Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, and research resources provided under the Creative Commons (CC) licenses and can be freely used, shared, and modified. However, OER adoption is not widespread, and various barriers remain in the way of its growing emphasis. This article is aimed to investigate OER adoption in higher institutions by using Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory. 422 responses to an online survey from faculty are gathered and analyzed, where adaptive attributes of DOI are adopted. The results of the descriptive method confirmed that relative advantage has a positive impact on faculty OER adoption. Indeed, positive impacts of observability and complexity are also shown. Ultimately, the findings from the structural model used, indicated that there is a positive correlation between trialability and respectively complexity and compatibility. Whereas relative advantage of OER impacts positively complexity and negatively compatibility. This study showed that it is not enough that faculty agree on OER benefits for teaching and research, the OER adoption rate must increase. Decision-makers in higher institutions are asked to perform additional OER initiatives to overcome challenges related to OER trialability, complexity, and compatibility.

The growth of biomedical engineering has made depression diagnosis via electroencephalography (EEG) a trendy issue. The two significant challenges to this application are EEG signals’ complexity and non-stationarity. Additionally, the effects caused by individual variances may hamper the generalization of detection systems. Given the association between EEG signals and particular demographics, such as gender and age, and the influences of these demographic characteristics on the incidence of depression, it would be preferable to include demographic factors during EEG modeling and depression detection. The main objective of this work is to develop an algorithm that can recognize depression patterns by studying EEG data. Following a multiband analysis of such signals, machine learning and deep learning techniques were used to detect depression patients automatically. EEG signal data are collected from the multi-modal open dataset MODMA and employed in studying mental diseases. The EEG dataset contains information from a traditional 128-electrode elastic cap and a cutting-edge wearable 3-electrode EEG collector for widespread applications. In this project, resting EEG readings of 128 channels are considered. According to CNN, training with 25 epoch iterations had a 97% accuracy rate. The patient’s status has to be divided into two basic categories: major depressive disorder (MDD) and healthy control. Additional MDD include the following six classes: obsessive-compulsive disorders, addiction disorders, conditions brought on by trauma and stress, mood disorders, schizophrenia, and the anxiety disorders discussed in this paper are a few examples of mental illnesses. According to the study, a natural combination of EEG signals and demographic data is promising for the diagnosis of depression.

AI-driven precision agriculture applications can benefit from the large data source that remote sensing provides, as it can gather agricultural monitoring data at various scales throughout the year. Numerous advantages for sustainable agricultural applications, including yield prediction, crop monitoring, and climate change adaptation, can be obtained from remote sensing and artificial intelligence. In this work, we proposed a fully automated Optimized Self-Attention Fused Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for land use and land cover classification using remote sensing (RS) data. A new contrast enhancement equation has been proposed and utilized in the proposed architecture for the data augmentation. After that, a fused Self-Attention CNN architecture was proposed. The proposed architecture initially consists of two custom models named IBNR-65 and Densenet-64. Both models have been designed based on the inverted bottleneck residual mechanism and Dense Blocks. After that, both models were fused using a depth-wise concatenation and append a Self-Attention layer for deep features extraction. After that, we trained the model and performed classification using neural network (NN) classifiers. The results obtained from the NN classifiers are insufficient; therefore, we implemented a Bayesian Optimization and fine-tuned the hyperparameters of NN. In addition, we proposed a Quantum Hippopotamus Optimization Algorithm for the best feature selection. The selected features are finally classified using fine-tuned NN classifiers and obtained improved accuracy of 98.20, 89.50, and 91.70%, and the highest precision rate is 98.23, recall is 98.20, and f1-score is 98.21 respectively, for SIRI-WHU, EuroSAT, and NWPU datasets. Moreover, a detailed ablation study was conducted, and the performance was compared with SOTA. The proposed architecture shows improved accuracy, sensitivity, precision and computational time performance.

The study introduces an efficient data aggregation technique for smart agriculture by leveraging Blockchain technology and a novel method referred to as the “cluster head sleep schedule.” The primary objective is to enhance the data collection process within a large-scale agricultural setting where multiple sensors continually generate vast amounts of data while monitoring and safeguarding crops from pest attacks. The proposed method involves the segmentation of sensors into clusters, each led by a designated cluster head responsible for collecting data from its constituent members deployed in the field to monitor pest attacks and promptly report any issues to the management. To curtail data redundancy, the study employs a fuzzy matrix to group nodes based on high-similarity data. This approach enables the selective suspension of certain nodes while others remain active. The data received from these nodes undergoes analysis using a fuzzy similarity matrix for clustering, ensuring that only unique data is transmitted to the base station. Redundant nodes from all clusters are identified and placed in a sleep mode, thus conserving energy and prolonging the network’s lifespan. This sleep scheduling mechanism is implemented subsequent to data redundancy reduction, facilitating immediate pest attack control in agriculture. By implementing these techniques, smart agriculture stands to benefit from optimized energy utilization and reduced costs associated with monitoring and pest control, thereby fostering sustainable and efficient operations. The cluster head is responsible for storing the data on a base station positioned at the network’s edge, allowing for local processing and prompt communication of pest attack information to the farmer for immediate action. Moreover, this edge system stores the data on a Blockchain network for future analysis and serves as a guideline for pest attack control in the pesticide industry, thereby enhancing data security and immutability. In addition to these advantages, the research also emphasizes the importance of controlling pest attacks to enhance crop production in the field, ultimately contributing to the country’s economic growth. Simulation results affirm that the proposed approach leads to notable cost reductions, decreased energy consumption, improved crop production, precise crop monitoring to prevent pest attacks, and a prolonged network lifespan. These outcomes underscore the effectiveness of this approach within the context of smart agriculture and its role in enhancing the monitoring system for smart agriculture and bolstering security through Blockchain technology.

Human activity recognition is a challenging and active research topic in computer science due to its applications in video surveillance, health monitoring, rehabilitation, human-robot interaction, robotics, gesture and posture analysis, and sports. In the past, various studies have utilized manual features to identify human activities and obtained good accuracy. Nonetheless, the performance of such features degraded in complex situations. Therefore, recent research used deep learning (DL) techniques to capture the local features automatically from given activity instances. Though automatic feature extraction overcomes the problems of manual features, there is still a need to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of existing techniques. The motivation behind this research is to improve the efficiency and accuracy of HAR systems. This research proposed a HAR system, which applies data enhancement techniques before capturing robust and discriminative features set from each activity instance. The captured feature set is given to the transformer model for activities recognition using the PAMAP2, UCI HAR, and WISDM datasets. The achieved results revealed that the proposed HAR model outperformed the baseline methods. Specifically, the proposed HAR achieved 98.2% accuracy for PAMAP2 with all instances in 12 activities, 98.6% accuracy for UCI HAR with all instances in 6 activities, 97.3% for WISDM with all instances in 6 activities. The advantage of the proposed hybrid features is the capability to capture both low-level and high-level information from the sensor data, potentially enhancing the discriminative power of the system. In addition, this study employed a transformer a model due to its ability to capture long-range dependencies, which are beneficial in recognizing complex human activities patterns.