Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050152

Authors: Michał Gostkowski Tomasz Ząbkowski Krzysztof Gajowniczek

Effective peak load management enables utilities to mitigate increased electricity demand and optimize the use of available resources during periods of maximum consumption. Accurate forecasting of the peak load is essential for ensuring the reliability, efficiency, and resilience of contemporary power systems. In this study, commercial customer-level data were employed to identify electricity peak demand within the Polish power system, drawing upon historical records of both energy consumption and meteorological variables. Departing from conventional time series forecasting approaches, the problem was intentionally reformulated as a pattern recognition task. Three classification techniques were systematically evaluated to identify individual customers’ peak load events, thereby offering a basis for demand-side management strategies and incentive mechanisms aimed at flattening load profiles and improving grid stability. The proposed approach demonstrates how data-driven analytics can support utilities in extracting actionable knowledge from large-scale energy datasets and enabling proactive demand response programs. Empirical results indicate that the proposed methods are capable of predicting up to 90% of electricity peak occurrences, with a forecasting horizon of 24 h leading to significant shifts in the load curve.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050151

Authors: Roland Tanácsi András Micsik

Background: The Hungarian Science Bibliography applies the OECD Frascati Fields of Science and Technology taxonomy for subject classification; however, approximately 80% of its records lack assigned categories. Automated large-scale classification could support retrospective completion and improve the quality of bibliographic data. Methods: We evaluated multiple artificial intelligence approaches to classifying publications into level 4 Frascati categories using only titles and keywords. Training datasets were compiled from bibliographic records and subjected to heuristic and large-language-model-based filtering to reduce noise and ambiguity. The approaches tested included statistical methods, classical machine learning classifiers, fine-tuned SciBERT models, zero-shot prompting with large language models, and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture. Results: Data quality had a stronger impact on performance than model complexity. Large-language-model-based filtering substantially improved classification results. The best-performing model, a Support Vector Classifier, achieved a weighted F1 score of 0.83, which is an outstanding result relative to state-of-the-art approaches from the literature. Conclusions: Our findings contribute new insights into classification research and may assist others in selecting appropriate solutions for real-world, large-scale bibliographic classification tasks.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050150

Authors: Hao Nguyen Thi Loc Nguyen The Huu Dang Quoc

This paper introduces the ETMS-RCPSP (Earliness–Tardiness Multi-Skill Resource-Constrained Scheduling Problem)—a novel problem derived from the MS-RCPSP by adding constraints on project completion time or actual production contracts. The goal of the new problem is to control the project completion time as closely as possible to reality—this differs from the original MS-RCPSP, which aimed to minimize project execution time. The objective of the problem is of greater practical significance in ensuring project completion on schedule while also addressing related issues, such as the ability to receive finished products on time as stipulated in the contract. The ETMS-RCPSP is an NP-hard problem whose result can be used for resource allocation in project execution or for resource arrangement in production lines to fulfill economic contracts. To address the ETMS-RCPSP, the paper proposes a new evolutionary algorithm, BDERL (Balanced Differential Evolution with Reinforcement Learning), that combines differential evolution with a problem-specific decoding mechanism and an adaptive parameter control strategy based on reinforcement learning (Q-learning). The proposed algorithm is evaluated on benchmark instances derived from the iMOPSE dataset and the TNG company dataset—a real-world dataset from manufacturing and contract-driven environments. Experimental results demonstrate that the approach consistently reduces total production costs compared to baseline heuristics while maintaining competitive computational efficiency. The findings underscore the efficacy of adaptive hybrid optimization techniques in solving intricate production scheduling problems characterized by limited resources and varied skill competencies.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050149

Authors: Shaofu Lin Yumiao Chang Jianhui Chen Lianfang Ma

Accurate kidney tumor segmentation from abdominal CT is essential for quantitative assessment and treatment planning. However, indistinct tumor boundaries and substantial inter-patient shape variability render traditional hand-crafted feature-based methods unreliable for precise delineation. Although deep learning has advanced this task, these methods still struggle with multi-scale tumor characteristics, complex morphological variations, and background noise in medical images. To address these challenges, we propose MDA-Net, an end-to-end segmentation method based on enhanced multi-scale feature extraction and attention refinement. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-Scale Feature Extraction (MSFE) module into encoder–decoder skip connections to aggregate dilated features across multiple receptive fields and learn branch-wise weights for adaptive refinement and fusion, thereby enhancing boundary details and semantic cues to reduce tumor-tissue ambiguity. At the bottleneck, a Deformable Pyramid Feature Refinement (DPFR) module combines deformable sampling with pyramid contextual modeling, thereby improving adaptability to variations in tumor shape and scale while preserving feature resolution. Moreover, a Channel and Spatial Attention (CASA) module is embedded in the decoder to suppress background interference and enhance boundary-sensitive structures during upsampling via coordinated channel and spatial reweighting, thereby improving the reconstruction of fine-grained tumor morphology and contours. Experiments on both KiTS19 and KiTS21 show that MDA-Net consistently improves tumor boundary delineation, lesion localization, and mask reconstruction, demonstrating stronger robustness and cross-dataset generalizability than representative baseline methods. Ablation studies further confirm the complementary effects of MSFE, DPFR, and CASA. In addition, Grad-CAM visualizations improve the clinical transparency and interpretability of the model. Overall, this method advances deep learning for medical image analysis and supports precise diagnosis and treatment of renal tumors.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050148

Authors: Serhii Vladov Oksana Mulesa Maryana Marusinets Tiberiy Chegi Victoria Vysotska Anton Kazakov Iryna Kirieieva Maksym Korniienko Tetiana Morhunova

The article develops a hybrid multimodal neural network for the automatic prevention of personal digital rights violations, focusing on improving security through anomaly detection and ensuring data confidentiality. The main aim is to integrate several innovative methods, such as federated learning, gating, latent competitive learning, and a variational autoencoder, to improve violation detection accuracy. The key contribution is the development of a training mixture that combines a probabilistic anomaly detector and an autoencoder reconstruction signal, which allows for effective detection of typical incidents and hidden anomalies. The experimental evaluation results showed high-performance indicators, with ROC-AUC at 0.96 and accuracy at 0.94, confirming the system’s effectiveness on anonymized data. The results obtained have a significant practical contribution, as they can be integrated into national information security systems, including SOC and forensic reports, which will ensure a higher level of personal data protection and reduce privacy breach risks. The scope of the proposed system simultaneously covers cybersecurity, personal data protection, national security, SOC systems, and forensic analysis.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050147

Authors: Yihua Zhu Chao Luo Ke Wu Jiawei Yu Binjiang Hu Lei Huang Bitao Xiao

Enhancing the accuracy of short-term wind power forecasting helps mitigate the adverse impacts of prediction errors on grid dispatch. Wind power exhibits a significantly nonlinear dependence on multiple influencing factors. However, existing methods struggle to effectively resolve multi-dimensional feature redundancy and multi-scale non-stationary evolutionary characteristics inherent in far-offshore wind power forecasting tasks. This leads to bottlenecks such as insufficient feature discriminability and temporal dependency focus shift under complex marine environments, ultimately limiting further improvements in prediction accuracy. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a federated learning-based adaptive multi-head attention model for wind power forecasting (Fed-AMHA). The proposed framework operates as follows: First, each wind farm client utilizes a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network to model input sequences bidirectionally, capturing long-term temporal dependencies. Subsequently, linear projection and parallel one-dimensional convolution operations are introduced to mine multi-scale local temporal features from each time step and its neighborhood. Building upon this, channel attention and multi-head temporal feature attention mechanisms are stacked. The model adaptively adjusts the weights of different time slices and feature channels by learning the importance of each channel to the forecasting task. The central server then aggregates the model parameters uploaded by the clients via averaging, enabling cross-site collaborative training without directly sharing raw data. Simulation results based on public datasets and actual wind farm data under various short-term forecasting scenarios demonstrate that the proposed model consistently achieves lower prediction errors and superior stability compared to existing forecasting models under identical settings.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050146

Authors: Elia Morgulev Ofer H. Azar

Big-data analytics are increasingly used in scouting and talent identification, with machine learning (ML) tools applied to evaluate and predict player performance based on match statistics, video tracking, physical and anthropometric tests, psychological assessments, social media data, and qualitative scouting reports. Advances in computer vision, together with the emergence of affordable automated broadcasting and data collection systems, have extended the deployment of ML-driven scouting from professional to youth sport. The use of algorithms in educational, employment, and healthcare settings has been shown to introduce biases and discrimination while wrongly assuming accuracy and objectivity because the decisions are made automatically and quantitatively. In this respect, we briefly describe the development of data-driven performance analysis and how ML-based technologies are currently applied for early screening and comparison of large player populations. Based on a narrative overview of the literature, we draw on evidence from education, employment, and healthcare to identify risks that may also emerge in ML-driven player evaluation, including algorithmic bias, non-representative training data, privacy concerns, and the persistence of model-based labels over time, especially in youth sport. Our main contribution is translating these threats into governance principles and operational safeguards for responsible use of AI in scouting and talent identification.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050145

Authors: Rodrigo Gabriel Salazar Alva Matías Núñez Cristian López Del Alamo Javier Martín Arista

