Cassava is a vital crop for millions of farmers worldwide, but its cultivation is threatened by various destructive diseases. Current detection methods for cassava diseases are costly, time-consuming, and often limited to controlled environments, making them unsuitable for large-scale agricultural use. This study aims to develop a deep learning framework that enables early, accurate, and efficient detection of cassava diseases in real-world conditions. We propose a self-supervised object segmentation technique, combined with a progressive learning algorithm (PLA) that incorporates both triplet loss and classification loss to learn robust feature embeddings. Our approach achieves superior performance on the Cassava Leaf Disease Classification (CLDC) dataset from the Kaggle competition, with an accuracy of 91.43%, outperforming all other participants. The proposed method offers a practical and efficient solution for cassava disease detection, demonstrating the potential for large-scale, real-world application in agriculture.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are becoming wiser, even surpassing human performances in some fields, such as image classification, chess, and Go. However, most high-performance AI systems, such as deep learning models, are black boxes (i.e., only system inputs and outputs are visible, but the internal mechanisms are unknown) and, thus, are notably challenging to understand. Thereby a system with better explainability is needed to help humans understand AI. This paper proposes a dual-track AI approach that uses reinforcement learning to supplement fine-grained deep learning-based sentiment classification. Through lifelong machine learning, the dual-track approach can gradually become wiser and realize high performance (while keeping outstanding explainability). The extensive experimental results show that the proposed dual-track approach can provide reasonable fine-grained sentiment analyses to product reviews and remarkably achieve a $133\%$ promotion of the Macro-F1 score on the Twitter sentiment classification task and a $27.12\%$ promotion of the Macro-F1 score on an Amazon iPhone 11 sentiment classification task, respectively.

The access control system is a critical element in intelligent buildings. In this paper, we present SPCL, an innovative access control system designed to facilitate building entry through the use of mobile phones. Our system aims to provide a secure and convenient solution for building access, capitalizing on the widespread availability and capabilities of mobile devices. Additionally, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol to enhance security. The performance of the protocol is measured for different curves at different frequencies, proving that the protocol is more suitable for door lock systems than the benchmark protocol. In addition, we investigated the security and usability of SPCL. Finally, a comparison of the security of human-lock interfaces for smart locks and blockchain-based payment methods are discussed.