The emergence of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) which was declared a pandemic has spread to 210 countries worldwide. It has had a significant impact on health systems and economic, educational and social facets of contemporary society. As the rate of transmission increases, various collaborative approaches among stakeholders to develop innovative means of screening, detecting and diagnosing COVID-19’s cases among human beings at a commensurate rate have evolved. Further, the utility of computing models associated with the fourth industrial revolution technologies in achieving the desired feat has been highlighted. However, there is a gap in terms of the accuracy of detection and prediction of COVID-19 cases and tracing contacts of infected persons. This paper presents a review of computing models that can be adopted to enhance the performance of detecting and predicting the COVID-19 pandemic cases. We focus on big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and nature-inspired computing (NIC) models that can be adopted in the current pandemic. The review suggested that artificial intelligence models have been used for the case detection of COVID-19. Similarly, big data platforms have also been applied for tracing contacts. However, the nature-inspired computing (NIC) models that have demonstrated good performance in feature selection of medical issues are yet to be explored for case detection and tracing of contacts in the current COVID-19 pandemic. This study holds salient implications for practitioners and researchers alike as it elucidates the potentials of NIC in the accurate detection of pandemic cases and optimized contact tracing.

Sustainable energy development consists of design, planning, and control optimization problems that are typically complex and computationally challenging for traditional optimization approaches. However, with developments in artificial intelligence, bio-inspired algorithms mimicking the concepts of biological evolution in nature and collective behaviors in societies of agents have recently become popular and shown potential success for these issues. Therefore, we investigate the latest research on bio-inspired approaches for smart energy management systems in smart homes, smart buildings, and smart grids in this paper. In particular, we give an overview of the well-known and emerging bio-inspired algorithms, including evolutionary-based and swarm-based optimization methods. Then, state-of-the-art studies using bio-inspired techniques for smart energy management systems are presented. Lastly, open challenges and future directions are also addressed to improve research in this field.

Due to the high-dimensional characteristics of dataset, we propose a new method based on the Wolf Search Algorithm (WSA) for optimising the feature selection problem. The proposed approach uses the natural strategy established by Charles Darwin; that is, ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives,but the most adaptable’. This means that in the evolution of a swarm, the elitists are motivated to quickly obtain more and better resources. The memory function helps the proposed method to avoid repeat searches for the worst position in order to enhance the effectiveness of the search, while the binary strategy simplifies the feature selection problem into a similar problem of function optimisation. Furthermore, the wrapper strategy gathers these strengthened wolves with the classifier of extreme learning machine to find a sub-dataset with a reasonable number of features that offers the maximum correctness of global classification models. The experimental results from the six public high-dimensional bioinformatics datasets tested demonstrate that the proposed method can best some of the conventional feature selection methods up to 29% in classification accuracy, and outperform previous WSAs by up to 99.81% in computational time.

Waste management is one of the challenges facing countries globally, leading to the need for innovative ways to design and operationalize smart waste bins for effective waste collection and management. The inability of extant waste bins to facilitate sorting of solid waste at the point of collection and the attendant impact on waste management process is the motivation for this study. The South African University of Technology (SAUoT) is used as a case study because solid waste management is an aspect where SAUoT is exerting an impact by leveraging emerging technologies. In this article, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based model called You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO) is employed as the object detection algorithm to facilitate the classification of waste according to various categories at the point of waste collection. Additionally, a nature-inspired search method is used as learning rate for the CNN model. The custom YOLO model was developed for waste object detection, trained with different weights and backbones, namely darknet53.conv.74, darknet19_448.conv.23, Yolov4.conv.137 and Yolov4-tiny.conv.29, respectively, for Yolov3, Yolov3-tiny, Yolov4 and Yolov4-tiny models. Eight (8) classes of waste and a total of 3171 waste images are used. The performance of YOLO models is considered in terms of accuracy of prediction (Average Precision—AP) and speed of prediction measured in milliseconds. A lower loss value out of a percentage shows a higher performance of prediction and a lower value on speed of prediction. The results of the experiment show that Yolov3 has better accuracy of prediction as compared with Yolov3-tiny, Yolov4 and Yolov4-tiny. Although the Yolov3-tiny is quick at predicting waste objects, the accuracy of its prediction is limited. The mean AP (%) for each trained version of YOLO models is Yolov3 (80%), Yolov4-tiny (74%), Yolov3-tiny (57%) and Yolov4 (41%). This result of mAP (%) indicates that the Yolov3 model produces the best performance results (80%). In this regard, it is useful to implement a model that ensures accurate prediction to develop a smart waste bin system at the institution. The experimental results show the combination of KSA learning rate parameter of 0.0007 and Yolov3 is identified as the accurate model for waste object detection and classification. The use of nature-inspired search methods, such as the Kestrel-based Search Algorithm (KSA), has shown future prospect in terms of learning rate parameter determination in waste object detection and classification. Consequently, it is imperative for an EdgeIoT-enabled system to be equipped with Yolov3 for waste object detection and classification, thereby facilitating effective waste collection.

The current dispensation of big data analytics requires innovative ways of data capturing and transmission. One of the innovative approaches is the use of a sensor device. However, the challenge with a sensor network is how to balance the energy load of wireless sensor networks, which can be achieved by selecting sensor nodes with an adequate amount of energy from a cluster. The clustering technique is one of the approaches to solve this challenge because it optimizes energy in order to increase the lifetime of the sensor network. In this article, a novel bio-inspired clustering algorithm was proposed for a heterogeneous energy environment. The proposed algorithm (referred to as DEEC-KSA) was integrated with a distributed energy-efficient clustering algorithm to ensure efficient energy optimization and was evaluated through simulation and compared with benchmarked clustering algorithms. During the simulation, the dynamic nature of the proposed DEEC-KSA was observed using different parameters, which were expressed in percentages as 0.1%, 4.5%, 11.3%, and 34% while the percentage of the parameter for comparative algorithms was 10%. The simulation result showed that the performance of DEEC-KSA is efficient among the comparative clustering algorithms for energy optimization in terms of stability period, network lifetime, and network throughput. In addition, the proposed DEEC-KSA has the optimal time (in seconds) to send a higher number of packets to the base station successfully. The advantage of the proposed bio-inspired technique is that it utilizes random encircling and half-life period to quickly adapt to different rounds of iteration and jumps out of any local optimum that might not lead to an ideal cluster formation and better network performance.