Preserving ancient languages is essential for understanding the cultural and linguistic heritage of humanity. Old English, however, remains critically under-resourced, which limits its accessibility to modern natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We present a scalable framework that uses advanced large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality Old English texts to address this gap. In this study, we specifically employ state-of-the-art models, including Llama-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B, as our foundation models, which are then adapted to the unique characteristics of Old English. Our approach combines parameter-efficient fine-tuning (Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)), data augmentation via back-translation, and a dual-agent pipeline that separates content generation (in English) and translation (into Old English). Evaluation with automated metrics (BLEU, METEOR, and CHRF) shows improvements over baseline models, with BLEU scores increasing from 26 to over 65 for English-to-Old English translation. Expert human assessment confirms high grammatical accuracy and stylistic fidelity in the generated texts, with average scores of 9.0/10 for inflection and word order, 9.1/10 for lexical authenticity, and 7.8 for semantic coherence. These results demonstrate that the framework can reliably expand limited historical corpora while maintaining linguistic integrity, with immediate practical applications in digital humanities research, computational philology, and the development of educational resources for Old English study. Beyond expanding the Old English corpus, our method offers a practical blueprint for revitalizing other endangered languages, thus linking AI innovation with the goals of cultural preservation.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050144

Authors: Ismail Jabri Zine Eddine Louriga Aziza El Ouaazizi Abdelaziz Ahaitouf

Sarcasm detection remains a challenging task in natural language processing because sarcastic expressions often convey meanings that contradict their literal wording. Although transformer-based encoders such as RoBERTa capture contextual semantics effectively, sparse linguistic signals common in sarcastic user-generated text, such as exaggerated punctuation, elongated words, capitalization, and sentiment contrast, may not always remain explicitly accessible in the final sentence representation. To address this limitation, we propose HYSARD, a hybrid feature-fusion model that combines RoBERTa-based sentence embeddings with complementary linguistic features, including sentiment polarity, stylistic markers, syntactic patterns, and TF-IDF lexical cues. The resulting feature space is refined through Random Forest-based feature selection to reduce redundancy and improve robustness, while SMOTE mitigates class imbalance during training. We evaluate HYSARD on the SemEval-2022 iSarcasmEval dataset and the balanced Main and Political subsets of SARC 2.0. Results show strong and consistent performance across datasets, with an F1-score of 0.80 on iSarcasmEval, while held-out test-set error analysis further highlights strong class-wise discrimination. The ablation study further confirms that combining contextual embeddings with explicit linguistic cues improves sarcasm detection over reduced feature configurations. These findings show that hybrid feature fusion remains an effective and practical strategy for sarcasm detection in noisy social media text.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050143

Authors: Itai Himelboim Mudit Baid

This manuscript develops and demonstrates a practical framework for evaluating automated classifiers used in communication research, using harmful language detection as an illustrative case. We combine (a) a structured review of documentation practices for 27 publicly available classifiers and their associated annotation processes with (b) a cross-dataset evaluation that re-tests each model beyond its original training context. Across 27 datasets, we extract and compare reporting on construct definitions, annotator instructions, and inter-annotator agreement, and we quantify generalization by applying each model to multiple out-of-domain test sets. We also benchmark a contemporary large language model (GPT-5) under a consistent prompting protocol to illustrate how LLM-based classification compares to fine-tuned classifiers. Results show that documentation is uneven and often insufficient for theory-driven measurement, inter-annotator agreement varies widely across datasets, and cross-dataset performance frequently drops substantially relative to within-dataset evaluations. Building on these findings and existing validation guidance, we provide a reusable checklist and decision flow to help researchers select, justify, and report classifier-based measures in ways that support transparency and cumulative science. Recommendations for researchers, reviewers, and journal editors stress aligning model selection with standards of validity, reliability, and transparency.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050142

Authors: Emmanuel Chibuikem Nnadozie Susana Merino-Caviedes Daniel A. de Luis-Román Marcos Martín-Fernández Carlos Alberola-López

High-performance medical segmentation models are often benchmarked on high-end GPUs. Such benchmarks do not provide useful performance insights for point-of-care low-end devices. This work, firstly, posits that to achieve improved clinical adoption of AI-powered segmentation models, especially in reduced manpower settings like rural hospitals, we need benchmarks that provide actionable insights on the degree to which high-performance models address five deployment constraints viz: resource-effectiveness for low-end computing devices, clinically acceptable accuracy, clinically compatible execution times, localization of user data, and user-based finetuning. In this work, five state-of-the-art foundation segmentation models and one target-specific model were systematically evaluated on three multi-organ medical datasets. Furthermore, the best-ranking foundation model and target-specific model were benchmarked on three low-end devices. Our findings show that lightweight foundation models provided the best performance trade-off and are easily user-fine-tuned on custom datasets. Target-specific models provide high accuracy out-of-the-box, but may require significant optimisation to deliver comparably fast execution times and user-based finetuning on low-end devices. The methods and results from this research provide actionable insights on high-performance medical segmentation models for low-end computing devices, as a necessary step towards improved adoption in resource-limited clinical settings.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050141

Authors: Fan Dong Wenjing Guo Jie Liu Ann Varghese Weida Tong Tucker A. Patterson Huixiao Hong

Social media platforms host abundant and timely descriptions of medication experiences that can complement traditional pharmacovigilance systems. Yet the linguistic informality of these data presents a major challenge for mapping adverse drug event (ADE) expressions to standardized medical terminology. In this study, we developed BERT-based language models to classify ADE mentions from social media into MedDRA System Organ Classes (SOCs). Using the SMM4H and CADEC corpora, as well as their combination, we performed 20 iterations of 20% holdout validation for 3-, 6-, 22-, and 25-SOC classification tasks with a selected fixed training configuration (learning rate, batch size, and training epochs) based on training-loss convergence. The models achieved accuracies ranging from 75% to 94%, demonstrating strong performance for SOC-level classification of noisy and informal ADE expressions under the evaluated settings. These results are based on a controlled mention-level evaluation using deduplicated adverse drug event strings and do not establish document-level or real-world deployment generalization. This work provides a systematic evaluation of BERT-based models for SOC-level classification of ADEs and demonstrates consistent performance within the evaluated datasets and label granularities. While direct comparison with prior studies is limited by differences in datasets and evaluation protocols, the results demonstrate that transformer-based models can effectively classify ADEs into SOCs. These findings support the use of transformer-based normalization for SOC-level aggregation of user-reported adverse events and their integration into large-scale social media pharmacovigilance pipelines as a downstream component under controlled conditions.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050140

Authors: Yair Wiseman

The AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is a modern, royalty-free image format that leverages the AV1 video codec for superior compression efficiency, supporting both lossy and lossless modes. Its entropy encoding relies on a multi-symbol context-adaptive arithmetic coder (range coding with adaptive cumulative distribution functions (CDFs)), which is effective for general imagery but may not optimally exploit the repetitive structures common in Geographic Information System (GIS) maps/data. This paper proposes replacing AVIF’s entropy encoder with the Burrows–Wheeler Transform (BWT), a reversible preprocessing algorithm that rearranges data to create runs of similar symbols, enhancing subsequent compression. We detail the technical steps for modification, drawing from AV1’s open-source implementation, and explain why BWT is advantageous for GIS raster maps/data, which often feature large uniform areas, limited color palettes, and spatial redundancies. Empirical evidence from related studies on BWT-based image compression shows improvements in lossless scenarios, potentially considerably reducing file sizes over standard methods while preserving data integrity critical for geospatial analysis. This swap could improve storage, transmission, and processing efficiency in GIS applications, such as remote sensing and cartography. The discussion includes challenges like computational overhead and compatibility, with recommendations for implementations. The resulting BWT-AVIF hybrid produces a non-standard AV1 bit-stream that is not compliant with the AV1 or AVIF specifications and therefore requires custom decoders. It is presented here as a research prototype for GIS-specific compression rather than a compliant AVIF extension.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050139

Authors: Sunisa Kunarak

Next-generation heterogeneous wireless networks (HetNets) comprising LTE macro-cells, 5G New Radio (NR) small cells, and WiFi 6 access points aim to provide seamless connectivity under diverse mobility scenarios. However, vertical handover (VHO) remains a performance bottleneck because of the highly variable radio environments, dynamic user mobility, stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements, and the coexistence of multi-tier access technologies. Existing handover approaches based on deep learning and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) suffer from limitations: deep learning models lack decision-making capabilities, whereas DRL models, particularly deep Q-network (DQN)-based policies, face Q-value overestimation and unstable convergence. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a Hybrid deep double-Q networks (DDQN)–bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) Framework that integrates bi-directional mobility prediction and DRL-based adaptive decision-making. The Bi-LSTM module captures forward and backward temporal dependencies and predicts future Received Signal Strength (RSS) trajectories, mobility dynamics, and cell-edge transitions. The DDQN module stabilizes the action value estimation, mitigates overestimation bias, and enables context-aware handover decisions. A multi-tier simulation environment consisting of LTE, 5G NR, and WiFi 6 networks was developed using realistic path loss, shadowing, interference, and mobility models. Extensive evaluations demonstrated substantial improvements in mobility prediction accuracy, handover stability, radio link reliability, throughput efficiency, and latency reduction compared to conventional RSS-based and DQN-based schemes. The findings highlight the effectiveness of integrating predictive intelligence with reinforcement learning for reliable mobility management in 5G-Advanced and emerging 6G networks.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050138

Authors: Latifa Boubekri Hassnae Aberkane Mohammed Chaouki Abounaima Loubna Lamrini

The TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method is one of the most widely used multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches in industrial, financial, and scientific fields. However, its sequential computational cost of O(m × n), where m denotes the number of alternatives and n the number of criteria, becomes prohibitive when decision matrices have several million rows. Despite its geometric interpretability and simplicity, classical TOPSIS faces two key computational bottlenecks at scale: (i) Euclidean distance calculations O(m × n) dominating the total cost, and (ii) the O(m × log m) sorting step, both inherently sequential and memory-bound on CPUs. To overcome these limitations, we propose GPU-TOPSIS, a fully vectorized and parallel reformulation of TOPSIS based on tensor execution on graphics processing units (GPUs), whose main contributions are: (i) a formally correct reformulation of TOPSIS as a GPU tensor pipeline preserving mathematical fidelity to the original method; (ii) a two-pass fragment-processing algorithm guaranteeing exact mathematical equivalence with monolithic TOPSIS, while reducing the memory footprint from O(m × n) to O(mt × n), where mt < m is the size of each independently processed fragment; (iii) three independent implementations on CuPy, PyTorch, and TensorFlow, ensuring the framework’s portability and genericity. Experimental evaluations on real data from the Amazon Products 2023 dataset, using matrices of up to 200 million alternatives (via the 2-pass formulation), demonstrate speedups of up to 4.75× compared to the reference CPU implementation (NumPy), with inter-backend score differences below 5 × 10−8 and 100% ranking overlap across all tested Top-K thresholds. A perturbation sensitivity analysis of the criteria weights and cross-backend consistency tests confirms that GPU acceleration fully preserves robustness and decision reliability, making GPU-TOPSIS a practical, open, and reproducible solution for large-scale multi-criteria decision making in Big Data environments.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050137

Authors: Yuhan Zhang Zehang Wang Yuanfang Chen Chunfeng Du Jing Chen

With the continuous growth of data-intensive applications and artificial intelligence workloads, traditional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) is increasingly struggling to meet demands in terms of capacity scale, energy consumption constraints, and data retention after power failure. Consequently, non-volatile memory (NVM) has emerged as a crucial technology for bridging the gap between the memory and storage layers. However, due to inherent differences in write life, read–write performance variations, and consistency guarantee after failure, the systematic application of NVM still faces a series of challenges. Addressing these issues, this paper takes as its starting point the adaptation of medium characteristics and system design, and summarizes the research progress in aspects such as write optimization, consistency and security coordination mechanisms, data structure modification under hybrid memory architecture, and cross-layer resource collaboration. It also conducts an in-depth analysis of representative solutions and evaluation methods. The review results show that current research has shifted from improving a single performance bottleneck to multi-mechanism collaborative optimization. Various technical approaches have proven complementary in alleviating write amplification, enhancing persistence efficiency, and optimizing access patterns. This paper demonstrates that achieving stable and scalable application of NVM requires establishing a more systematic collaborative design concept between durability, security, and performance. As AI training workloads and big data analytics place increasing demands on memory bandwidth and persistence, the techniques surveyed here provide a foundational basis for next-generation memory-centric computing infrastructures.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050136

Authors: Abdellah Rezoug Mohamed Bader-el-den

The proliferation of online fraud has resulted in substantial financial damage to individuals and organizations alike, with web phishing emerging as one of the most pervasive and harmful attack vectors. In response, this paper proposes the Stacking Ensemble Models Generator (SEMG), a URL-based phishing detection approach that leverages a multi-objective Genetic Algorithm to jointly optimize Precision and Recall in the selection and configuration of stacking ensemble models. An initial pool of base learners is trained on labeled datasets and subsequently evolved through genetic operators toward a globally optimal ensemble. Experimental evaluation across five datasets sourced from Mendeley and UCI repositories demonstrates that SEMG consistently surpasses individual base learners and compares favorably against existing methods, attaining 99.2% performance across all metrics on D2 while matching or exceeding state-of-the-art results on the remaining benchmarks. These outcomes underscore the framework’s robustness and its potential for deployment in real-world phishing detection systems.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050135

Authors: Zilin Tian Xin Wang Yunfei Long Liguo Zhang

Adversarial transferability makes black-box attacks practical and exposes weaknesses of deep neural networks for computer vision, image recognition, and visual understanding. Among various transferability-enhancing methods, input transformation is one of the most effective strategies. However, existing methods often ignore the decoupling of style and semantics in the input image, as well as the need for customized transformation strategies, resulting in limited performance gains or suboptimal outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Fourier-based perspective for input transformation generalization in the context of vision adversarial attacks. The main observations are that the Fourier amplitude captures stylistic information and the phase encompasses richer semantics which are crucial for visual understanding. Motivated by this, we develop a Fourier-based strategy, which performs a stylistic transform and semantic mixup on the input examples to improve transferability. To avoid inconsistent semantics of augmented images for the surrogate model, we mix the original images with the augmentations to maintain semantic consistency and mitigate imprecise gradients. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-compatible datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing input transformation attacks.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050134

Authors: Alexander A. Karmanov Petr V. Nikitin

Energy-intensive refrigeration systems require predictive models that remain informative under counterfactual control trajectories, not only on archived operation. This paper develops a control-oriented multi-step state model and a nonlinear model predictive control framework for an indoor ice-rink refrigeration system. Historical state, control, and exogenous variables are encoded jointly with an admissible future control trajectory, and a normalized thermal-balance residual is added to the training objective. A lightweight conditioned transformer predicts ice temperature, return-glycol temperature, supply-glycol temperature, and compressor power over a 30 min horizon. The selected weakly regularized model with regularization coefficient λphys = 0.001 decreases the normalized thermal-balance root-mean-square error on the horizon tail by 30.29% relative to the base model while increasing the average ice-temperature root-mean-square error by only 1.90%. In a surrogate-based counterfactual four-day evaluation, the resulting nonlinear model predictive controller reduces predicted daily energy by 4.84%, terminal violation share by 17.32%, mean absolute terminal ice-temperature deviation by 18.74%, and the mean objective value by 30.82% relative to historical admissible setpoint tracking. The mean full control cycle time is 0.0311 s, confirming real-time feasibility for a 5 min supervisory update interval. All controller results are surrogate-based rather than field-deployed and therefore represent receding-horizon benchmark results under learned-model evaluation, not realized field savings.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050133

Authors: Walaa Othman Batol Hamoud Nikolay Shilov Alexey Kashevnik Alexander Mayatin

Blood pressure monitoring is important for overall health assessment, yet traditional cuff-based methods are intrusive and unsuitable for continuous monitoring. This paper proposes a contactless approach for blood pressure estimation from facial videos using a bidirectional Mamba-based architecture with uncertainty quantification. Our method processes 64-frame video segments through a hierarchical 3D convolutional encoder to extract spatiotemporal features, then applies bidirectional state-space modeling to capture temporal dynamics efficiently. The model was evaluated on the Vitals for Vision (V4V) dataset, achieving mean absolute errors of 13.15 mmHg for systolic and 9.56 mmHg for diastolic blood pressure, outperforming prior methods while requiring significantly fewer computational resources than attention-based approaches. While these results do not meet clinical-grade diagnostic standards, they demonstrate the feasibility of contactless blood pressure estimation for non-clinical applications such as wellness monitoring, preliminary health screening, and continuous remote observation, where unobtrusive and computationally efficient monitoring is desirable.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050132

Authors: Soufiyan Ouali Kanza Raisi Asmaa Mourhir El Habib Nfaoui Said El Garouani

Offensive language detection is crucial for ensuring safe and inclusive digital environments. Identifying harmful content protects users and supports healthier online interactions. Despite advances in transformer-based models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), their application to this task remains underexplored for low-resource languages such as Moroccan Arabic, especially compared with high-resource languages. This study evaluates the performance of various open- and closed-source LLMs for offensive language detection in Moroccan Darija. The evaluated models include general-purpose LLMs such as LLaMA, Mistral, and Gemma, as well as Arabic-focused models such as ArabianGPT, Falcon Arabic, and Atlas-Chat. We also experiment with reasoning models such as DeepSeek and GPT-4. Beyond traditional evaluation metrics, we investigate the robustness of these LLMs and examine the impact of adversarial training on their performance. Moreover, we contribute to the field by creating a large, high-quality dataset. Our evaluation revealed that GPT-4o Mini achieved the best overall performance, reaching an F1-score of 88%. However, robustness testing under black-box and white-box adversarial attacks exposed notable vulnerabilities, with attack success rates reaching 30%, thereby highlighting the need for enhancement. Despite the complex morphology and linguistic variability of Moroccan Darija, adversarial training resulted in a notable improvement in both overall model performance and robustness against adversarial attacks, yielding an average increase of 20.89% in resistance to attacks. Furthermore, this approach enabled GPT-4o Mini to achieve an F1-score of 91%, surpassing the current state-of-the-art performance by 6%. These results highlight the importance of incorporating adversarial approaches in low-resource dialectal settings to effectively address linguistic variability and data scarcity.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050131

Authors: Areej Hamza Amel Tuama Asraf Mohamed Moubark

The high accuracy achieved by deep learning techniques has made them indispensable in computer vision applications. However, their substantial memory demands and high computational complexity limit their deployment in resource-constrained environments. To address this challenge, this study introduces a Feature Enhancement Module (FEM) as part of a unified hybrid compression framework that combines mixed-precision quantization and structured pruning to improve model efficiency. Experimental results on the Tiny ImageNet dataset using ResNet50 and MobileNetV3 architectures demonstrate the strong adaptability and scalability of the proposed approach. Compared with state-of-the-art compression methods, the proposed FEM-based framework achieves up to 6% improvement in Top-1 accuracy, while reducing memory usage by 32.26% and improving inference speed by 66%. Furthermore, the ablation study demonstrates that incorporating the FEM module leads to up to 24% improvement over the baseline model, highlighting its effectiveness. The results further show that FEM effectively preserves inter-channel feature representation stability even under aggressive compression, making it well suited for real-time processing and practical Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. By maintaining semantic richness while significantly reducing computational cost, the proposed method bridges the gap between high-performance deep models and lightweight, deployable solutions. Overall, the FEM-based hybrid compression framework establishes a scalable and architecture-independent foundation for sustainable deep learning in resource-limited environments.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10050130

