The Curriculum Sequencing (CS) problem is a challenging task to tackle in the field of online teaching and learning system development. The current methods of education management might still possess certain drawbacks that would cause ineffectiveness and incompatibility of the whole system. A solution for achieving better user satisfaction would be to treat users individually and to offer educational materials in a customized way. Adaptive Curriculum Sequencing (ACS) plays an important role in education management system, for it helps finding the optimal sequence of a curriculum among various possible solutions, which is a typical NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel metaheuristic algorithm named Group-Theoretic Particle Swarm Optimization (GT-PSO) to tackle the ACS problem. GT-PSO would rebuild the search paradigm adaptively based on the solid mathematical foundation of symmetric group through encoding the solution candidates, decomposing the search space, guiding neighborhood movements, and updating the swarm topology. The objective function is the learning goal, with additional intrinsic and extrinsic information from those users. Experimental results show that GT-PSO has outperformed most other methods in real-life scenarios, and the insights provided by our proposed method further indicate the theoretical and practical value of an effective and robust education management system.

The humidity has often been measured through a single point sensor. Where, the humidity could be varied at different locations as well as depending on environmental conditions. The present paper developed the dual point humidity measuring sensor by using a polymer optical fiber (POF) based on a single illuminating fiber. The sensor’s basic structure is to twist two fibers and bend them at a certain radius. However, the dual point sensor is developed through the cascading of twisted micro bend (TMB-1 and TMB-2). The twisting of fibers couples the light from one fiber to another fiber through the side coupling method. An increase in the humidity level leads to a change in the reflective index, which helps to get variation in coupled light intensity. To measure the humidity, the dual point sensors are placed into the control humidity chamber at two random positions. The power reading variation is significantly linear when the humidity level increases from 30 to 80%. The sensor has a fast response of about 1 s and a recovery time of about 4 s. Furthermore, the chemical coating is applied to improve the sensor’s sensitivity. Between 30 and 80% range of humidity, the both sensors of dual point TMB-1 and TMB-2 have appropriate sensitivity and detection limits, which is about 680.8 nW/% and 763.9 nW/% and 1.37% and 1.98%, respectively. To measure the humidity at variable positions, the present dual points humidity sensor is well-stable, easy, and straightforward, which uses a less expensive method.

With the development of the intelligent vision industry, ship detection and identification technology has gradually become a research hotspot in the field of marine insurance and port logistics. However, due to the interference of rain, haze, waves, light, and other bad weather, the robustness and effectiveness of existing detection algorithms remain a continuous challenge. For this reason, an improved YOLOv8n algorithm is proposed for the detection of ship targets under unforeseen environmental conditions. In the proposed method, the efficient multi-scale attention module (C2f_EMAM) is introduced to integrate the context information of different scales so that the convolutional neural network can generate better pixel-level attention to high-level feature maps. In addition, a fully-concatenate bi-directional feature pyramid network (Concatenate_FBiFPN) is adopted to replace the simple superposition/addition of feature map, which can better solve the problem of feature propagation and information flow in target detection. An improved spatial pyramid pooling fast structure (SPPF2+1) is also designed to emphasize low-level pooling features and reduce the pooling depth to accommodate the information characteristics of the ship. A comparison experiment was conducted between other mainstream methods and our proposed algorithm. Results showed that our proposed algorithm outperformed other models by achieving 99.4% of accuracy, 98.2% of precision, 98.5% of recall, 99.1% of mAP@.5, and 85.4% of mAP@.5:.95 on the SeaShips dataset.

Advances in information technologies enable data to be ubiquitously generated from sensors, especially in the industrial healthcare research and application fields. The aim is to develop an adaptive windowing pre-processing approach using clustering-based metaheuristics search for biomedical data stream classification, which uses a sliding window to scan the multivariate data stream segment to segment. Our new model is put under test with other temporal data stream pre-processing methods on those biomedical sensor datasets. The experiments give higher accuracy and less time cost especially in dynamically adjusting the window size according to clustering outcomes that are optimised by metaheuristics.

The development of pressure sensors of high sensitivity and stable robustness over a broad range is indispensable for the future progress of electronic skin applicable to the detection of normal and shear pressures of various dynamic human motions. Herein, we present a flexible capacitive tactile sensing array that incorporates a porous dielectric layer with micro-patterned structures on the surface to enable the sensitive detection of normal and shear pressures. The proposed sensing array showed great pressure-sensing performance in the experiments, with a broad sensing range from several kPa to 150 kPa of normal pressure and 20 kPa of shear pressure. Sensitivities of 0.54%/kPa at 10 kPa and below, 0.45%/kPa between 10 kPa and 80 kPa, and 0.12%/kPa at 80 kPa and above were achieved for normal pressures. Meanwhile, for shear pressures, sensitivities up to 1.14%/kPa and 1.08%/kPa in x and y directions, respectively, and below 10 kPa, 0.73%/kPa, and 0.75%/kPa under shear pressure over 10 kPa were also validated. The performance of the finger-attached sensing array was also demonstrated, demonstrating which was a potential electronic skin to use in all kinds of wearable devices, including prosthetic hands, surgical robots, and other pressure monitoring systems.

There are three primary challenges in the automatic diagnosis of arrhythmias by electrocardiogram (ECG): the significant variation among individual patients, the multiple pathologies in the ECG signal and the high cost in annotating clinical ECG with the corresponding labels. Traditional ECG processing approaches rely heavily on prior knowledge, such as those from feature extraction and waveform analysis. The preprocessing for prior knowledge incurs computational overhead. Furthermore, standard deep learning methods do not fully consider the dynamic temporal, spatial and multi-labeling characteristics of ECG data. In clinical ECG waveforms, it is common to see multi-labeling in which a patient is labeled with multiple classes of arrhythmias. However, multiclass approaches in current research mainly solve the multi-label machine learning problem, ignoring the correlation between diseases, resulting in information loss. In this paper, an arrhythmia detection and classification scheme called multi-label fusion deep learning is proposed. The objective is to build a unified system with automatic feature learning which supports effective multi-label classification. First, a multi-label ECG-based feature selection method is combined with a matrix decomposition and sparse learning theory. The optimal feature subset is selected as a preprocessing algorithm for ECG data. A multi-label classifier is then constructed by fusing CNN and RNN networks to fully exploit the interactions and features of the time and space dimensions. The experimental result demonstrates that the proposed method can achieve a state-of-the-art performance compared to other algorithms in multi-label database experiments.