Electric vehicles (EV) are fast becoming an integral part of our evolving society. There is a growing movement in advanced countries to replace gas-driven vehicles with EVs towards cutting down pollution from emissions. When fully integrated into society, electric vehicles will share from energy available on the grid; therefore, it is important to understand consumption profiles for EVs. In this study, some computation models are developed from predicting day-ahead energy consumption for electric vehicles in the city of Barcelona. Five different machine learning algorithms namely support vector regression (SVR), Gaussian process regression (GPR), artificial neural networks (ANN), decision tree (DT), and ensemble learners were used to train the forecasting models. The hyperparameters for each of the ML algorithms were tuned by Bayesian optimization algorithm. In order to propose efficient features for modeling EV demand, two different model structures were investigated, named Type-I and Type-II model. In the instance of the Type-I model, seven regressors representing the consumption of the previous seven days were considered as input features. The Type-II models considered only the EV consumption on the previous day and on the same day in the previous week. Based on the results in this study, we find that the performance of the Type-II models was as good as the Type-I models across all the algorithms considered although less input features were considered. Overall, the all algorithms employed in this study gave about 75-80% model accuracy based on the performance criterion. The models formulated in this study may prove useful for planning and unit commitment functions in city energy management functions.

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are biocells that use microorganisms as biocatalysts to break down organic matter and convert chemical energy into electrical energy. Presently, the application of MFCs as alternative energy sources is limited by their low power attribute. Optimization of MFCs is very important to harness optimum energy. In this study, we develop optimal data-driven models for a typical MFC synthesized from polymethylmethacrylate and two graphite plates using machine learning algorithms including support vector regression (SVR), artificial neural networks (ANNs), Gaussian process regression (GPR), and ensemble learners. Power density and output voltage were modeled from two different datasets; the first dataset has current density and anolyte concentration as features, while the second dataset considers current density and chemical oxygen demand as features. Hyperparameter optimization was carried out on each of the considered machine learning-based models using Bayesian optimization, grid search, and random search to arrive at the best possible models for the MFC. A model was derived for power density and output voltage having 99% accuracy on testing set evaluations.

Training an agent to generate cooperative joint learning policies for executing object sorting in cluttered scenes is complex. This paper presents a comparative model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) system built from variants of end-to-end lightweight deep neural networks that jointly complement three primitive policies (pushing, grasping, and placing) that operate from visual observations to actions. The end goal of the proposed DRL systems is to perform object sorting in very dynamic and complex environmental scenarios of cluttered and random objects (irregular and regular blocks) existing in different color variations. For this, we investigated DRL methods built from 12 custom instances of Pixel-wise Q-valued Critic Networks (PQCN) from four main backbone networks (DenseNet121, DenseNet169, MobileNetV3, and SqueezeNet) individually combined with custom fully convolutional neural networks (FCN) for learning the image-based observation space through affordance mapping paradigm while considering both dual and single transfer learning schemes. Additionally, we explored three categories of gradient-based optimization methods and considered custom reward functions with varying discount factors. The results show that the PQCN constructed by integrating DenseNet121 or MobileNetV3 with FCN and trained by a dual transfer learning scheme (with a discount factor of $\gamma =0.70$) yielded the best performance in most categories of our evaluation in the training phases. Overall, the PQCN-DenseNet121, when trained with a dual transfer learning process, yielded the best generalization (sorting success rate) in most of the evaluation metrics across all object categories in the testing phase. Furthermore, our study provides a new benchmark for validating deep reinforcement learning algorithms while sorting object blocks under varying degrees of complexity. This research finds practical relevance in industrial fields such as manufacturing and packaging, building construction, plant sorting, automobile assembly lines, and waste sorting. Here is the article’s source code: https://github.com/Emmanuel-Okafor/DRL_for_Object_Sorting.git.

The global prevalence of skin cancer necessitates the development of AI‐assisted technologies for accurate and interpretable diagnosis of skin lesions. This study presents a novel deep learning framework for enhancing the interpretability and reliability of skin lesion predictions from clinical images, which are more inclusive, accessible, and representative of real‐world conditions than dermoscopic images. We comprehensively analyzed 13 deep learning models from four main convolutional neural network architecture classes: DenseNet, ResNet, MobileNet, and EfficientNet. Different data augmentation strategies and model optimization algorithms were explored to access the performances of the deep learning models in binary and multiclass classification scenarios. In binary classification, the DenseNet‐161 model, initialized with random weights, obtained a top accuracy of 79.40%, while the EfficientNet‐B7 model, initialized with pretrained weights from ImageNet, reached an accuracy of 85.80%. Furthermore, in the multiclass classification experiments, DenseNet121, initialized with random weights and trained with AdamW, obtained the best accuracy of 65.1%. Likewise, when initialized with pretrained weights, the DenseNet121 model attained a top accuracy of 75.07% in multiclass classification. Detailed interpretability analyses were carried out leveraging the SHAP and CAM algorithms to provide insights into the decision rationale of the investigated models. The SHAP algorithm was beneficial in understanding the feature attributions by visualizing how specific regions of the input image influenced the model predictions. Our study emphasizes using clinical images for developing AI algorithms for skin lesion diagnosis, highlighting the practicality and relevance in real‐world applications, especially where dermoscopic tools are not readily accessible. Beyond accessibility, these developments also ensure that AI‐assisted diagnostic tools are deployed in diverse clinical settings, thus promoting inclusiveness and ultimately improving early detection and treatment of skin cancers.