Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a highly infectious disease that has captured the attention of the worldwide public. Modeling of such diseases can be extremely important in the prediction of their impact. While classic, statistical, modeling can provide satisfactory models, it can also fail to comprehend the intricacies contained within the data. In this paper, authors use a publicly available dataset, containing information on infected, recovered, and deceased patients in 406 locations over 51 days (22nd January 2020 to 12th March 2020). This dataset, intended to be a time-series dataset, is transformed into a regression dataset and used in training a multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network (ANN). The aim of training is to achieve a worldwide model of the maximal number of patients across all locations in each time unit. Hyperparameters of the MLP are varied using a grid search algorithm, with a total of 5376 hyperparameter combinations. Using those combinations, a total of 48384 ANNs are trained (16128 for each patient group—deceased, recovered, and infected), and each model is evaluated using the coefficient of determination (R2). Cross-validation is performed using K-fold algorithm with 5-folds. Best models achieved consists of 4 hidden layers with 4 neurons in each of those layers, and use a ReLU activation function, with R2 scores of 0.98599 for confirmed, 0.99429 for deceased, and 0.97941 for recovered patient models. When cross-validation is performed, these scores drop to 0.94 for confirmed, 0.781 for recovered, and 0.986 for deceased patient models, showing high robustness of the deceased patient model, good robustness for confirmed, and low robustness for recovered patient model.

Lowering joint torques of a robotic manipulator enables lowering the energy it uses as well as increase in the longevity of the robotic manipulator. This article proposes the use of evolutionary computation algorithms for optimizing the paths of the robotic manipulator with the goal of lowering the joint torques. The robotic manipulator used for optimization is modelled after a realistic six-degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator. Two cases are observed and these are a single robotic manipulator carrying a weight in a point-to-point trajectory and two robotic manipulators cooperating and moving the same weight along a calculated point-to-point trajectory. The article describes the process used for determining the kinematic properties using Denavit–Hartenberg method and the dynamic equations of the robotic manipulator using Lagrange–Euler and Newton–Euler algorithms. Then, the description of used artificial intelligence optimization algorithms is given – genetic algorithm using random and average recombination, simulated annealing using linear and geometric cooling strategy and differential evolution. The methods are compared and the results show that the genetic algorithm provides best results in regard to torque minimization, with differential evolution also providing comparatively good results and simulated annealing giving the comparatively weakest results while providing smoother torque curves.

COVID-19 is an infectious disease that mostly affects the respiratory system. At the time of this research being performed, there were more than 1.4 million cases of COVID-19, and one of the biggest anxieties is not just our health, but our livelihoods, too. In this research, authors investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the global economy, more specifically, the impact of COVID-19 on the financial movement of Crude Oil price and three US stock indexes: DJI, S&P 500, and NASDAQ Composite. The proposed system for predicting commodity and stock prices integrates the stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BDLSTM) networks. Firstly, SWT is used to decompose the data into approximation and detail coefficients. After decomposition, data of Crude Oil price and stock market indexes along with COVID-19 confirmed cases were used as input variables for future price movement forecasting. As a result, the proposed system BDLSTM + WT-ADA achieved satisfactory results in terms of five-day Crude Oil price forecast.

COVID-19 is one of the greatest challenges humanity has faced recently, forcing a change in the daily lives of billions of people worldwide. Therefore, many efforts have been made by researchers across the globe in the attempt of determining the models of COVID-19 spread. The objectives of this review are to analyze some of the open-access datasets mostly used in research in the field of COVID-19 regression modeling as well as present current literature based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods for regression tasks, like disease spread. Moreover, we discuss the applicability of Machine Learning (ML) and Evolutionary Computing (EC) methods that have focused on regressing epidemiology curves of COVID-19, and provide an overview of the usefulness of existing models in specific areas. An electronic literature search of the various databases was conducted to develop a comprehensive review of the latest AI-based approaches for modeling the spread of COVID-19. Finally, a conclusion is drawn from the observation of reviewed papers that AI-based algorithms have a clear application in COVID-19 epidemiological spread modeling and may be a crucial tool in the combat against coming pandemics.

Urinary bladder cancer is one of the most common urinary tract cancers. Standard diagnosis procedure can be invasive and time-consuming. For these reasons, procedure called optical biopsy is introduced. This procedure allows in-vivo evaluation of bladder mucosa without the need for biopsy. Although less invasive and faster, accuracy is often lower. For this reason, machine learning (ML) algorithms are used to increase its accuracy. The issue with ML algorithms is their sensitivity to the amount of input data. In medicine, collection can be time-consuming due to a potentially low number of patients. For these reasons, data augmentation is performed, usually through a series of geometric variations of original images. While such images improve classification performance, the number of new data points and the insight they provide is limited. These issues are a motivation for the application of novel augmentation methods. Authors demonstrate the use of Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGAN) for the generation of images. Augmented datasets used for training of commonly used Convolutional Neural Network-based (CNN) architectures (AlexNet and VGG-16) show a significcan performance increase for AlexNet, where AUCmicro reaches values up to 0.99. Average and median results of networks used in grid-search increases. These results point towards the conclusion that GAN-based augmentation has decreased the networks sensitivity to hyperparemeter change.

This paper investigates the possibility of the implementation of Genetic Programming (GP) algorithm on a publicly available COVID-19 data set, in order to obtain mathematical models which could be used for estimation of confirmed, deceased, and recovered cases and the estimation of epidemiology curve for specific countries, with a high number of cases, such as China, Italy, Spain, and USA and as well as on the global scale. The conducted investigation shows that the best mathematical models produced for estimating confirmed and deceased cases achieved R² scores of 0.999, while the models developed for estimation of recovered cases achieved the R² score of 0.998. The equations generated for confirmed, deceased, and recovered cases were combined in order to estimate the epidemiology curve of specific countries and on the global scale. The estimated epidemiology curve for each country obtained from these equations is almost identical to the real data contained within the data set.