outperforms the benchmark method.

Biological systems in case of real-time state and also large-scale simulation approach are interesting and challenge-based due to different aspects of nonlinear mathematical modeling that can describe the interactions of biological blocks. Thus, hardware circuit designing of these basic blocks in the Central Nervous System (CNS) can be an important field in case of achieving high performance neuromorphic system emulator. This paper presents a high-speed, low-cost, and efficient digital circuit for emulating the plausible calcium-dynamic-based model of astrocyte which has spontaneous oscillations. The nonlinear high-cost functions of the complex astrocyte model are reformulated using the power-2 based low-cost terms using optimized exhaustive search algorithm. Subsequently, the proposed model is simulated in case of validating the presented model and new optimized functions. Finally, the proposed model is physically realized in hardware case using Virtex 4 FPGA platform to test and validate final circuits. FPGA implementation results confirmed the ability of the design to emulate biological cell behaviours in detail with high accuracy. The proposed hardware consumes maximum 2% of the all resources of a Virtex 4 board. Additionally, timing analysis and synthesize report represent that the proposed model works in a high frequency of 371.56 MHz. Moreover, to validate the results of implementation, the proposed model is compared with the original model and other similar works in terms of accuracy, speed-up, and maximum number of implemented astrocyte.

In order to promote ecological sustainability, the issue of sulphur dioxide emissions is of increasing interest to researchers. Majority of the current research, however, focuses on the relationship between sulphur dioxide (SO₂) emissions, foreign direct investment (FDI), and trade, as well as the effects of trade on SO₂ emissions, thus rarely takes it into account that the greater impact of the institutional environment and economic growth on SO₂ emissions. Using the 2008–2017 provincial panel data, this paper uses a fixed effects model to empirically test the institutional environment and economic growth of sulphur dioxide (SO₂) emissions. The results show that GDP growth and SO₂ emissions had an inverted “U”-shaped relationship. The institutional environment and the higher level of government intervention in the region led to SO₂ emissions decreasing significantly, and the institutional environment and the level of government intervention on economic growth and SO₂ emissions form a negative regulatory role. In this paper, environmental governance research, specified by the regional environmental governance, and government environmental performance audit policy provide empirical evidence, thus promoting sustainable ecological and environmental development.

The air kerma is a key parameter in medical diagnostic radiology. Radiologists use the air kerma parameter to evaluate organ doses and any associated patient hazards. The air kerma can be simply described as the deposited kinetic energy once a photon passes through the air, and it represents the intensity of the radiation beam. Due to the heel effect in the X-ray sources of medical imaging systems, the air kerma is not uniform within the X-ray beam’s field of view. Additionally, the X-ray tube voltage can also affect this nonuniformity. In this investigation, an intelligent technique based on the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) is presented to predict the air kerma at every point within the fields of view of the X-ray beams of medical diagnostic imaging systems based on discrete and limited measured data. First, a diagnostic imaging system was modeled with the help of the Monte Carlo N Particle X version (MCNPX) code. It should be noted that a tungsten target and beryllium window with a thickness of 1 mm (no extra filter was applied) were used for modeling the X-ray tube. Second, the air kerma was calculated at various discrete positions within the conical X-ray beam for tube voltages of 40 kV, 60 kV, 80 kV, 100 kV, 120 kV, and 140 kV (this range covers most medical X-ray imaging applications) to provide the adequate dataset for training the network. The X-ray tube voltage and location of each point at which the air kerma was calculated were used as the RBFNN inputs. The calculated air kerma was also assigned as the output. The trained RBFNN model was capable of estimating the air kerma at any random position within the X-ray beam’s field of view for X-ray tube voltages within the range of medical diagnostic radiology (20–140 kV).