The trade-off between more user bandwidth and quality of service requirements introduces unprecedented challenges to the next generation smart optical networks. In this regard, the use of optical performance monitoring (OPM) and modulation format identification (MFI) techniques becomes a common need to enable the development of next-generation autonomous optical networks, with ultra-low latency and selfadaptability. Recently, machine learning (ML)-based techniques have emerged as a vital solution to many challenging aspects of OPM and MFI in terms of reliability, quality, and implementation efficiency. This paper surveys ML-based OPM and MFI techniques proposed in the literature. First, we address the key advantages of employing ML algorithms in optical networks. Then, we review the main optical impairments and modulation formats being monitored and classified, respectively, using ML algorithms. Additionally, we discuss the current status of optical networks in terms of MFI and OPM. This includes standards, monitoring parameters, and the available commercial products with their limitations. Second, we provide a comprehensive review of the available ML-based techniques for MFI, OPM, and joint MFI/OPM, describing their performance, advantages, and limitations. Third, we give an overview of the exiting ML-based OPM and MFI techniques for the emerging optical networks such as the new fiber-based networks that use future space division multiplexing techniques (e.g. few-mode fiber), the hybrid radioover-fiber networks, and the free space optical networks. Finally, we discuss the open issues, potential future research directions, and recommendations for the potential implementation of MLbased OPM and MFI techniques. Some lessons learned are presented after each section throughout the paper to help the reader identifying the gaps, weaknesses, and strengths in this field.

Ahead-of-time forecasting of the output power of power plants is essential for the stability of the electricity grid and ensuring uninterrupted service. However, forecasting renewable energy sources is difficult due to the chaotic behavior of natural energy sources. This paper presents a new approach to estimate short-term solar irradiance from sky images. The proposed algorithm extracts features from sky images and use learning-based techniques to estimate the solar irradiance. The performance of proposed machine learning (ML) algorithm is evaluated using two publicly available datasets of sky images. The datasets contain over 350,000 images for an interval of 16 years, from 2004 to 2020, with the corresponding global horizontal irradiance (GHI) of each image as the ground truth. Compared to the state-of-the-art computationally heavy algorithms proposed in the literature, our approach achieves competitive results with much less computational complexity for both nowcasting and forecasting up to 4 h ahead of time.

Fire detection has been an issue of interest to researchers due to its significant damage to lives and property within a very short time. One of the recent solutions developed to detect fire is to use Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices equipped with cameras for surveillance. The captured videos of surroundings may be processed by the IoT devices themselves or at the cloud. The latter case is required if the detection algorithm is computationally demanding. However, the use of cloud has a flaw. In fact, using the cloud could pose the threat of having the privacy of a place violated, either through hacking or unauthorized access to the footage of the place where the cloud is installed. In this paper, a fire detection system that preserves the privacy of surroundings, while maintaining a high level of accuracy for fire detection is proposed. The proposed system makes use of the cloud for fire detection; and that is achieved by sending to the cloud features extracted from the video captured by the IoT device, instead of sending the actual footage. Binary video descriptors and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have been used to develop the fire detection algorithm. The video descriptors are used to extract features, while the CNN is used for classification. Videos with real fire and non-fire scenes have been used in this development. Results show that the performance of proposed fire detection algorithm can achieve 97.5% classification accuracy, that outperforms the state-of-the art algorithms which make direct use of raw videos. Therefore, the proposed fire detector is as reliable as other available systems, with the advantage of having a privacy-preserving capability. It is also demonstrated that the proposed video descriptors can be implemented for real-time processing using an IoT device, Raspberry Pi 4 platform, with an average processing speed of 100ms per frame, which well satisfies practical needs.

This paper considers, for the first time, optical performance monitoring (OPM) in few mode fiber (FMF)-based optical networks. One dimensional (1D) features vector, extracted by projecting a two-dimensional (2D) asynchronous in-phase quadrature histogram (IQH), and the 2D IQH are proposed to achieve OPM in FMF-based network. Three machine learning algorithms are employed for OPM and their performances are compared. These include support vector machine, random forest algorithm, and convolutional neural network. Extensive simulations are conducted to monitor optical to signal ratio (OSNR), chromatic dispersion (CD), and mode coupling (MC) for dual polarization-quadrature phase shift keying (DP-QPSK) at 10, 12, 16, 20, and 28 Gbaud transmission speeds. Besides, M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M = 8 and 16) is considered. Also, the OPM accuracy is investigated under different FMF channel conditions including phase noise and polarization mode dispersion. Simulation results show that the proposed 1D projection features vector provides better OPM results than those of the widely used asynchronous amplitude histogram (AAH) features. Furthermore, it has been found that the 2D IQH features outperform the 1D projection features but require larger number of features samples. Additionally, the effect of fiber nonlinearity on the OPM accuracy is investigated. Finally, OPM using the 2D IQH features has been verified experimentally for 10 Gbaud DP-QPSK signal. The obtained results show a good agreement between both simulation and experimental findings.

In this paper, we propose a saliency-based attribute, SalSi, to detect salt dome bodies within seismic volumes. SalSi is based on the saliency theory and modeling of the human vision system (HVS). In this work, we aim to highlight the parts of the seismic volume that receive highest attention from the human interpreter, and based on the salient features of a seismic image, we detect the salt domes. Experimental results show the effectiveness of SalSi on the real seismic dataset acquired from the North Sea, F3 block. Subjectively, we have used the ground truth and the output of different salt dome delineation algorithms to validate the results of SalSi. For the objective evaluation of results, we have used the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves and area under the curves (AUC) to demonstrate SalSi is a promising and an effective attribute for seismic interpretation.

In the realm of smart grids, machine learning (ML) detectors—both binary (or supervised) and anomaly (or unsupervised)—have proven effective in detecting electricity theft (ET). However, binary detectors are designed for specific attacks, making their performance unpredictable against new attacks. Anomaly detectors, conversely, are trained on benign data and identify deviations from benign patterns as anomalies, but their performance is highly sensitive to the selected threshold values. Additionally, ML detectors are vulnerable to evasion attacks, where attackers make minimal changes to malicious samples to evade detection. To address these limitations, we introduce a hybrid anomaly detector that combines a Deep Auto-Encoder (DAE) with a One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM). This detector not only enhances classification performance but also mitigates the threshold sensitivity of the DAE. Furthermore, we evaluate the vulnerability of this detector to benchmark evasion attacks. Lastly, we propose an accurate and robust cluster-based DAE+OCSVM ET anomaly detector, trained using Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) explanations generated by the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) method on consumption readings. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed XAI-based detector achieves superior classification performance and exhibits enhanced robustness against various evasion attacks, including gradient-based and optimization-based methods, under a black-box threat model.