Authors: Zhiyuan Wang Tristan Lim Yun Teng Chongwu Xia

This study proposes a novel data-driven machine learning (ML) framework for multi-criteria environmental, social, and governance (ESG) evaluation. The framework aims to address the transparency, consistency, and subjectivity limitations of existing ESG evaluation systems by employing a fully data-driven, modular, and ML-supported architecture. It comprises three main modules: (i) ESG data preprocessing with missing-data imputation by the MissForest algorithm; (ii) a three-plane ESG feature selection workflow that integrates clustering, feature importance, and classification algorithms to identify representative ESG indicators; and (iii) a hybrid weighting and ranking procedure that combines unsupervised principal component analysis (PCA), criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation (CRITIC), and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods. A recent 2024 real-world application involving 57 listed Chinese pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and 70 ESG indicators demonstrates the framework’s practical utility in producing transparent and objective ESG rankings. The main contributions of this work are fourfold: (1) the development of an end-to-end, entirely data-driven ML framework for ESG evaluation; (2) the introduction of an innovative three-plane ESG feature selection workflow within the framework; (3) the first study for designing a hybrid PCA-CRITIC-TOPSIS approach in ESG weighting and ranking; (4) the validation of the framework through a real-world industry application using recent and authentic ESG data.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040129

Authors: Xiao Feng Shuaibing Lu Taotao Gu Yuanping Nie Qian Yan Mucheng Yang Jinyang Chen Xiaohui Kuang

Fuzzing is an essential element of software supply chain security governance. Despite its importance, the widespread adoption of library fuzzing is limited by the significant costs associated with constructing fuzz drivers. Without a clear entry point, the reachable path space of the target library is determined by the interplay of API call sequences, parameter dependencies, and state constraints. As a result, fuzz drivers must achieve not only successful builds but also provide sufficient semantic context to enable exploration of deeper state machine interactions, thereby avoiding premature stagnation at superficial validation logic. To systematically assess advancements in automated fuzz driver generation, this paper develops a taxonomy organized around the primary data sources used to derive driver-generation constraints, categorizing existing approaches into four technological trajectories: Usage Artifact Mining, Source Code Constraint Inference, Binary Semantics Recovery, and Heterogeneous Data Fusion. Large language models are increasingly integrated into these workflows as generators and as components for constraint alignment and repair. To address inconsistencies in experimental methodologies, this paper introduces a bounded comparability-oriented evaluation perspective focused on three dimensions: validity, reachability-related evidence, and reproducibility and cost. Together with a disclosure and reporting protocol for metric comparability, this perspective clarifies the information needed for cross-study comparison and examines the unique features and inherent limitations of each technical trajectory. Based on these findings, three key directions for future research are identified: facilitating structural evolution in response to coverage plateaus to address deep logic unreachability; coordinating dynamic closed-loop orchestration that utilizes on-demand heterogeneous data retrieval to resolve context challenges; and developing language-agnostic driver representations with pluggable adaptation mechanisms to improve cross-ecosystem portability and scalability.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040128

Authors: Vismaya V. S Swetha P Jubin K. Babu Diya Gijo Varada M. T Adithya K. K Ekaterina Kopets Sishu Shankar Muni

Reservoir computing (RC) is an efficient framework for processing time-series data. This work investigates the synchronization of two independently trained reservoir computers that, after training, operate without external input from the chaotic system and interact solely through symmetric linear coupling. This approach addresses a gap in existing reservoir computing-based synchronization studies, which predominantly rely on master–slave or system-driven configurations. In this work, we first build and train two reservoir computing models based on 3D nonlinear chaotic maps and hyperchaotic systems and then introduce a symmetric linear coupling mechanism between them. This study demonstrates that reservoir computing can accurately reproduce the short-term dynamics of chaotic systems and provides insight into the interactions between learned dynamical models, while also helping us understand how complex systems connect and operate collectively. We use this systematic approach to establish a framework for understanding how two trained reservoir computers interact under varying coupling strengths, enabling a detailed investigation of their synchronization behavior. To demonstrate the adaptability of the proposed framework to diverse dynamical behaviors, we systematically investigated three discrete chaotic and hyperchaotic systems: (1) discrete 3D sinusoidal map with discrete Lorenz attractor, (2) 3D sinusoidal map with conjoined Lorenz twin attractor, and (3) 3D quadratic hyperchaotic map. For performance evaluation, we trained coupled RCs and computed the synchronization error for different coupling strengths. We also present phase portraits and time-series plots of the attractors and RCs, along with the synchronization error as a function of the coupling strength, thereby demonstrating the possibility of synchronization of two linearly coupled RCs, which are independently trained on discrete, three-dimensional chaotic and hyperchaotic systems.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040127

Authors: Fabrizio Marozzo Riccardo Cantini

In recent years, generative artificial intelligence and, in particular, large language models (LLMs) have rapidly transformed the landscape of data analysis, knowledge extraction, content generation, and intelligent decision support [...]

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040126

Authors: Martin Moreno Iván Trejo-Zúñiga Víctor Alejandro González-Huitrón René Francisco Santana-Cruz Raúl García García Gabriela Pineda Chacón

Image-based AI offers a low-cost alternative to traditional turbidity sensors in farm ponds, yet the prevailing shift toward Vision Transformers (ViTs) critically overlooks two field realities: the chronic scarcity of annotated data (Small Data) and the strict computational limits of edge hardware. This study presents a frugal computer vision framework that challenges the need for complex architectures in environmental screening. By systematically benchmarking six deep learning models across a calibrated high-turbidity dataset (200–800 NTU, 700 images) under standardized capture conditions, we demonstrate that traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) possess a crucial inductive bias for this task. Specifically, ResNet-50 significantly outperformed modern ViTs in both accuracy (96.3% vs. 80.0%) and data efficiency, effectively capturing spatial scattering patterns without the massive data requirements that hindered transformer convergence. Deployed on a resource-constrained Raspberry Pi 4, the CNN-based system achieved an inference latency of 46 ms, demonstrated in an initial hardware-in-the-loop field proof-of-concept (82.4% agreement under baseline, calm-weather conditions, n=17). This edge-native approach not only provides actionable spatial turbidity maps to guide on-farm filtration and livestock management decisions but also establishes a critical architectural baseline: under controlled capture protocols, mature CNNs consistently outperform ViTs, establishing them as the optimal architecture for frugal, small-data agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) deployments.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040125

Authors: Khadija Lasri Khalid El Fazazy Adnane Mohamed Mahraz Hamid Tairi Jamal Riffi

While Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have revolutionized skeleton-based action recognition, existing methods face a critical efficiency–accuracy dilemma: state-of-the-art approaches achieve high performance through computationally expensive multi-stream fusion (joint, bone, joint motion, and bone motion) and deep architectures, limiting real-world deployment on resource-constrained devices. We propose LST-AGCN (Lightweight Spatial–Temporal Attention Graph Convolutional Network), introducing three technical contributions that address this challenge: (1) Unified Attention Module (UAM)—a framework that integrates channel, spatial, and temporal attention through a single compact operation, significantly reducing attention parameters compared to separate attention mechanisms; (2) Depthwise Separable Attention Mechanism (DSAM)—a factorization using depthwise separable convolutions that achieves linear complexity reduction from O(C2) to O(C) in attention operations; and (3) Efficient Topology-Aware Fusion (ETAF)—an adaptive Joint-wise Attention strategy that captures fine-grained spatial relationships without quadratic complexity growth. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60 and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets demonstrate that LST-AGCN achieves strong performance using only joint modality (86.14%/94.0% and 79.5%/82.0% Top-1 accuracy with 99.0% Top-5 on cross-view) while requiring 14.11 M parameters and 19.02 GFLOPs, delivering efficient inference suitable for edge deployment.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040124

Authors: Mabel López Bordao Antonia Ferrer Sapena Carlos A. Reyes Pérez Enrique A. Sánchez Pérez

This study aims to identify and synthesize the major global trends that shaped 2025 by applying the DeflyCompass methodology to a curated corpus of strategic foresight reports. The study synthesizes insights from 23 strategic reports published by leading international organizations, including the World Economic Forum, Accenture, Euromonitor, and major technology firms. Methodologically, DeflyCompass operationalizes a structured hybrid human–AI pipeline comprising the deployment of multi-agent AI systems, automated knowledge graph construction, semantic clustering, and hybrid human–AI validation processes, reducing an initial set of 816 preliminary signals to a validated catalog of 50 high-priority trends across six PESTEL domains: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal/Governance. Key findings indicate that artificial intelligence functions as a systemic enabling technology across all domains, climate and sustainability imperatives permeate multiple domains, geopolitical fragmentation introduces systemic tension, and trust deficits emerge as a critical vulnerability. The study contributes a replicable and scalable framework for global-level strategic foresight that operationalizes human–AI integration within a rigorous expert-driven validation process, complementing existing hybrid analytical approaches in the literature. Implications extend to decision-making in technology governance, sustainability strategy, social adaptation, and scenario planning, highlighting the necessity of integrating AI augmentation with human expertise for effective future-oriented planning.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040123

Authors: Ahsan Rafiq Eduard Melnik Alexey Samoylov Alexander Kozlovskiy Irina Safronenkova

