Human healthcare is one of the most important topics for society. It tries to find the correct effective and robust disease detection as soon as possible to patients receipt the appropriate cares. Because this detection is often a difficult task, it becomes necessary medicine field searches support from other fields such as statistics and computer science. These disciplines are facing the challenge of exploring new techniques, going beyond the traditional ones. The large number of techniques that are emerging makes it necessary to provide a comprehensive overview that avoids very particular aspects. To this end, we propose a systematic review dealing with the Machine Learning applied to the diagnosis of human diseases. This review focuses on modern techniques related to the development of Machine Learning applied to diagnosis of human diseases in the medical field, in order to discover interesting patterns, making non-trivial predictions and useful in decision-making. In this way, this work can help researchers to discover and, if necessary, determine the applicability of the machine learning techniques in their particular specialties. We provide some examples of the algorithms used in medicine, analysing some trends that are focused on the goal searched, the algorithm used, and the area of applications. We detail the advantages and disadvantages of each technique to help choose the most appropriate in each real-life situation, as several authors have reported. The authors searched Scopus, Journal Citation Reports (JCR), Google Scholar, and MedLine databases from the last decades (from 1980s approximately) up to the present, with English language restrictions, for studies according to the objectives mentioned above. Based on a protocol for data extraction defined and evaluated by all authors using PRISMA methodology, 141 papers were included in this advanced review.

In recent years, we have seen a significant number of new technological ideas appearing in literature discussing the future of education. For example, E-learning, cloud computing, social networking, virtual laboratories, virtual realities, virtual worlds, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and bring your own device (BYOD) are all new concepts of immersive and global education that have emerged in educational literature. One of the greatest challenges presented to e-learning solutions is the reproduction of the benefits of an educational institution’s physical laboratory. For a university without a computing lab, to obtain hands-on IT training with software, operating systems, networks, servers, storage, and cloud computing similar to that which could be received on a university campus computing lab, it is necessary to use a combination of technological tools. Such teaching tools must promote the transmission of knowledge, encourage interaction and collaboration, and ensure students obtain valuable hands-on experience. That, in turn, allows the universities to focus more on teaching and research activities than on the implementation and configuration of complex physical systems. In this article, we present a model for implementing ecosystems which allow universities to teach practical Information Technology (IT) skills. The model utilizes what is called a “social cloud”, which utilizes all cloud computing services, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Additionally, it integrates the cloud learning aspects of a MOOC and several aspects of social networking and support. Social clouds have striking benefits such as centrality, ease of use, scalability, and ubiquity, providing a superior learning environment when compared to that of a simple physical lab. The proposed model allows students to foster all the educational pillars such as learning to know, learning to be, learning to live together, and, primarily, learning to do, through hands-on IT training from a MOOCs. An aspect of the model has been verified experimentally and statistically through a course of computer operating systems.

This article describes the design, development and implementation of a set of microservices based on an architecture that enables detection and assisted clinical diagnosis within the field of infectious diseases of elderly patients, via a telemonitoring system. The proposed system is designed to continuously update a medical database fed with vital signs from biosensor kits applied by nurses to elderly people on a daily basis. The database is hosted in the cloud and is managed by a flexible microservices software architecture. The computational paradigms of the edge and the cloud were used in the implementation of a hybrid cloud architecture in order to support versatile high-performance applications under the microservices pattern for the pre-diagnosis of infectious diseases in elderly patients. The results of an analysis of the usability of the equipment, the performance of the architecture and the service concept show that the proposed e-health system is feasible and innovative. The system components are also selected to give a cost-effective implementation for people living in disadvantaged areas. The proposed e-health system is also suitable for distributed computing, big data and NoSQL structures, thus allowing the immediate application of machine learning and AI algorithms to discover knowledge patterns from the overall population.

The increase of the technology related to radio localization and the exponential rise in the data traffic demanded requires a large number of base stations to be installed. This increase in the base stations density also causes a sharp rise in energy consumption of cellular networks. Consequently, energy saving and cost reduction is a significant factor for network operators in the development of future localization networks. In this paper, a localization method based on ray-tracing and fingerprinting techniques is presented. Simulation tools based on high frequencies are used to characterize the channel propagation and to obtain the ray-tracing data. Moreover, the fingerprinting technique requires a costly initial learning phase for cell fingerprint generation (radio-map). To estimate the localization of mobile stations, this paper compares power levels and delay between rays as cost function with different distance metrics. The experimental results show that greater accuracy can be obtained in the location process using the delay between rays as a cost function and the Mahalanobis distance as a metric instead of traditional methods based on power levels and the Euclidean distance. The proposed method appears well suited for localization systems applied to indoor and outdoor scenarios and avoids large and costly measurement campaigns.

Currently, population growth is global and tends to concentrate in large cities, which increases the demand for illuminating public spaces for safety, visual orientation, aesthetic considerations, and quality of life. The undesirable side effects are increase in energy consumption and light pollution. The current tools used for designing public lighting systems are not suitable for optimizing multiple objectives in addition to energy savings, and these solutions could provide for a more sustainable environment. The application of evolutionary optimization techniques seems to be growing rapidly because of the nonlinearity of the model behavior and the nonproprietary nature of the algorithms, which are considered as black box systems . This paper develops a data model for these types of optimizers, analyzing the ability of different artificial neural network (ANN) architectures to simulate a simple public lighting design by measuring the performance with respect to the fitness function, training speed, and goodness of fit with a dataset generated with different conditions. The architectures selected in this paper are those with multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) with different hidden layer configurations using different numbers of neurons in each layer, which have been analyzed to determine the configuration that best fits the purpose of this work. The data for training the ANNs were generated with a recognized open-software platform, DIALux. The experiments were repeated and analyzed to determine the variance of the results obtained. In this way, it was possible to identify the most appropriate number of iterations required. The results show that better precision is obtained when using the Levenberg–Marquardt training algorithm, especially when the ANN architecture has fewer neurons in the hidden layer.

Currently, smart buildings generate large amounts of data due to the many devices and equipment available. Hence, buildings implement building management systems (BMSs), which monitor, control, manage and analyze each of these components. However, current BMSs are incapable of managing a massive amount of data (big data) and therefore cannot extract knowledge or make intelligent decisions in quasi real time. In addition, there are serious limitations to integrating BMSs with other services since they generally use proprietary software. In this sense, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that allows one to build distributed systems and provide functionalities such as services to end users or other types of services. Therefore, an SOA has the great advantage of allowing the expansion of the functionalities of BMSs. In fact, there are several studies that address SOAs for building management. However, we have not found any description or systematic analysis in the literature that allows the development of a versatile and interoperable SOA focused on the energy efficiency of buildings and that can integrate massive data analysis features. For these reasons, this study seeks to fill this knowledge gap and, more specifically, to identify and analyze the various software requirements proposed in the literature and the characteristics of big data that allow for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. To this end, we performed an in-depth review of the literature according to the methodology proposed by Kitchenham. As a result of this review, we provide researchers with a specific vision of the requirements and characteristics to consider for software development aimed at the energy efficiency of unique or historic buildings.