Africa
List Of Jeff Bezos' Businesses: From Washington Post To Blue Origin
With a net worth of $154.3 billion, Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world. He even competes for the top title with Elon Musk in Forbes' Billionaires 2022, a wealthy list updated in real-time. And it's not surprising that Bezos has amassed massive wealth. A long list of companies is attached to his name, with Amazon leading the pack. Let's take a look at the many businesses of Jeff Bezos, from Amazon to Zappos: Bezos founded Amazon in July 1995 โ predating tech giant Google.
Bayesian Calibration for Activity Based Models
Schultz, Laura, Auld, Joshua, Sokolov, Vadim
Transportation activity-based simulators (ABMs) represent an individual traveler's activity patterns and trips throughout the day by using nested choice models. The generated trips are then simulated in a traffic flow simulator to learn system-level patterns. These behaviorally-realistic models require a high-resolution representation of network flows and, thus, are computationally expensive. The very same flexibility which makes these simulation models appealing, also makes their calibration problems intractable, with the number of simulations required to find an optimal solution growing exponentially as the input dimension increases [90, 70]. As a result, the use of these simulators is currently limited to what-if analysis. This paper focuses on calibrating the static choice model parameters used in activity-based simulators. The goal of calibration is to find values of the simulator's input parameters ฮธ that minimizes the deviance between observed data and simulator's outputs.
Artificial Intelligence-Based Analytics for Impacts of COVID-19 and Online Learning on College Students' Mental Health
Rezapour, Mostafa, Elmshaeuser, Scott K.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), first emerged in Wuhan, China late in December 2019. Not long after, the virus spread worldwide and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. This caused many changes around the world and in the United States, including an educational shift towards online learning. In this paper, we seek to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic and increase in online learning impact college students' emotional wellbeing. We use several machine learning and statistical models to analyze data collected by the Faculty of Public Administration at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in conjunction with an international consortium of universities, other higher education institutions, and students' associations. Our results indicate that features related to students' academic life have the largest impact on their emotional wellbeing. Other important factors include students' satisfaction with their university's and government's handling of the pandemic as well as students' financial security.
RX-ADS: Interpretable Anomaly Detection using Adversarial ML for Electric Vehicle CAN data
Wickramasinghe, Chathurika S., Marino, Daniel L., Mavikumbure, Harindra S., Cobilean, Victor, Pennington, Timothy D., Varghese, Benny J., Rieger, Craig, Manic, Milos
Recent year has brought considerable advancements in Electric Vehicles (EVs) and associated infrastructures/communications. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are widely deployed for anomaly detection in such critical infrastructures. This paper presents an Interpretable Anomaly Detection System (RX-ADS) for intrusion detection in CAN protocol communication in EVs. Contributions include: 1) window based feature extraction method; 2) deep Autoencoder based anomaly detection method; and 3) adversarial machine learning based explanation generation methodology. The presented approach was tested on two benchmark CAN datasets: OTIDS and Car Hacking. The anomaly detection performance of RX-ADS was compared against the state-of-the-art approaches on these datasets: HIDS and GIDS. The RX-ADS approach presented performance comparable to the HIDS approach (OTIDS dataset) and has outperformed HIDS and GIDS approaches (Car Hacking dataset). Further, the proposed approach was able to generate explanations for detected abnormal behaviors arising from various intrusions. These explanations were later validated by information used by domain experts to detect anomalies. Other advantages of RX-ADS include: 1) the method can be trained on unlabeled data; 2) explanations help experts in understanding anomalies and root course analysis, and also help with AI model debugging and diagnostics, ultimately improving user trust in AI systems.
HAGCN : Network Decentralization Attention Based Heterogeneity-Aware Spatiotemporal Graph Convolution Network for Traffic Signal Forecasting
The construction of spatiotemporal networks using graph convolution networks (GCNs) has become one of the most popular methods for predicting traffic signals. However, when using a GCN for traffic speed prediction, the conventional approach generally assumes the relationship between the sensors as a homogeneous graph and learns an adjacency matrix using the data accumulated by the sensors. However, the spatial correlation between sensors is not specified as one but defined differently from various viewpoints. To this end, we aim to study the heterogeneous characteristics inherent in traffic signal data to learn the hidden relationships between sensors in various ways. Specifically, we designed a method to construct a heterogeneous graph for each module by dividing the spatial relationship between sensors into static and dynamic modules. We propose a network decentralization attention based heterogeneity-aware graph convolution network (HAGCN) method that aggregates the hidden states of adjacent nodes by considering the importance of each channel in a heterogeneous graph. Experimental results on real traffic datasets verified the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving a 6.35% improvement over the existing model and realizing state-of-the-art prediction performance.