As industries deploy more connected devices in factories, warehouses, and smart facilities, the need for artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can operate securely in distributed, data-intensive environments is growing. Traditional centralized learning and online education platforms struggle when students and systems have to process real-time streams (sensors, video, text) with strict latency and privacy requirements. To address this challenge, a blockchain-secured, edge-enabled multimodal federated learning framework tailored for Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments is proposed. The model integrates four key layers: (i) a blockchain layer that provides credentialing, transparency, and token-based incentives; (ii) a multimodal community layer that supports group formation, peer consensus, and cross-modal learning across text, images, audio, and sensor data; (iii) an edge computing layer that enables low-latency task offloading and secure training within Intel SGX enclaves; and (iv) a data layer that applies pre-processing, differential privacy, and synthetic augmentation to safeguard sensitive information. Experiments on industrial multimodal datasets demonstrate 42% faster model aggregation, 78.9% multimodal accuracy, and 1.9% accuracy loss under ε = 1.0 differential privacy. This shows a scalable and practical path for decentralized AI training in next-generation IIoT systems, confirming the possibility of technical support for educational processes. However, the conducted research requires a validation of pedagogical effectiveness.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040122

Authors: Mikhail Rumiantcev

Analyzing music similarity in large catalogs is challenging because people perceive music differently and important details are found in audio, text, and metadata. This article introduces a multimodal framework that uses an ontology to make music similarity and recommendation more explainable. The framework brings together learned features from audio, lyrics, and other text with structured metadata in a shared similarity space, and then improves ranking with a music ontology that captures relationships between songs, artists, genres, and moods. The design works with any encoder that creates fixed-size features. This study uses strong neural audio and text encoders, mainly based on transformers. This approach allows the system to handle different input types while staying reliable across datasets. This study tests the framework on several open music and audio datasets using content-based retrieval tasks and standard ranking measures. In addition to Configurations C1–C4, this study includes an external content-based reference baseline based on conventional MIR audio descriptors. This baseline represents a signal-level retrieval approach that models complementary aspects of the audio signal, such as timbre, harmony, and spectral characteristics, and is evaluated under the same retrieval protocol as the main framework. It is included to provide an external comparison point outside the proposed C1–C4 design. Compared to audio-only and non-ontological variants within the same framework, the proposed multimodal and ontology-guided configurations achieve better precision, recall, and mean average precision, and also cover more rare content. Visualizations and case studies show that combining different data types and using ontology-based reranking can improve performance and make results easier to interpret. This work lays the groundwork for explainable, cognitively informed music recommendation systems and points to future work in modeling user behavior over time and adapting to different cultures.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040121

Authors: Noé Y. Flandre Philippe J. Giabbanelli

Communicating the design and results of agent-based models (ABMs) to subject matter experts is challenging, which hinders participation and limits trust in simulation-based decision support. Large language models (LLMs) can communicate ABMs as textual summaries, thus complementing traditional disclosure through statistical and visualization techniques. While prior work translated the structure of conceptual models into narratives via LLMs, our extension covers the dynamics of simulation models via an automated simulation-to-text method that extracts contextual information from NetLogo ABMs, performs repeated simulations, and generates narrative descriptions (including the model’s purpose, parameters, and simulation dynamics) using mutimodal LLMs. Furthermore, four summarization algorithms spanning abstractive and extractive methods provide shorter reports. Using Design-of-Experiments methods over three peer-reviewed ABMs, state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs from 2026 (Gemini 3.1 Pro, Qwen 3.5, Kimi K2.5, Claude Opus 4.6) and different prompt elements (e.g., roles, examples, generating insights, statistical analyses), we compare our results with several reference reports (e.g., from associate professors). We find that report quality is determined mainly (i.e., up to 34% of the variance) by the summarization algorithm and its interaction with the LLM, with abstractive summarizers (BART, T5) producing more coherent and readable reports, while Claude Opus 4.6 is the most robust LLM.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040120

Authors: Francesco Granata Francesco Poggi Misael Mongiovì

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures are gaining significant attention for their ability to ground language generation in reliable knowledge sources. Despite their effectiveness, RAG systems based solely on semantic similarity often fail to ensure factual accuracy in specialized domains, where terminological ambiguity can affect retrieval relevance. This study proposes Entity Linking Enhanced RAG (ELERAG), an enhanced RAG architecture that integrates a factual signal derived from Entity Linking to improve the accuracy of educational question-answering systems in Italian. The system includes a Wikidata-based Entity Linking module and implements a hybrid re-ranking strategy based on Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). To validate our approach, we compared it against standard baselines and state-of-the-art methods, including a Weighted-Score Re-ranking, a standalone Cross-Encoder and a combined RRF + Cross-Encoder pipeline. Experiments were conducted on two benchmarks: a custom academic dataset and the standard SQuAD-it dataset. Results show that, in domain-specific contexts, ELERAG significantly outperforms both the baseline and the Cross-Encoder configurations. Conversely, the Cross-Encoder approaches achieve the best results on the general-domain dataset. These findings provide strong experimental evidence of the domain mismatch effect, highlighting the importance of domain-adapted hybrid strategies to enhance factual precision in educational RAG systems without relying on computationally expensive models trained on disparate data distributions. They also demonstrate the potential of entity-aware RAG systems in educational environments, fostering adaptive and reliable AI-based tutoring tools.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040118

Authors: Kosmas Katsioulas Ilias Maglogiannis

Handball performance analysis is still often conducted through the manual review of match videos, while automation on broadcast footage remains challenging due to camera motion, strong perspective effects, and frequent occlusions during dense interactions. This study presents a practical and reproducible monocular pipeline for extracting handball analytics from a single broadcast viewpoint. Players are detected per frame, tracked over time, and projected onto a standardized handball court via homography-based camera calibration. The resulting court-referenced trajectories in metric units enable motion indicators such as distance covered and speed, along with coaching-oriented visual summaries, including trajectory overlays and heatmaps. In addition, clip-level action recognition is performed using interpretable kinematic and scene-derived features and lightweight classifiers, with a comparative evaluation across multiple classical models. The modular design keeps the intermediate steps explicit, supports reproducibility, and facilitates interpretation of both intermediate outputs and final analytics. Experiments on the UNIRI handball dataset demonstrate that meaningful performance analytics and action understanding can be obtained from single-camera broadcast video using transparent intermediate representations. This work highlights the practical potential of interpretable trajectory-based modeling for under-instrumented sports and provides a reproducible baseline for future extensions incorporating richer contextual cues.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040119

Authors: Naima Firdaus Sachin Balkrushna Jadhav Zahid Raza Maria Lapina Mikhail Babenko

Federated learning has become a promising paradigm in the training of decentralized machine learning models across clients without sharing raw data, thereby preserving privacy. Current federated support vector machine methods are mainly based on the learning of a single global model, which inadequately addresses the challenges presented by heterogeneous and non-IID client data distributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose FMT-SVM, a novel federated multi-task learning framework that jointly trains both binary and multi-class classification tasks within each client, where the client uses a unified convolutional neural network encoder to extract common features among tasks, which are passed to task-specific linear SVM heads dedicated to each classification task. By leveraging a primal optimization integrating task covariance and global consensus regularization, FMT-SVM explicitly models relationships between heterogeneous tasks and enforces alignment across clients, effectively handling the non-IID nature of data distributions. Unlike traditional FL methods that exchange entire model parameters or large support vector sets, our method communicates only the compact SVM heads during aggregation, greatly reducing communication overhead and enhancing scalability for clients with limited bandwidth. To further enhance privacy, Gaussian differential privacy mechanisms are applied to client updates, balancing privacy preservation with predictive performance. Experiments are performed on two medical image datasets: the Pediatric Pneumonia Dataset and the Breast Ultrasound dataset, demonstrating that the FMT-SVM framework achieves competitive accuracy on both binary and multi-class tasks while maintaining communication efficiency and privacy guarantees. These results highlight the capability of the proposed FMT-SVM framework as a practical, scalable, and privacy-aware solution for the federated true multi-task learning problem in sensitive healthcare applications.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040117

Authors: Anna Dalla Vecchia Simone Mattioli Sara Migliorini Elisa Quintarelli

Understanding and predicting how tourists move through a city is a challenging task, as it involves a complex interplay of spatial, temporal, and social factors. Traditional recommender systems often rely on structured data, trying to capture the nature of the problem. However, recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) open new possibilities for reasoning over richer, text-based representations of user context, even without a dedicated pre-training phase. In this study, we investigate the potential of LLMs to interpret and predict tourist movements in a real-world application scenario involving tourist visits to Verona, a municipality in Northern Italy, between 2014 and 2023. We propose an incremental prompt engineering approach that gradually enriches the model input, from spatial features alone to richer behavioral information, including visit histories, time information, and user cluster patterns. The approach is evaluated using six open-source models, enabling us to compare their accuracy and efficiency across various levels of contextual enrichment. The results provide a first insight about the abilities of LLMs to incorporate spatio-temporal contextual factors, thus improving predictions, while maintaining computational efficiency. The analysis of the model-generated explanations completes the picture by adding an interpretability dimension that most existing next-PoI prediction solutions lack. Overall, the study demonstrates the potential of LLMs to integrate multiple contextual dimensions in tourism mobility, highlighting the possibility of a more text-oriented, adaptive, and explainable T-RS.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040115

Authors: Vasiliy Pchelko Vladislav Kholkin Vyacheslav Rybin Alexander Mikhailov Timur Karimov

