Accurate Multi-Category Student Performance Forecasting at Early Stages of Online Education Using Neural Networks

The ability to accurately predict and analyze student performance in online education, both at the outset and throughout the semester, is vital. Most of the published studies focus on binary classification (Fail or Pass) but there is still a significant research gap in predicting students' performance across multiple categories. This study introduces a novel neural network-based approach capable of accurately predicting student performance and identifying vulnerable students at early stages of the online courses. The Open University Learning Analytics (OULA) dataset is employed to develop and test the proposed model, which predicts outcomes in Distinction, Fail, Pass, and Withdrawn categories. The OULA dataset is preprocessed to extract features from demographic data, assessment data, and clickstream interactions within a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Comparative simulations indicate that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing baseline models including Artificial Neural Network Long Short Term Memory (ANN-LSTM), Random Forest (RF) 'gini', RF 'entropy' and Deep Feed Forward Neural Network (DFFNN) in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The results indicate that the prediction accuracy of the proposed method is about 25% more than the existing state-of-the-art. Furthermore, compared to existing methodologies, the model demonstrates superior predictive capability across temporal course progression, achieving superior accuracy even at the initial 20% phase of course completion.

Non-contact Lung Disease Classification via OFDM-based Passive 6G ISAC Sensing

This paper is the first to present a novel, non-contact method that utilizes orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals (of frequency 5.23 GHz, emitted by a software defined radio) to radio-expose the pulmonary patients in order to differentiate between five prevalent respiratory diseases, i.e., Asthma, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), Interstitial lung disease (ILD), Pneumonia (PN), and Tuberculosis (TB). The fact that each pulmonary disease leads to a distinct breathing pattern, and thus modulates the OFDM signal in a different way, motivates us to acquire OFDM-Breathe dataset, first of its kind. It consists of 13,920 seconds of raw RF data (at 64 distinct OFDM frequencies) that we have acquired from a total of 116 subjects in a hospital setting (25 healthy control subjects, and 91 pulmonary patients). Among the 91 patients, 25 have Asthma, 25 have COPD, 25 have TB, 5 have ILD, and 11 have PN. We implement a number of machine and deep learning models in order to do lung disease classification using OFDM-Breathe dataset. The vanilla convolutional neural network outperforms all the models with an accuracy of 97%, and stands out in terms of precision, recall, and F1-score. The ablation study reveals that it is sufficient to radio-observe the human chest on seven different microwave frequencies only, in order to make a reliable diagnosis (with 96% accuracy) of the underlying lung disease. This corresponds to a sensing overhead that is merely 10.93% of the allocated bandwidth. This points to the feasibility of 6G integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems of future where 89.07% of bandwidth still remains available for information exchange amidst on-demand health sensing. Through 6G ISAC, this work provides a tool for mass screening for respiratory diseases (e.g., COVID-19) at public places.

Dense Optical Flow Estimation Using Sparse Regularizers from Reduced Measurements

Optical flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects in a scene. The computation of optical flow is a critical component in numerous computer vision tasks such as object detection, visual object tracking, and activity recognition. Despite a lot of research, efficiently managing abrupt changes in motion remains a challenge in motion estimation. This paper proposes novel variational regularization methods to address this problem since they allow combining different mathematical concepts into a joint energy minimization framework. In this work, we incorporate concepts from signal sparsity into variational regularization for motion estimation. The proposed regularization uses a robust l1 norm, which promotes sparsity and handles motion discontinuities. By using this regularization, we promote the sparsity of the optical flow gradient. This sparsity helps recover a signal even with just a few measurements. We explore recovering optical flow from a limited set of linear measurements using this regularizer. Our findings show that leveraging the sparsity of the derivatives of optical flow reduces computational complexity and memory needs.

Cuff-less Arterial Blood Pressure Waveform Synthesis from Single-site PPG using Transformer & Frequency-domain Learning

We propose two novel purpose-built deep learning (DL) models for synthesis of the arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveform in a cuff-less manner, using a single-site photoplethysmography (PPG) signal. We utilize the public UCI dataset on cuff-less blood pressure (CLBP) estimation to train and evaluate our DL models. Firstly, we implement a transformer model that incorporates positional encoding, multi-head attention, layer normalization, and dropout techniques, and synthesizes the ABP waveform with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 14. Secondly, we implement a frequency-domain (FD) learning approach where we first obtain the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the PPG and ABP signals corresponding to two cardiac cycles, and then learn a linear/non-linear (L/NL) regression between them. We learn that the FD L/NL regression model outperforms the transformer model by achieving an MAE of 11.87 and 8.01, for diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and systolic blood pressure (SBP), respectively. Our FD L/NL regression model also fulfills the AAMI criterion of utilizing data from more than 85 subjects, and achieves grade B by the BHS criterion.