There is a significantly increasing demand for monitoring systems for elderly people in the health‐care sector. As the aging population increases, patient privacy violations and the cost of elderly assistance have driven the research community toward computer vision and image processing to design and deploy new systems for monitoring the elderly in the authors’ society and turning their living houses into smart environments. By exploiting recent advances and the low cost of three‐dimensional (3D) depth sensors such as Microsoft Kinect, the authors propose a new skeleton‐based approach to describe the spatio‐temporal aspects of a human activity sequence, using the Minkowski and cosine distances between the 3D joints. We trained and validated their approach on the Microsoft MSR 3D Action and MSR Daily Activity 3D datasets using the Extremely Randomised Trees algorithm. The results are very promising, demonstrating that the trained model can be used to build a monitoring system for the elderly using open‐source libraries and a low‐cost depth sensor.

This paper describes an on-road air quality monitoring and control approach by proposing an agent-based system for modeling the urban road network infrastructure, establishing the real-time and predicted air pollution indexes in different road segments and generating recommendations and regulation proposals for road users. This can help by reducing vehicle emissions in the most polluted road sections, optimizing the pollution levels while maximizing the vehicle flow. For this, we use data sets gathered from a set of air quality monitoring stations, embedded low-cost e-participatory pollution sensors, contextual data, and the road network available data. These data are used in the air quality indexes calculation and then the generation of a dynamic traffic network. This network is represented by a weighted graph in which the edges weights evolve according to the pollution indexes. In this paper, we propose to combine the benefits of agent technology with both machine learning and big data tools. An artificial neural networks model and the Dijkstra algorithm are used for air quality prediction and the least polluted path finding in the road network. All data processing tasks are performed over a Hadoop-based framework: HBase and MapReduce.

Purpose: Even if MOOCs (massive open online courses) are becoming a trend in distance learning, they suffer from a very high rate of learners’ dropout, and as a result, on average, only 10 per cent of enrolled learners manage to obtain their certificates of achievement. This paper aims to give tutors a clearer vision for an effective and personalized intervention as a solution to “retain” each type of learner at risk of dropping out. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents a methodology to provide predictions on learners’ behaviors. This work, which uses a Stanford data set, was divided into several phases, namely, a data extraction, an exploratory study and then a multivariate analysis to reduce dimensionality and to extract the most relevant features. The second step was the comparison between five machine learning algorithms. Finally, the authors used the principle of association rules to extract similarities between the behaviors of learners who dropped out from the MOOC. Findings: The results of this work have given that deep learning ensures the best predictions in terms of accuracy, which is an average of 95.8 per cent, and is comparable to other measures such as precision, AUC, Recall and F1 score. Originality/value: Many research studies have tried to tackle the MOOC dropout problem by proposing different dropout predictive models. In the same context, comes the present proposal with which the authors have tried to predict not only learners at a risk of dropping out of the MOOCs but also those who will succeed or fail.

Artificial technologies are rapidly becoming one of the most powerful and popular technologies for solving complicated problems involving distributed systems. Nevertheless, their potential for application to advanced artificial transportation systems has not been sufficiently explored. This paper presents a traffic optimization system based on agent technology and fuzzy logic that aims to manage road traffic, prioritize emergency vehicles, and promote collective modes of transport in smart cities. This approach aims to optimize traffic light control at a signalized intersection by acting on the length and order of traffic light phases in order to favor priority flows and fluidize traffic at an isolated intersection and for the whole multi-intersection network, through both inter- and intra-intersection collaboration and coordination. Regulation and prioritization decisions are made on real-time monitoring through cooperation, communication, and coordination between decentralized agents. The performance of the proposed system is investigated by implementing it in the AnyLogic simulator, using a section of the road network that contains priority links. The results indicate that our system can significantly increase the efficiency of the traffic regulation system.

This paper presents an integrated and adaptive problem-solving approach to control the on-road air quality by modeling the road infrastructure, managing traffic based on pollution level and generating recommendations for road users. The aim is to reduce vehicle emissions in the most polluted road segments and optimizing the pollution levels. For this we propose the use of historical and real time pollution records and contextual data to calculate the air quality index on road networks and generate recommendations for reassigning traffic flow in order to improve the on-road air quality. The resulting air quality indexes are used in the system’s traffic network generation, which the cartography is represented by a weighted graph. The weights evolve according to the pollution indexes and path properties and the graph is therefore dynamic. Furthermore, the systems use the available pollution data and meteorological records in order to predict the on-road pollutant levels by using an artificial neural network based prediction model. The proposed approach combines the benefits of multi-agent systems, Big data technology, machine learning tools and the available data sources. For the shortest path searching in the road network, we use the Dijkstra algorithm over Hadoop MapReduce framework. The use Hadoop framework in the data retrieve and analysis process has significantly improved the performance of the proposed system. Also, the agent technology allowed proposing a suitable solution in terms of robustness and agility.