Despite the success of artificial neural networks in solving numerous tasks, they face significant challenges, including difficulties in online adaptation and rapidly increasing energy consumption. As a biologically plausible alternative, spiking neural networks offer promising capabilities for efficient cognitive computing. Recently, a three-element spiking neuron model consisting of a threshold selector, a tunnel diode, and a capacitor was proposed. In this work, we experimentally validate this model using a threshold selector hardware emulator and demonstrate its dynamical equivalence to the biologically plausible Izhikevich neuron model. To evaluate the novel neuron’s applicability for cognitive computing, we implement a liquid state machine (LSM) reservoir architecture with spatially dependent random topology for synaptic weight distribution. Our simulations on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST benchmarks demonstrate competitive classification accuracy (97.9% and 89.5%, respectively) while offering estimated energy efficiency and processing speed enhancements compared to existing FPGA-based and memristor-based spiking reservoir implementations. The developed reservoir is feasible for processing neuromorphic sensors output, including visual perception tasks.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040116

Authors: Luisiana Sabbatini Alberto Belli Sara Bruschi Marco Esposito Sara Raggiunto Paola Pierleoni

Sleep plays a fundamental role in human health and cognitive functioning, motivating the development of reliable and scalable methodologies for sleep stage classification (SSC). Recent advances in non-invasive and economically sustainable sensing technologies enable continuous sleep monitoring beyond laboratory settings. However, SSC remains a challenging data analytics task due to the intrinsic class imbalance among sleep stages. This study investigates the effectiveness of different imbalanced data management strategies within a machine learning framework for non-invasive SSC. The proposed approach relies exclusively on heart rate and motion signals, which can be acquired through wearable devices or contactless under-mattress sensors, making it suitable for longitudinal monitoring scenarios. Using the PhysioNet DREAMT dataset, 32 experimental scenarios are defined by combining data-level techniques (ADASYN oversampling with different balancing weights), algorithm-level strategies (cost-sensitive learning), and hybrid solutions. Four model families are evaluated—Decision Tree, k-Nearest Neighbors, Ensemble Classifiers, and Artificial Neural Networks—across classification tasks involving 2, 3, 4, and 5 sleep stages. The experimental results show that ensemble-based models provide robust and consistent performance under severe class imbalance, achieving macro accuracies of 82% for sleep–wake detection, 73% for 3-stage classification, 72% for 4-stage classification, and 64% for 5-stage classification. These findings confirm the relevance of imbalance-aware analytics and demonstrate the feasibility of accurate, minimally invasive SSC within big data and cognitive computing paradigms.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040114

Authors: Irina Evgenievna Kalabikhina Anton Vasilyevich Kolotusha Vadim Sergeevich Moshkin

Patients leave millions of medical reviews annually, providing critical data for quality management. However, manual processing is infeasible, and existing systems fail to distinguish medical from organizational problems—a distinction essential for complaint routing. The consequences of misrouting are significant: clinical issues may go unaddressed when medical complaints reach administrative staff, while systemic service problems remain unresolved when organizational complaints reach medical directors. We developed a hybrid approach combining expert annotation with Large Language Models (LLMs). Fifteen prompt iterations on 1500 reviews with expert validation (modified Cohen’s kappa (κ_mod), which weights errors hierarchically, reached 0.745) preceded the LLM annotation of 15,000 mixed-sentiment and positive reviews. These were combined with 7417 expert-annotated negative reviews to form a corpus of 22,417 reviews. Eight architectures, ranging from Logistic Regression to a BERT + TF-IDF + LightGBM ensemble, were compared using both standard metrics and domain-specific practical metrics tailored to complaint routing. The best model, scaled to 4.3 million Russian-language reviews from the Prodoctorov.ru platform, achieved 92.9% Practical Accuracy—the proportion of reviews classified without critical medical–organizational misclassification errors (M ↔ O)—compared to 68.0% standard accuracy, which treats all errors equally. Critical errors were reduced to 1.4%, yielding 144,000 more correctly processed complaints than traditional methods (TF-IDF + Logistic Regression). Analysis of the scaled data revealed the following: 46.1% M (medical), 21.0% O (organizational), and 32.9% C (combined) reviews; medical ratings were highest (4.75 vs. 4.59 for organizational, p < 0.001); combined reviews were longest (802 characters); zero-star reviews comprised 3.8% of feedback, with organizational complaints dominating (38.2%) among extreme negatives; and average ratings rose by 1.24 points over 14 years. This hybrid approach yields expert-comparable corpora, automates 93% of feedback processing, ensures correct complaint routing, and contributes to healthcare sustainability by reducing administrative burden, accelerating resolution, and enabling data-driven quality management without proportional increases in human resources. All analyses were conducted on Russian-language patient reviews.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040113

Authors: Diego Labate Dipanwita Thakur Giancarlo Fortino

Smart-meter theft detection requires learning from fine-grained electricity consumption data, whose centralized processing poses significant privacy risks. Federated learning (FL) mitigates these risks by decentralizing training, but providing rigorous user-level differential privacy (DP) under non-IID data and heterogeneous client behavior remains challenging. Existing DP-FL approaches rely on fixed global clipping bounds for client updates, which substantially overestimate sensitivity when privacy loss is composed using Rényi Differential Privacy (RDP), zero-Concentrated DP (zCDP), or Moments Accountant (MA) frameworks, leading to excessive noise and degraded utility. This work proposes an adaptive clipping-based RDP accountant that incorporates empirical, round-wise update magnitudes into privacy accounting by rescaling each round’s RDP contribution according to the observed clipping ratio. The method is optimizer-agnostic and is evaluated with FedAvg, FedProx, and SCAFFOLD on the SGCC smart-meter theft dataset under IID and Dirichlet non-IID partitions. Experimental results show consistently tighter privacy bounds and improved model utility compared to classical DP accountants, demonstrating the effectiveness of sensitivity-aware privacy accounting for practical differentially private FL.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040112

Authors: Paulino José García-Nieto Esperanza García-Gonzalo José Pablo Paredes-Sánchez Luis Alfonso Menéndez-García

The higher heating value (HHV), sometimes referred to as the gross calorific value, is a crucial metric for determining a fuel’s primary energy potential in energy production systems. By combining extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) with the differential evolution (DE) optimizer, an innovative machine learning-based model was created in this study to forecast the HHV (dependent variable). As input variables, the model included the constituents of the coal’s ultimate analysis: carbon (C), oxygen (O), hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), and sulfur (S). For comparative purposes, random forest regression (RFR), M5 model tree, multivariate linear regression (MLR), and previously reported empirical correlations were also applied to the experimental dataset. The results showed that the XGBoost strategy produced the most accurate predictions. An initial XGBoost analysis was carried out to identify the relative contribution of the input variables to coal HHV prediction. In particular, for coal HHV estimates reliant on experimental samples, the XGBoost regression produced a correlation coefficient of 0.9858 and a coefficient of determination of 0.9691. The excellent agreement between observed and anticipated values shows that the DE/XGBoost-based approximation performed satisfactorily. Lastly, a synopsis of the investigation’s key conclusions is provided.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040111

Authors: Thaer AL Ibaisi Stefan Kuhn Muhammad Kazim Ismail Kara Turgay Altindag Mujeeb Ur Rehman

The increasing deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices introduces significant security challenges, while privacy concerns limit centralized data aggregation for intrusion detection. Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized alternative, yet the interaction between feature representation, model architecture, and data heterogeneity remains insufficiently understood in IoT malware detection. This study provides a controlled comparative analysis of centralized and federated learning, optionally using amino acid encoding, under IID and Non-IID conditions using a 10,000-sample subset of the CTU–IoT–Malware–Capture dataset. First, we evaluate raw tabular features versus amino acid-based feature encoding, followed by a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (2882 parameters) versus a deeper residual network (70,532 parameters), across binary and multi-class classification tasks. In the binary setting, centralized training achieved up to 98.6% accuracy, while federated IID training reached 98.6%, with differences within statistical variance. Under Non-IID conditions, performance decreased modestly (0.1–0.5 percentage points), and accuracy was consistently lower when using encoded features compared with raw features. The degradation is smaller in deeper architectures and may offer improved stability under highly skewed federated conditions. In the four-class setting, the complex network achieved up to 97.8% accuracy with raw features, while amino acid encoding achieves up to 93.3%. The results show that federated learning can achieve performance comparable to centralized training under moderate heterogeneity, that lightweight architectures are sufficient for low-dimensional IoT traffic features, and that feature compression via amino acid encoding does not inherently mitigate Non-IID effects. These findings clarify the relative impact of representation, heterogeneity, and architectural capacity in practical FL-based IoT intrusion detection systems.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040110

Authors: Leonidas Theodorakopoulos Aristeidis Karras Alexandra Theodoropoulou Christos Klavdianos

Enterprise decision making in marketing, finance, and audit remains fragmented, leading to inefficient budget allocation and incomplete risk assessment. This study proposes an integrated, Big Data-driven decision-support framework that unifies Large Language Models (LLMs), attention-based marketing mix modeling, and multi-agent, game-theoretic optimization to coordinate cross-functional decisions. The architecture combines five modules: LLM-enhanced customer segmentation and customer lifetime value prediction, attention-weighted marketing mix modeling, multi-agent LLM systems for hierarchical budget optimization, attention-informed Markov multi-touch attribution, and LLM-augmented audit quality assessment. Empirical validation on a large-scale e-commerce dataset with 2.8 million customers and USD 156 million in marketing expenditure shows that marketing return on investment increases from 4.2 to 6.78 (61.4% relative improvement), financial forecasting error (MAPE) decreases from 12.8% to 4.7% (63.3% reduction), fraud detection accuracy improves by 29.8%, the Audit Quality Index reaches 0.951, and customer lifetime value prediction accuracy improves from 76.4% to 91.3%. By operationalizing the convergence of LLMs, attention mechanisms, and game-theoretic reasoning within a unified and empirically validated framework, the study delivers both theoretical advances and practically deployable tools for integrated business intelligence in digital economies.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040109

