More than 5% of the people around the world are deaf and have severe difficulties in communicating with normal people according to the World Health Organization (WHO). They face a real challenge to express anything without an interpreter for their signs. Nowadays, there are a lot of studies related to Sign Language Recognition (SLR) that aims to reduce this gap between deaf and normal people as it can replace the need for an interpreter. However, there are a lot of challenges facing the sign recognition systems such as low accuracy, complicated gestures, high-level noise, and the ability to operate under variant circumstances with the ability to generalize or to be locked to such limitations. Hence, many researchers proposed different solutions to overcome these problems. Each language has its signs and it can be very challenging to cover all the languages’ signs. The current study objectives: (i) presenting a dataset of 20 Arabic words, and (ii) proposing a deep learning (DL) architecture by combining convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN). The suggested architecture reported 98% accuracy on the presented dataset. It also reported 93.4% and 98.8% for the top-1 and top-5 accuracies on the UCF-101 dataset.

Harris Hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm was a powerful metaheuristic algorithm for solving complex problems. However, HHO could easily fall within the local minimum. In this paper, we proposed an improved Harris Hawks optimization (IHHO) algorithm for solving different engineering tasks. The proposed algorithm focused on random location-based habitats during the exploration phase and on strategies 1, 3, and 4 during the exploitation phase. The proposed modified Harris hawks in the wild would change their perch strategy and chasing pattern according to updates in both the exploration and exploitation phases. To avoid being stuck in a local solution, random values were generated using logarithms and exponentials to explore new regions more quickly and locations. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, IHHO was compared to other five recent algorithms [grey wolf optimization, BAT algorithm, teaching–learning-based optimization, moth-flame optimization, and whale optimization algorithm] as well as three other modifications of HHO (BHHO, LogHHO, and MHHO). These optimizers had been applied to different benchmarks, namely standard benchmarks, CEC2017, CEC2019, CEC2020, and other 52 standard benchmark functions. Moreover, six classical real-world engineering problems were tested against the IHHO to prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. The numerical results showed the superiority of the proposed algorithm IHHO against other algorithms, which was proved visually using different convergence curves. Friedman's mean rank statistical test was also inducted to calculate the rank of IHHO against other algorithms. The results of the Friedman test indicated that the proposed algorithm was ranked first as compared to the other algorithms as well as three other modifications of HHO.

Automatic grading requires the adaption of the latest technologies. It has become essential especially when most of the courses became online courses (MOOCs). The objectives of the current work are (1) Reviewing the literature on the text semantic similarity and automatic exam correction systems, (2) Proposing an automatic exam correction framework (HMB-AECF) for MCQs, essays, and equations that is abstracted into five layers, (3) Suggesting equations similarity checker algorithm named “HMB-MMS-EMA”, (4) Presenting an expression matching dataset named “HMB-EMD-v1”, (5) Comparing the different approaches to convert textual data into numerical data (Word2Vec, FastText, Glove, and Universal Sentence Encoder (USE)) using three well-known Python packages (Gensim, SpaCy, and NLTK), and (6) Comparing the proposed equations similarity checker algorithm (HMB-MMS-EMA) with a Python package (SymPy) on the proposed dataset (HMB-EMD-v1). Eight experiments were performed on the Quora Questions Pairs and the UNT Computer Science Short Answer datasets. The best-achieved highest accuracy in the first four experiments was 77.95% without fine-tuning the pre-trained models by the USE. The best-achieved lowest root mean square error (RMSE) in the second four experiments was 1.09 without fine-tuning the used pre-trained models by the USE. The proposed equations similarity checker algorithm (HMB-MMS-EMA) reported 100% accuracy over the SymPy Python package which reported 71.33% only on “HMB-EMD-v1”.

Breast cancer is among the major frequent types of cancer worldwide, causing a significant death rate every year. It is the second most prevalent malignancy in Egypt. With the increasing number of new cases, it is vital to diagnose breast cancer in its early phases to avoid serious complications and deaths. Therefore, routine screening is important. With the current evolution of deep learning, medical imaging became one of the interesting fields. The purpose of the current work is to suggest a hybrid framework for both the classification and segmentation of breast scans. The framework consists of two phases, namely the classification phase and the segmentation phase. In the classification phase, five different CNN architectures via transfer learning, namely MobileNet, MobileNetV2, NasNetMobile, VGG16, and VGG19, are applied. Aquila optimizer is used for the calculation of the optimal hyperparameters of the different TL architectures. Four different datasets representing four different modalities (i.e., MRI, Mammographic, Ultrasound images, and Histopathology slides) are used for training purposes. The framework can perform both binary- and multi-class classification. In the segmentation phase, five different structures, namely U-Net, Swin U-Net, Attention U-Net, U-Net++, and V-Net, are applied to identify the region of interest in the ultrasound breast images. The reported results prove the efficiency of the suggested framework against current state-of-the-art studies.