Background Mobile learning has become an essential instruction platform in many schools, colleges, universities, and various other educational institutions across the globe, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The resulting severe, pandemic-related circumstances have disrupted physical and face-to-face contact teaching practices, thereby requiring many students to actively use mobile technologies for learning. Mobile learning technologies offer viable web-based teaching and learning platforms that are accessible to teachers and learners worldwide. Objective This study investigated the use of mobile learning platforms for instruction purposes in United Arab Emirates higher education institutions. Methods An extended technology acceptance model and theory of planned behavior model were proposed to analyze university students’ adoption of mobile learning platforms for accessing course materials, searching the web for information related to their disciplines, sharing knowledge, and submitting assignments during the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected a total of 1880 questionnaires from different universities in the United Arab Emirates. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling and machine learning algorithms were used to assess the research model, which was based on the data gathered from a student survey. Results Based on our results, each hypothesized relationship within the research model was supported by our data analysis results. It should also be noted that the J48 classifier (89.37% accuracy) typically performed better than the other classifiers when it came to the prediction of the dependent variable. Conclusions Our study revealed that teaching and learning could considerably benefit from adopting remote learning systems as educational tools during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the value of such systems could be lessened because of the emotions that students experience, including a fear of poor grades, stress resulting from family circumstances, and sadness resulting from a loss of friends. Accordingly, these issues can only be resolved by evaluating the emotions of students during the pandemic.

The growing importance and widespread adoption of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies have helped the enhancement of smart environments in numerous sectors such as manufacturing, smart cities, transportation and Internet of Things by providing pervasive real-time applications. In this survey, we analyze the existing research trends with respect to Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods in WSN and the possible use of these methods for WSN enhancement. The main goal of data collection, aggregation and dissemination algorithms is to gather and aggregate data in an energy efficient manner so that network lifetime is enhanced. In this paper, we highlight data collection, aggregation and dissemination challenges in WSN and present a comprehensive discussion on the recent studies that utilized various AI methods to meet specific objectives of WSN, during the span of 2010 to 2021. We compare and contrast different algorithms on the basis of optimization criteria, simulation/real deployment, centralized/distributed kind, mobility and performance parameters. We conclude with possible future research directions. This would guide the reader towards an understanding of up-to-date applications of AI methods with respect to data collection, aggregation and dissemination challenges in WSN. Then, we provide a general evaluation and comparison of different AI methods used in WSNs, which will be a guide for the research community in identifying the mostly adapted methods and the benefits of using various AI methods for solving the challenges related to WSNs. Finally, we conclude the paper stating the open research issues and new possibilities for future studies.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are aggregated, combined and analyzed for suitable treatment planning and safe therapeutic procedures of patients. Integrated EHRs facilitate the examination, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. However, the existing EHRs models are centralized. There are several obstacles that limit the proliferation of centralized EHRs, such as data size, privacy and data ownership consideration. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology and algorithm to handle the mining of distributed medical data sources at different sites (hospitals and clinics) using Association Rules. These medical data resources cannot be moved to other network sites. Therefore, the desired global computation must be decomposed into local computations to match the distribution of data across the network. The capability to decompose computations must be general enough to handle different distributions of data and different participating nodes in each instance of the global computation. In the proposed methodology, each distributed data source is represented by an agent. The global association rule computation is then performed by the agent either exchanging some minimal summaries with other agents or travelling to all the sites and performing local tasks that can be done at each local site. The objective is to perform global tasks with a minimum of communication or travel by participating agents across the network, this will preserve the privacy and the security of the local data. The proposed association rule mining methodology will be used for heart disease prediction using real heart disease data. These real data exist at different clinics and cannot be moved to a central site. The proposed model protects the patient data privacy and achieves the same results as if the data are moved and joined at a central site. We also validate the extracted association rules from all the data providers using an independent test datasets.INDEX TERMS Association rules, medical distributed databases, electronic health care records, agents, data privacy.

This study aims to develop a better Financial Statement Fraud (FSF) detection model by utilizing data from publicly available financial statements of firms in the MENA region. We develop an FSF model using a powerful ensemble technique, the XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) algorithm, that helps to identify fraud in a set of sample companies drawn from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The issue of class imbalance in the dataset is addressed by applying the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) algorithm. We use different Machine Learning techniques in Python to predict FSF, and our empirical findings show that the XGBoost algorithm outperformed the other algorithms in this study, namely, Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), AdaBoost, and Random Forest (RF). We then optimize the XGBoost algorithm to obtain the best result, with a final accuracy of 96.05% in the detection of FSF.

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Despite the obvious benefits and growing popularity of Machine Learning (ML) technology, there are still concerns regarding its ability to provide Financial Distress Prediction (FDP). An accurate FDP model is required to avoid financial risk at the lowest possible cost. However, in the Internet era, financial data are exploding, and they are being coupled with other kinds of risk data, making an FDP model challenging to operate. As a result, researchers presented several novel FDP models based on ML and Deep Learning. Time series data is are important to reflect the multi-source and heterogeneous aspects of financial data. This paper gives insight into building a time-series model and forecasting distress far in advance of its occurrence. To build an efficient FDP model, we provide a hybrid model (GALSTM-FDP) that incorporates LSTM and GA. Unlike other previous studies, which established models that predicted distress probability only within one year, our approach predicts distress two years ahead. This research integrates GA with LSTM to find the optimum hyperparameter configuration for LSTM. Using GA, we focus on optimizing architectural aspects for modeling the optimal network based on prediction accuracy. The results showed that our algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of predictive accuracy.

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