Authors: Yu-Kai Huang Chih-Hung Chen Yun-Cheng Tsai Shun-Shii Lin

This study proposes a machine learning framework tailored to the institutional characteristics of Taiwan’s stock market, aiming to enhance forecasting accuracy for the Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index (TAIEX). The model employs the Radius Neighbors Regressor with a dynamic radius-based similarity measure and integrates domain-specific features including technical indicators, volume–price relationships, and Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) activity. A custom 60-day input window with a 20-day forecast horizon is applied to capture medium-term market dynamics. The framework was evaluated through extensive backtesting and real-world validation with the TAIEX Futures. The results demonstrate that the model achieves a peak directional accuracy of 85.1% under optimal parameter settings. Moreover, trading simulations confirm its practical viability, yielding a cumulative return on investment (ROI) of approximately 1600% during the short-term evaluation period (2023–2025) and nearly 2000% in the long-term evaluation (2019–2025), even after accounting for transaction costs and stop-loss mechanisms. These findings indicate that combining historical pattern similarity with institutional investor behavior substantially improves predictive power and profitability. Nevertheless, the framework remains constrained by its reliance on Taiwan-specific institutional features and historical trading data, limiting generalizability. Future research should extend applications to other markets while incorporating macroeconomic variables, corporate fundamentals, and news-driven signals to enhance adaptability.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040108

Authors: Qing Chen Yujie Xue Jie Lin Chang Zhu

The rapid development of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in graduate education has changed human–AI interaction within knowledge-intensive environments, leading to important questions about user-side cognitive adaptation in probabilistic AI systems. While many studies focus on ethical implications, limited attention has been paid to the cognitive mechanisms underlying graduate students’ adoption of GenAI. Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study explores the cognitive and interactional mechanisms shaping graduate students’ adoption and usage of GenAI. Using thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with 20 graduate students from diverse academic backgrounds, the study identifies seven interrelated constructs: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, external environment, risk perception, attitude, behavioral intention, and interaction subjectivity. This study demonstrates that the adoption of GenAI is not merely a result of perceived efficiency but is shaped by cognitive calibration between trust and risk evaluation. Moreover, interaction subjectivity emerges as a metacognitive factor that determines whether engagement results in human–AI collaboration or passive automation. By integrating external environment, risk perception, and interaction subjectivity, this study provides a cognitively grounded framework for understanding human–AI adoption and interaction dynamics. Practically, the findings provide design-relevant insights for developing GenAI systems that support calibrated trust, uncertainty awareness, and adaptive cognitive participation.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040107

Authors: Jinsong Zhang Xiongzheng Li Yuqin Lin

Exemplar-based image translation generates an output image by transferring appearance from a reference exemplar to a content image. Existing works only consider the local correspondences between two modalities, and ignore the global distributions in each modality, struggling to obtain fine-grained details with efficient computation. In this paper, we propose OTFormer, a multi-scale Optimal Transport transformer for exemplarbased image translation. We formulate cross-modal alignment as a multi-scale optimal transport problem, which progressively provides a globally coherent matching. In addition, we design a lightweight multi-scale fusion block to extract and fuse features efficiently. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and DeepFashion demonstrate that OTFormer improves both image fidelity and style adherence, while reducing model parameters by 62% and achieving faster inference compared with strong baselines. These results highlight OTguided global alignment as an effective and deployable solution for high-fidelity exemplarbased image translation.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040106

Authors: Kenan Kassab Alexey Kashevnik Irina Shoshina

Candidate interview assessment is primarily reliant on subjective human judgment, while existing AI-based methods rely on end-to-end predictions with no psychometric basis. In this paper, we propose an interpretable multi-modal framework that combines nonverbal behavior, LLM-based verbal analysis, and Big Five personality traits into three theory-based constructs: professional-cognitive competence, observed leadership behavior, and leadership disposition. The proposed method utilizes computer vision and larger language models to extract features from video interviews. Rather than targeting predictive accuracy, the proposed method prioritizes construct validity and transparent aggregation under severe label scarcity. The proposed method aggregates the constructs into a Top Potential Score that reflects the executive abilities of the candidate. Experiments on the method show its ability to significantly differentiate top candidates from others (Cliff’s delta = 0.91 for the composite Top Potential Score, permutation p = 0.0002). Leave-one-out analysis verifies robustness, while rank-based evaluation yields 100% recall of executive candidates in the top 20% of rated applications. The findings justify the use of the proposed multi-modal method as an interpretable decision-support tool for candidate interview assessment.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040105

Authors: Jinsong Zhang Cheng Guan Zhihua Lin Yuqin Lin

Reconstructing photorealistic and animatable whole-body avatars from monocular videos is a hot topic in computer vision and computer graphics. However, existing methods still face challenges due to the limited frequency response of single-scale geometry encodings and the instability of appearance modeling without an explicit surface anchor. In this paper, we present H2Avatar, a real-time framework that builds on a mesh-embedded 3D Gaussian representation guided by SMPL-X and disentangles geometry and appearance into hierarchical and hybrid components. For geometry, we propose a semantic-aware hierarchical encoding based on a multi-scale tri-plane pyramid, where features at different resolutions capture both global structure and high-frequency surface details such as clothing wrinkles. For appearance, we introduce a hybrid rendering strategy that anchors canonical colors using a learnable UV texture map, and complements it with a neural residual color branch conditioned on tri-plane features, pose embedding, and surface normals to model pose- and view-dependent shading variations. This design improves temporal stability and preserves identity details while enhancing photorealism under complex motions. Experiments on the NeuMan dataset demonstrate that H2Avatar consistently outperforms representative baselines across multiple sequences, outperforming ExAvatar by up to 0.66 dB in PSNR and reducing LPIPS by up to 16.3%. These results validate the effectiveness of hierarchical geometry encoding and texture-anchored hybrid appearance modeling.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040104

Authors: Linfei Ma Dexing Wei Xiangpeng Li Feng Wen Haisu Zhang

Schema linking, the task of identifying relevant database schema elements (tables and columns) for natural language queries, is a critical component in database-driven natural language interfaces. While existing approaches rely on question decomposition to handle complex queries, they often suffer from error propagation and low precision. In this paper, we propose a novel schema linking framework enhanced by self-verification (SV) and value hints (VHs) that significantly improves both precision and recall. Our approach introduces two key components: (1) self-verification (SV), an iterative refinement mechanism that validates and corrects initial predictions through explicit verification prompts, and (2) value hints (VHs), which explicitly guide the model to recognize database values mentioned in queries. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Spider and BIRD, using two language models of 4B and 80B parameters. Our results demonstrate that SV + VH consistently improves performance across datasets, models, and method configurations, outperforming both decomposition-based approaches and compute-matched alternatives such as self-consistency under equivalent inference budgets.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040103

Authors: Joel Lehmann Tim Markus Häußermann Julian Reichwald

Complex products and production processes are intertwined and demand expressive, lifecycle-wide digital representations. The Asset Administration Shell emerged as a standard for Digital Twins (DTs), structuring heterogeneous data across cloud-based Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) infrastructures. However, today’s deployments predominantly realize passive or reactive DTs, while intelligent behavior remains underexploited. This paper addresses this gap, proposing an end-to-end architecture operationalizing the DT Reference Model through the integration of machine-interpretable granulated industrial skills, which are semantically accumulated into a knowledge graph enabling discovery and reasoning, while a multi-agent system provides autonomous, utility-based negotiation via machine-to-machine interactions within a federated marketplace. The approach is applied in a real smart manufacturing demonstrator, combining order processes, production orchestration, and lifecycle documentation into a unified execution pipeline spanning IIoT-connected shopfloor assets and cloud-based services. Quantitative experiments evaluating negotiation latency, renegotiation robustness, and utility variation demonstrate stable, predictable behavior even under concurrent demand and failure scenarios. The architecture lays a foundation for interoperable, sovereign collaboration across value chains to realize shared production. The results underline the effectiveness of the tightly coupled enabler technologies realizing proactive, reconfigurable, and semantically enriched intelligent DTs.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040102

Authors: Manuel Gozzi Francesca Fallucchi

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a variety of natural language understanding tasks, yet their sensitivity to emotional framing in user prompts remains underexplored. This paper presents an empirical study investigating how four emotional tones—joy, apathy, anger, and fear—affect LLM performance on the SuperGLUE benchmark. We evaluate five instruction-tuned, open-weight models across eight diverse tasks, systematically modulating input prompts with affective cues while keeping semantic content constant. Results reveal that prompts framed with joy and apathy lead to consistently higher accuracy, with gains of up to 4.5 percentage points compared to fear-framed inputs, which yield the lowest performance. These findings demonstrate that affective modulation in user prompts measurably impacts LLM reasoning and task outcomes, suggesting that emotional framing is not merely stylistic but functionally relevant to model behavior. Our study provides a reproducible experimental framework and an open-source prompt set, offering a foundation for future research on affect-aware prompting strategies and their implications in human–AI interaction.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040101

Authors: Ding-Wei Chen Yun-Nan Chang

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disorder that is significantly contributed to by epigenetics. We developed a machine learning-based framework to identify DNA methylation biomarkers associated with AD classification and severity. Genome-wide methylation data from peripheral blood were processed using four feature selection algorithms: coarse approximation linear function (CALF), elastic net (EN), minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR), and recursive feature elimination with cross-validation (RFECV). The integrative framework identified a central panel of 8 CpG sites that achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 1.00 in the test set. This panel demonstrated high disease specificity, showing poor classification performance for systemic lupus erythematosus (AUC = 0.46), Crohn’s disease (AUC = 0.50), and oral squamous cell carcinoma (AUC = 0.58). Severity prediction using RFECV-selected 63 CpG sites (RFE63) achieved high accuracy across classifiers, with Random Forest (accuracy = 0.94) outperforming the others. The functional enrichment of CpG-associated genes highlighted key immune-related transcriptional regulators, including STAT5A, RUNX1, MEIS1, and PAX4. These genes are linked to chromatin remodeling, T helper cell differentiation, and interleukin-2 regulation, which are critical in AD pathogenesis and severity. Our findings demonstrate the utility of machine learning-integrated epigenomics in identifying robust, disease-specific biomarkers for AD diagnosis and monitoring, offering new insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying childhood AD. However, further validation in large-scale independent cohorts is required to confirm their clinical robustness and generalizability.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10040100

