Electronic nose (E-nose) and electronic tongue (E-tongue) can mimic the sensory perception of human smell and taste, and they are widely applied in tea quality evaluation by utilizing the fingerprints of response signals representing the overall information of tea samples. The intrinsic part of human perception is the fusion of sensors, as more information is provided comparing to the information from a single sensory organ. In this study, a framework for a multi-level fusion strategy of electronic nose and electronic tongue was proposed to enhance the tea quality prediction accuracies, by simultaneously modeling feature fusion and decision fusion. The procedure included feature-level fusion (fuse the time-domain based feature and frequency-domain based feature) and decision-level fusion (D-S evidence to combine the classification results from multiple classifiers). The experiments were conducted on tea samples collected from various tea providers with four grades. The large quantity made the quality assessment task very difficult, and the experimental results showed much better classification ability for the multi-level fusion system. The proposed algorithm could better represent the overall characteristics of tea samples for both odor and taste.

With the extensive availability of social media platforms, Twitter has become a significant tool for the acquisition of peoples’ views, opinions, attitudes, and emotions towards certain entities. Within this frame of reference, sentiment analysis of tweets has become one of the most fascinating research areas in the field of natural language processing. A variety of techniques have been devised for sentiment analysis, but there is still room for improvement where the accuracy and efficacy of the system are concerned. This study proposes a novel approach that exploits the advantages of the lexical dictionary, machine learning, and deep learning classifiers. We classified the tweets based on the sentiments extracted by TextBlob using a stacked ensemble of three long short-term memory (LSTM) as base classifiers and logistic regression (LR) as a meta classifier. The proposed model proved to be effective and time-saving since it does not require feature extraction, as LSTM extracts features without any human intervention. We also compared our proposed approach with conventional machine learning models such as logistic regression, AdaBoost, and random forest. We also included state-of-the-art deep learning models in comparison with the proposed model. Experiments were conducted on the sentiment140 dataset and were evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 Score. Empirical results showed that our proposed approach manifested state-of-the-art results by achieving an accuracy score of 99%.

Particle size is the most important index to reflect the crushing quality of ores, and the accuracy of particle size statistics directly affects the subsequent operation of mines. Accurate ore image segmentation is an important prerequisite to ensure the reliability of particle size statistics. However, given the diversity of the size and shape of ores, the influence of dust and light, the complex texture and shadows on the ore surface, and especially the adhesion between ores, it is difficult to segment ore images accurately, and under-segmentation can be a serious problem. The construction of a large, labeled dataset for complex and unclear conveyor belt ore images is also difficult. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel, multi-task learning network based on U-Net for ore image segmentation. To solve the problem of limited available training datasets and to improve the feature extraction ability of the model, an improved encoder based on Resnet18 is proposed. Different from the original U-Net, our model decoder includes a boundary subnetwork for boundary detection and a mask subnetwork for mask segmentation, and information of the two subnetworks is fused in a boundary mask fusion block (BMFB). The experimental results showed that the pixel accuracy, Intersection over Union (IOU) for the ore mask (IOU_M), IOU for the ore boundary (IOU_B), and error of the average statistical ore particle size (ASE) rate of our proposed model on the testing dataset were 92.07%, 86.95%, 52.32%, and 20.38%, respectively. Compared to the benchmark U-Net, the improvements were 0.65%, 1.01%, 5.78%, and 12.11% (down), respectively.

Purpose: This paper seeks to discover whether the technical, organisational and technology acceptance model (TAM) factors will significantly affect the adoption of blockchain technology (ABT) amongst SMEs. Design/methodology/approach: The research employs structural equation modelling (SEM) and a machine learning approach to identify factors influencing the ABT behaviour that leaders can use to predict the prospect of the ABT in their enterprises. Information was collected from 255 respondents representing 166 SMEs in the food industry, Palestine. Findings: The analyses reveal that the ABT is positively and significantly shaped by TAM factors: (1) perceived benefits and (2) perceived ease of using blockchain. Simultaneously, the former is significantly influenced by compatibility and upper management support, while the latter is affected by complexity. Finally, education and training affect both factors. Originality/value: This paper is amongst the first attempts to examine the ABT behaviour in the food industry using the integration of SEM and machine learning approach.

Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) is a fast-learning algorithm for a single-hidden layer feedforward neural network (SLFN). It often has good generalization performance. However, there are chances that it might overfit the training data due to having more hidden nodes than needed. To address the generalization performance, we use a heterogeneous ensemble approach. We propose an Advanced ELM Ensemble (AELME) for classification, which includes Regularized-ELM, L2-norm-optimized ELM (ELML2), and Kernel-ELM. The ensemble is constructed by training a randomly chosen ELM classifier on a subset of training data selected through random resampling. The proposed AELM-Ensemble is evolved by employing an objective function of increasing diversity and accuracy among the final ensemble. Finally, the class label of unseen data is predicted using majority vote approach. Splitting the training data into subsets and incorporation of heterogeneous ELM classifiers result in higher prediction accuracy, better generalization, and a lower number of base classifiers, as compared to other models (Adaboost, Bagging, Dynamic ELM ensemble, data splitting ELM ensemble, and ELM ensemble). The validity of AELME is confirmed through classification on several real-world benchmark datasets.

Recent advances in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown impressive results in semantic segmentation. Among the successful CNN-based methods, U-Net has achieved exciting performance. In this paper, we proposed a novel network architecture based on U-Net and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to deal with the road extraction task in the remote sensing field. On the one hand, U-Net structure can effectively extract valuable features; on the other hand, ASPP is able to utilize multiscale context information in remote sensing images. Compared to the baseline, this proposed model has improved the pixelwise mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 3 points. Experimental results show that the proposed network architecture can deal with different types of road surface extraction tasks under various terrains in Yinchuan city, solve the road connectivity problem to some extent, and has certain tolerance to shadows and occlusion.