In recent years, due to the unnecessary wastage of electrical energy in residential buildings, the requirement of energy optimization and user comfort has gained vital importance. In the literature, various techniques have been proposed addressing the energy optimization problem. The goal of each technique is to maintain a balance between user comfort and energy requirements, such that the user can achieve the desired comfort level with the minimum amount of energy consumption. Researchers have addressed the issue with the help of different optimization algorithms and variations in the parameters to reduce energy consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this problem is not solved yet due to its challenging nature. The gaps in the literature are due to advancements in technology, the drawbacks of optimization algorithms, and the introduction of new optimization algorithms. Further, many newly proposed optimization algorithms have produced better accuracy on the benchmark instances but have not been applied yet for the optimization of energy consumption in smart homes. In this paper, we have carried out a detailed literature review of the techniques used for the optimization of energy consumption and scheduling in smart homes. Detailed discussion has been carried out on different factors contributing towards thermal comfort, visual comfort, and air quality comfort. We have also reviewed the fog and edge computing techniques used in smart homes.

This paper presents a systematic review of relevant primary studies on the use of augmented reality (AR) to improve various skills of children and adolescents diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from years 2005 to 2018 inclusive in eight bibliographic databases. This systematic review attempts to address eleven specific research questions related to the learing skills, participants, AR technology, research design, data collection methods, settings, evaluation parameters, intervention outcomes, generalization, and maintenance. The social communication skill was the highly targeted skill, and individuals with ASD were part of all the studies. Computer, smartphone, and smartglass are more frequently used technologies. The commonly used research design was pre-test and post-test. Almost all the studies used observation as a data collection method, and classroom environment or controlled research environment were used as a setting of evaluation. Most of the evaluation parameters were human-assisted. The results of the studies show that AR benefited children with ASD in learning skills. The generalization test was conducted in one study only, but the results were not reported. The results of maintenance tests conducted in five studies during a short-term period following the withdrawal of intervention were positive. Although the effect of using AR towards the learning of individuals was positive, given the wide variety of skills targeted in the studies, and the heterogeneity of the participants, a summative conclusion regarding the effectiveness of AR for teaching or learning of skills related to ASD based on the existing literature is not possible. The review also proposes the research taxonomy for ASD. Future research addressing the effectiveness of AR among more participants, different technologies supporting AR for the intervention, generalization, and maintenance of learning skills, and the evaluation in the inslusive classroom environment and other settings is warranted.

Brain tumor diagnosis at an early stage can improve the chances of successful treatment and better patient outcomes. In the biomedical industry, non-invasive diagnostic procedures, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), can be used to diagnose brain tumors. Deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence, can analyze MRI images in a matter of seconds, reducing the time it takes for diagnosis and potentially improving patient outcomes. Furthermore, an ensemble model can help increase the accuracy of classification by combining the strengths of multiple models and compensating for their individual weaknesses. Therefore, in this research, a weighted average ensemble deep learning model is proposed for the classification of brain tumors. For the weighted ensemble classification model, three different feature spaces are taken from the transfer learning VGG19 model, Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model without augmentation, and CNN model with augmentation. These three feature spaces are ensembled with the best combination of weights, i.e., weight1, weight2, and weight3 by using grid search. The dataset used for simulation is taken from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), having a lower-grade glioma collection with 3929 MRI images of 110 patients. The ensemble model helps reduce overfitting by combining multiple models that have learned different aspects of the data. The proposed ensemble model outperforms the three individual models for detecting brain tumors in terms of accuracy, precision, and F1-score. Therefore, the proposed model can act as a second opinion tool for radiologists to diagnose the tumor from MRI images of the brain.

The advancements in electronic devices have increased the demand for the internet of things (IoT) based smart homes, where the connecting devices are growing at a rapid pace. Connected electronic devices are more common in smart buildings, smart cities, smart grids, and smart homes. The advancements in smart grid technologies have enabled to monitor every moment of energy consumption in smart buildings. The issue with smart devices is more energy consumption as compared to ordinary buildings. Due to smart cities and smart homes’ growth rates, the demand for efficient resource management is also growing day by day. Energy is a vital resource, and its production cost is very high. Due to that, scientists and researchers are working on optimizing energy usage, especially in smart cities, besides providing a comfortable environment. The central focus of this paper is on energy consumption optimization in smart buildings or smart homes. For the comfort index (thermal, visual, and air quality), we have used three parameters, i.e., Temperature (°F), illumination (lx), and CO ₂ (ppm). The major problem with the previous methods in the literature is the static user parameters (Temperature, illumination, and CO ₂ ); when they (parameters) are assigned at the beginning, they cannot be changed. In this paper, the Alpha Beta filter has been used to predict the indoor Temperature, illumination, and air quality and remove noise from the data. We applied a deep extreme learning machine approach to predict the user parameters. We have used the Bat algorithm and fuzzy logic to optimize energy consumption and comfort index management. The predicted user parameters have improved the system’s overall performance in terms of ease of use of smart systems, energy consumption, and comfort index management. The comfort index after optimization remained near to 1, which proves the significance of the system. After optimization, the power consumption also reduced and stayed around the maximum of 15-18wh.

For many users of natural language processing (NLP), it can be challenging to obtain concise, accurate and precise answers to a question. Systems such as question answering (QA) enable users to ask questions and receive feedback in the form of quick answers to questions posed in natural language, rather than in the form of lists of documents delivered by search engines. This task is challenging and involves complex semantic annotation and knowledge representation. This study reviews the literature detailing ontology-based methods that semantically enhance QA for a closed domain, by presenting a literature review of the relevant studies published between 2000 and 2020. The review reports that 83 of the 124 papers considered acknowledge the QA approach, and recommend its development and evaluation using different methods. These methods are evaluated according to accuracy, precision, and recall. An ontological approach to semantically enhancing QA is found to be adopted in a limited way, as many of the studies reviewed concentrated instead on NLP and information retrieval (IR) processing. While the majority of the studies reviewed focus on open domains, this study investigates the closed domain.