The unprecedented spread of location-aware devices has resulted in a plethora of location-based services in which huge amounts of spatial data need to be efficiently processed by large-scale computing clusters. Existing cluster-based systems for processing spatial data employ static data-partitioning structures that cannot adapt to data changes, and that are insensitive to the query workload. Hence, these systems are incapable of consistently providing good performance. To close this gap, we present AQWA, an adaptive and query-workload-aware mechanism for partitioning large-scale spatial data. AQWA does not assume prior knowledge of the data distribution or the query workload. Instead, as data is consumed and queries are processed, the data partitions are incrementally updated. With extensive experiments using real spatial data from Twitter, and various workloads of range and k -nearest-neighbor queries, we demonstrate that AQWA can achieve an order of magnitude enhancement in query performance compared to the state-of-the-art systems.

The widespread use of location-aware devices together with the increased popularity of micro-blogging applications (e.g., Twitter) led to the creation of large streams of spatio-textual data. In order to serve real-time applications, the processing of these large-scale spatio-textual streams needs to be distributed. However, existing distributed stream processing systems (e.g., Spark and Storm) are not optimized for spatial/textual content. In this demonstration, we introduce Tornado, a distributed in-memory spatio-textual stream processing server that extends Storm. To efficiently process spatio-textual streams, Tornado introduces a spatio-textual indexing layer to the architecture of Storm. The indexing layer is adaptive, i.e., dynamically re-distributes the processing across the system according to changes in the data distribution and/or query workload. In addition to keywords, higher-level textual concepts are identified and are semantically matched against spatio-textual queries. Tornado provides data deduplication and fusion to eliminate redundant textual data. We demonstrate a prototype of Tornado running against real Twitter streams, where the users can register continuous or snapshot spatio-textual queries using a map-assisted query-interface.

With the explosion of visual content on the Internet, creating captions for images has become a necessary task and an exciting topic for many researchers. Furthermore, image captioning is becoming increasingly important as the number of people utilizing social media platforms grows. While there is extensive research on English image captioning (EIC), studies focusing on image captioning in other languages, especially Arabic, are limited. There has also yet to be an attempt to survey Arabic image captioning (AIC) systematically. This research aims to systematically survey encoder-decoder EIC while considering the following aspects: visual model, language model, loss functions, datasets, evaluation metrics, model comparison, and adaptability to the Arabic language. A systematic review of the literature on EIC and AIC approaches published in the past nine years (2015–2023) from well-known databases (Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore) is undertaken. We have identified 52 primary English and Arabic studies relevant to our objectives (The number of articles on Arabic captioning is 11, and the rest are for the English language). The literature review shows that applying the English-specific models to the Arabic language is possible, with the use of a high-quality Arabic database and following the appropriate preprocessing. Moreover, we discuss some limitations and ideas to solve them as a future direction.

Oral cancer, also known as oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), is one of the most prevalent types of cancer and caused 177,757 deaths worldwide in 2020, as reported by the World Health Organization. Early detection and identification of OSCC are highly correlated with survival rates. Therefore, this study presents an automatic image-processing-based machine learning approach for OSCC detection. Histopathological images were used to compute deep features using various pretrained models. Based on the classification performance, the best features (ResNet-101 and EfficientNet-b0) were merged using the canonical correlation feature fusion approach, resulting in an enhanced classification performance. Additionally, the binary-improved Haris Hawks optimization (b-IHHO) algorithm was used to eliminate redundant features and further enhance the classification performance, leading to a high classification rate of 97.78% for OSCC. The b-IHHO trained the k-nearest neighbors model with an average feature vector size of only 899. A comparison with other wrapper-based feature selection approaches showed that the b-IHHO results were statistically more stable, reliable, and significant (p < 0.01). Moreover, comparisons with those other state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches indicated that the b-IHHO model offered better results, suggesting that the proposed framework may be applicable in clinical settings to aid doctors in OSCC detection.

Recently, thyroid disease has been a leading cause of mortality, underscoring the importance of early diagnosis to mitigate its impact. Researchers have randomly employed static selection ensemble methods aiming to forecast the disease in its initial stages. However, the use of such ensemble methods in healthcare diagnosis poses challenges related to performance consistency and potential mismatches with new data characteristics. Hence, this paper proposes a novel approach by introducing the Dynamic Selection Hybrid Model (DSHM) that leverages the most effective conventional classifiers using an appropriate ensemble method. Instead of going the conventional way, we evaluate various baseline classifiers to demonstrate their impact on the characteristics selected by two robust feature selection techniques. This evaluation employs an explainable AI (XAI) method, Permutation Feature Importance (PFI), and selects the most effective classifiers based on their characteristics impact. Then the selected classifiers are integrated by an appropriate ensemble method, selected based on a comparative evaluation between four efficient ensemble methods. Allowing the proposed DSHM to dynamically adjust its composition based on selecting conditions can potentially achieve robust performance by better adaptability on unseen data. Prior to the training DSHM, the methodology begins by addressing the dataset’s imbalance issue using an effective data balancing method BOO-ST. To demonstrate the superiority of DSHM, various performance evaluation matrices, and a statistical test are employed. The experimental results reveal the effectiveness of our proposed DSHM, outperformed with an impressive 99.33% accuracy. Finally, to enhance transparency, trust, and patient outcomes, we applied the Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) to explain DSHM-provided outcomes. With a robust classification performance, our proposed DSHM aims to explain its outcomes, contributing to improved clinical decision-making processes and ultimately enhancing patient care.