The manual segmentation of the blood vessels in retinal images has numerous limitations. It is very time consuming and prone to human error, particularly with a very twisted structure of the blood vessel and a vast number of retinal images that needs to be analysed. Therefore, an automatic algorithm for segmenting and extracting useful clinical features from the retinal blood vessels is critical to help ophthalmologists and eye specialists to diagnose different retinal diseases and to assess early treatment. An accurate, rapid, and fully automatic blood vessel segmentation and clinical features measurement algorithm for retinal fundus images is proposed to improve the diagnosis precision and decrease the workload of the ophthalmologists. The main pipeline of the proposed algorithm is composed of two essential stages: image segmentation and clinical features extraction stage. Several comprehensive experiments were carried out to assess the performance of the developed fully automated segmentation algorithm in detecting the retinal blood vessels using two extremely challenging fundus images datasets, named the DRIVE and HRF. Initially, the accuracy of the proposed algorithm was evaluated in terms of adequately detecting the retinal blood vessels. In these experiments, five quantitative performances were measured and calculated to validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, which consist of the Acc., Sen., Spe., PPV, and NPV measures compared with current state-of-the-art vessel segmentation approaches on the DRIVE dataset. The results obtained showed a significantly improvement by achieving an Acc., Sen., Spe., PPV, and NPV of 99.55%, 99.93%, 99.09%, 93.45%, and 98.89, respectively.

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), colloquially known as drones, has grown rapidly over the past two decades and continues to expand at a rapid pace. This has resulted in the production of many research papers addressing the use of UAVs in a variety of applications, such as forest firefighting. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of UAV-based forest-fire-extinguishing activity (FFEA) operations. To achieve this goal, a systematic literature review was conducted to answer a specific set of questions, which were carefully formulated to address the results of research conducted between 2008 and 2021. This study aims to (i) expand our understanding of the development of UAVs and their current contributions to the FFEA; (ii) identify particularly novel or unique applications and characteristics of UAV-based fire-extinguishing systems; (iii) provide guidance for exploring and revising further ideas in this field by identifying under-researched topics and other areas in which more contributions are needed; and (iv) explore the feasibility of using UAV swarms to enable autonomous firefighting in the forest without human intervention. Of the 1353 articles systematically searched across five databases (Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library, Science Direct, Scopus, and IEEE Explore), 51 highly relevant articles were found to meet the inclusion criteria; therefore, they were analyzed and discussed. The results identified several gaps in this field of study among them the complexity of coordination in multi-robotic systems, the lack of evaluation and implementation of fire extinguishing systems, the inability of handling multiple spot fires, and poor management of time and resources. Finally, based on the conducted review, this paper provides significant research directions that require further investigations by researchers in this field including, the deployment of UAV-based Swarm Robotics, further study on the characteristics of the fire extinguishing systems; design more effective area coverage; and the propose of a self-firefighting model that enables individuals to decide on the course of events efficiently and locally for better utilization and management of time and resources.

The proliferation of mobile devices has changed the way people communicate and perform their day-to-day dealings. In particular, the widespread availability of mobile devices has enabled information distribution and sharing to be done almost instantly at your fingertips. Companies and organisations are also taking advantage of this phenomenon by changing the way they accomplish their tasks. From traditionally employing people to do the tasks, they now crowdsource the tasks to the public who can easily access the tasks through their mobile devices. As a result, many mobile crowdsourcing applications have been developed for this purpose. In this paper, the result of a systematic literature review performed in an attempt to understand the current state of mobile crowdsourcing applications that exist today is presented. The aim is to identify the potential categorisation of the applications in a way that enables the researchers to understand the current situation and hence determine the direction of future research in this area. Mobile crowdsourcing applications under review came from both; research and industry. Results obtained from the review showed that mobile crowdsourcing applications from the traffic and navigation category are mostly developed and majority of the mobile crowdsourcing applications only exist in mobile form. Finding from the review also showed that most mobile crowdsourcing applications from the industry are offered in both platforms; iOS and Android.

The use of games in the teaching and learning process is not new. It is said to be able to improve students understanding when the subject matters are taught in a less formal but more meaningful way. With the advances of technologies, educational games have evolved into digital games too. They have been introduced into many areas of study such as medicine and engineering. Software engineering is not spared. Since the last few decades, gamification through the use of digital and non-digital games are seen applied in the teaching of various topics of software engineering such as requirements engineering, design and testing. In this paper, a review is specifically made on the games that have been introduced to teach requirements engineering (RE) to the students. Particularly, the types, the learning objectives and the possible classification of the games are presented and discussed. The aim of the review is to identify the current state of RE games with respect to the above. Keyword searching was used to identify the relevant literature to be included in the review. Results showed that the existing RE games can be broadly divided into digital and non-digital games with role playing prevalently used as the game mechanics. Details on the learning objectives of the games and the evaluation performed on the games are also collected and analysed.

ASEAN Power Grid (APG) is one of the six programme areas initially identified in the first ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC) series, APAEC 1999-2004. It is an initiative to ensure security and sustainability of energy in the region, particularly the electricity. In each series, the APG objectives, strategies and actions are revised and updated to reflect its current state and progress. It has been twenty years since the first APAEC series and a lot of APG strategies and actions have been implemented to achieve the stated objectives. It is therefore timely to review the current state of its implementation to gain insight on its progress. In this paper, the action plans are presented and their current states of implementation are reviewed with the aim to determine their progress and achievements to date. Most of the information needed for this study was obtained from the official APAEC reports, related documents and news cuttings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever work that comprehensively review the progress and achievement of the APG to date. Existing reports are usually written per timeframe rather than per programme area, making it difficult to delve deeper into a specific programme area. Among others, findings from the review show that most of the implemented actions were focusing on the physical interconnections of the power grid and a lot still need to be done with regards to the trading. However, encouraging progress with regards to trading is also seen lately. Findings from this study would provide useful insight on the current state of the APG implementation, particularly when the relevant committees are currently drafting the second phase of the APAEC 2016-2025 that will cover the period from 2021 to 2025.

Malaysia is in the process of liberalising its electricity supply industry (ESI) further, with the second reform series announced in September 2018. If everything goes as planned, Malaysia would be the third country in the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN) to have a fully liberalised ESI after the Philippines and Singapore. A number of initiatives have been in the pipeline to be executed and a lot more will be planned. At this juncture, it is important for Malaysia to look for the best practices and lessons that can be learnt from the experience of other countries that have successfully liberalised their ESIs. Being in the same region, it is believed that there is a lot that Malaysia can learn from the Philippines and Singapore. This paper therefore presents and deliberates on the chronological development of the countries’ progressive journeys in liberalising their ESIs. The aim is to discern the good practices, the challenges as well as the lessons learnt from these transformations. Analysis is being made and discussed from the following four perspectives; legislative framework, implementation phases, market components and impact on renewable energy penetration. Findings from this study would provide useful insight for Malaysia in determining the course of actions to be taken to reform its ESI. Beyond Malaysia, the findings can also serve as the reference for the other ASEAN countries in moving towards liberalising their ESIs.