Impact analysis of recovery cases due to COVID19 using LSTM deep learning model
Haque, Md Ershadul, Hoque, Samiul
The present world is badly affected by novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Using medical kits to identify the coronavirus affected persons are very slow. What happens in the next, nobody knows. The world is facing erratic problem and do not know what will happen in near future. This paper is trying to make prognosis of the coronavirus recovery cases using LSTM (Long Short Term Memory). This work exploited data of 258 regions, their latitude and longitude and the number of death of 403 days ranging from 22-01-2020 to 27-02-2021. Specifically, advanced deep learning-based algorithms known as the LSTM, play a great effect on extracting highly essential features for time series data (TSD) analysis.There are lots of methods which already use to analyze propagation prediction. The main task of this paper culminates in analyzing the spreading of Coronavirus across worldwide recovery cases using LSTM deep learning-based architectures.
Drone Delivery in Africa Zipline and Jumia
Africa led the world in medical drone delivery. Now, instant logistics leader Zipline announced a partnership with African e-commerce platform Jumia that will see the integration of Zipline's delivery system with Jumia's distribution network for the deployment of automated, on-demand delivery for e-commerce in Africa. "Using the latest instant logistics technology will allow Jumia to offer our consumers on-demand delivery of the products they need โ instantly," said Apoorva Kumar, EVP Jumia, Group COO. "Whether they're ordering electronics, fashion, health, and beauty, or other categories, Zipline's instant logistics system will provide fast and convenient access. This will support Jumia's commitment to sustainability and innovation and provide much-needed access to rural and remote areas where conventional delivery services have challenges." A trial period was conducted across a variety of use cases with a range of assorted products, covering up to 2,500km in testing.
Liberia plans biometric voter registry with enrollment beginning in December
NEC Chairperson Davidetta Browne Lansanah said during a press conference that portable tablets with fingerprint scanners will be used to capture thumbprints for a biometric voter registry, The New Dawn Liberia reports. The biometrics could also be used for deduplication and the prevention of impersonation. Facial images will also be collected, and the NEC will attempt to reduce the volume of incorrect voter data in the system. Following deduplication, biometric voter registry cards will be issued from registration centers. A biometric voter registration initiative is slated to start on December 15, 2022, and conclude on March 17, 2023.
Fraud Detection Using Optimized Machine Learning Tools Under Imbalance Classes
Isangediok, Mary, Gajamannage, Kelum
Fraud detection is a challenging task due to the changing nature of fraud patterns over time and the limited availability of fraud examples to learn such sophisticated patterns. Thus, fraud detection with the aid of smart versions of machine learning (ML) tools is essential to assure safety. Fraud detection is a primary ML classification task; however, the optimum performance of the corresponding ML tool relies on the usage of the best hyperparameter values. Moreover, classification under imbalanced classes is quite challenging as it causes poor performance in minority classes, which most ML classification techniques ignore. Thus, we investigate four state-of-the-art ML techniques, namely, logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, and extreme gradient boost, that are suitable for handling imbalance classes to maximize precision and simultaneously reduce false positives. First, these classifiers are trained on two original benchmark unbalanced fraud detection datasets, namely, phishing website URLs and fraudulent credit card transactions. Then, three synthetically balanced datasets are produced for each original data set by implementing the sampling frameworks, namely, RandomUnderSampler, SMOTE, and SMOTEENN. The optimum hyperparameters for all the 16 experiments are revealed using the method RandomzedSearchCV. The validity of the 16 approaches in the context of fraud detection is compared using two benchmark performance metrics, namely, area under the curve of receiver operating characteristics (AUC ROC) and area under the curve of precision and recall (AUC PR). For both phishing website URLs and credit card fraud transaction datasets, the results indicate that extreme gradient boost trained on the original data shows trustworthy performance in the imbalanced dataset and manages to outperform the other three methods in terms of both AUC ROC and AUC PR.
IoT Book Bot
Datta, Souvik, Kundu, Mangolik, Choudhury, Ratnadeep Das, P, Sriramalakshmi, VT, Sreedevi
In order to ease the process of library management many technologies have been adopted but most of them focus on inventory management. There has hardly been any progress of automation in the field of issuing and returning books to the library on time. In colleges and schools, hostellers often forget to timely return the issued books back to the library. To solve the above issue and to ensure timely submission of the issued books, this work develops a Book-Bot which solves these complexities. The bot can commute from point A to point B, scan and verify QR Codes and Barcodes. The bot will have a certain payload capacity for carrying books. The QR code and Barcode scanning will be enabled by a Pi Camera, OpenCV and Raspberry Pi, thus making the exchange of books safe and secure. The odometry maneuvers of the bot will be controlled manually via a Blynk App. This paper focuses on how human intervention can be reduced and automates the issue part of library management system with the help of a bot.