Authors: Henrique Tostes de Sousa Leo Natan Paschoal

The growing integration of chatbots and large language models (LLMs) into society raises important concerns about their potential to reproduce toxic human behaviors. As a result, it is essential to investigate these models to mitigate or eliminate such risks. This paper presents an experimental study evaluating the responses of the Llama and Alpaca models to scenarios involving verbal harassment. The methodology involved using harassment dialogues generated by an LLM as prompts to elicit responses from both models. The responses were then analyzed for levels of toxicity, sexually explicit content, and flirtatiousness. The results indicate that although both models reduce explicit offensive terms, they exhibit limitations in identifying and intercepting abusive behavior from users. Statistical analysis reveals that general-purpose instruction tuning in Alpaca does not provide a robust safety barrier compared to the Llama base model for most variables investigated in the experiment. However, a significant difference was observed concerning flirting, where Llama proved more prone to validation and encouragement than Alpaca. Furthermore, the study identifies critical vulnerabilities, such as a “self-deprecation” bias in Llama and “mirroring” behavior in Alpaca. We also report a complementary triangulation with GPT-family models as a secondary point of reference. This paper discusses and contains content that can be offensive or upsetting.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030099

Authors: Oraya Sooknit Jakkarin Suksawatchon Ureerat Suksawatchon

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation focuses on predicting a user’s subsequent location based on historical check-in data. In practice, however, check-in logs frequently contain uncertain records in which ambiguous spatial, temporal, or behavioral information obscures the underlying mobility regularities, thereby degrading prediction performance. To address this challenge, this study first infers user preferences from historical trajectories and reweights transition importance based on temporal and spatial proximity. It then models transition relationships using three complementary feature dimensions: POI category, spatial area, and routine versus non-routine behavioral patterns. Using transition probability analysis, feature-level dependencies in user mobility are systematically investigated. The findings demonstrate that these transition features contribute unevenly to predictive performance, with area-based transitions yielding the strongest results when used in isolation. Nonetheless, their joint integration consistently achieves the highest accuracy, underscoring the critical role of transition-aware modeling. Across two real-world datasets, the proposed framework consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in top-ranked accuracy (Recall@1) and ranking quality (NDCG@1), while delivering competitive effectiveness at higher cutoff values (k=3 and k=5). Notably, on the NYC dataset, MTF-POI achieves the highest Recall@1 (+19.01% over the strongest baseline) with a marginal trade-off at Recall@3, reflecting the framework’s design emphasis on precise next-step prediction.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030098

Authors: Md Jahangir Alam Khondkar Ajan Ahmed Stephanie Schuckers Masudul H. Imtiaz

Speech enhancement through denoising is essential for maintaining signal intelligibility and quality in biometric speaker verification pipelines that operate in acoustically adverse conditions. Despite the proliferation of deep learning (DL) architectures for speech denoising, simultaneously optimizing noise attenuation, perceptual fidelity, and speaker-identity preservation remains an open problem. We address this gap by benchmarking three architecturally distinct DL-based enhancement models—Wave-U-Net, CMGAN, and U-Net—on three independent, domain-diverse corpora (SpEAR, VPQAD, and Clarkson) that the models never encountered during training and by introducing commercial-grade VeriSpeak speaker-verification scores as a biometric evaluation dimension absent from prior comparative studies. Our experiments reveal a clear three-way trade-off: U-Net achieves the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains (+61.44% on SpEAR, +67.05% on VPQAD, +235.3% on Clarkson) but sacrifices naturalness; CMGAN yields the best perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) values (3.33, 1.35, and 2.50, respectively), favoring listening-comfort applications; and Wave-U-Net delivers the strongest biometric fidelity (VeriSpeak improvements of +11.63%, +30.22%, and +29.24%) while offering competitive perceptual quality. These results highlight that model selection must be driven by the target deployment scenario and provide actionable guidance for improving biometric verification robustness under real-world noise.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030097

Authors: Awwal Ahmed Anthony Rispoli Carrie Wasieloski Ifrah Khurram Rafael Zamora-Resendiz Destinee Morrow Aijuan Dong Silvia Crivelli

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder associated with serious health risks. This study leverages large language models (LLMs) to process and interpret clinical narratives in electronic health records. It develops clinically meaningful lexicons for predicting mortality and readmission risk, as well as for multiclass diagnostic classification in OSA patients. Using LLM-expanded lexicons, logistic regression models achieved ROC–AUC scores of 0.844 for 6-month all-cause post-discharge mortality, 0.817 for 1-year all-cause post-discharge mortality, and 0.729 for all-cause hospital readmissions following the first discharge. Diagnostic performance was highest with smaller n-gram representations, indicating that additional contextual length did not improve performance. Compared with frequency-based n-gram models, LLM-expanded lexicons yielded sparser feature sets with lower computational cost and comparable performance. Our findings highlight the potential of LLM-expanded lexicons to enhance OSA diagnosis and clinical risk stratification.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030096

Authors: Sera Kim Youngjun Kim Jaewon Lee Dalwon Jang

This paper proposes a novel method for measuring music similarity. Existing music similarity measurements have often been used for music appreciation, but this paper proposes a method for measuring the similarity between music samples which are used for music production. Conventional music recommendation approaches often rely on either metadata-based similarity or audio-based feature similarity in isolation, which limits their effectiveness in sample-based recommendation scenarios where both compositional context and acoustic characteristics are important. To address this limitation, the proposed framework combines a hypergraph-based information similarity module with a feature-based similarity module learned using Siamese networks and triplet loss. In the information-based module, metadata attributes such as beats per minute (BPM), genre, chord, key, and instrument are modeled as vertices in a hypergraph, and Random Walk–Word2Vec embeddings are learned to capture structural relationships between music samples and their attributes. In parallel, the feature-based module employs vertex-specific Siamese networks trained on instrument and key classification tasks to learn perceptual similarity directly from audio signals. The two modules are trained independently and jointly utilized at the recommendation stage to provide attribute-specific similarity results for a given query sample. Results show that the proposed system achieves high Precision@k across multiple attributes and forms stable similarity structures in the embedding space, even without relying on user interaction data. These results reflect embedding consistency evaluated over the entire dataset where training and retrieval are performed on the same sample pool, rather than generalization to unseen samples. These results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid framework effectively captures both structural and perceptual similarity among music samples and is well suited for sample-based music recommendation in music production environments.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030095

Authors: Wenxi Sheng Chi Wei Yinuo Zhang Bowen Zhang Jingyun Sun

Text-based automatic compliance checking (ACC) employs natural language processing technologies to scrutinize a corporation’s business documents, ensuring adherence to related normative texts. The current methods fall into two primary categories: symbol-based and embedding-based approaches. Symbol-based methods, noted for their accuracy and transparent processing, suffer from limited versatility. Conversely, embedding-based methods operate independently of expert knowledge yet often yield challenging-to-interpret results and require substantial volumes of annotated data. While both types of methods exhibit advantages in different aspects, the current research fails to combine these advantages effectively. Therefore, the existing methods fail to balance interpretability, generalization ability, and accuracy, which are key requirements for practical compliance systems. To address this problem, we introduce a novel approach termed the Dynamic Prompt-based Logic-Aided Compliance Checker (DPLACC), which is grounded in the prompt learning framework. This method initially parses target texts, transforming the results into first-order logical expressions. It subsequently retrieves pertinent knowledge from a knowledge graph, converting the knowledge into analogous first-order logical expressions. These expressions are then encoded into a global semantic vector via a pre-trained first-order logistic encoder. Ultimately, the semantics of expressions and initial texts are amalgamated within the prompt template, facilitating the logical knowledge enhancement of model reasoning. Experiments on Chinese and English datasets demonstrate that DPLACC comprehensively outperforms existing methods based solely on symbols or embeddings in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score and significantly surpasses current mainstream large language models. Furthermore, DPLACC exhibits enhanced interpretability and reduced data dependence, maintaining 70% checking accuracy with as few as ten training samples. This capability allows DPLACC to be rapidly deployed in data-scarce real-world scenarios with minimal annotation overhead, thus offering a practical pathway toward the scalable implementation of compliance inspection systems.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030094

Authors: Abdussalam Elhanashi Siham Essahraui Pierpaolo Dini Davide Paolini Qinghe Zheng Sergio Saponara

Generative artificial intelligence and foundation models have changed machine learning by allowing systems to produce readable text, realistic images, and other multimodal content with little direct input from a user. Foundation models are large neural networks trained on very large and varied datasets, and they form the core of many current generative AI (GenAI) systems. Their rapid development has led to major advances in areas like natural language processing, computer vision, multimodal learning, and robotics. Examples include GPT, LLaMA, and diffusion-based architectures, such as models often used for image generation. Systems such as Stable Diffusion show this shift by illustrating how AI can interpret information, draw basic inferences, and produce new outputs using more than one type of data. This review surveys common foundation model architectures and examines what they can do in generative tasks. It reviews Transformer, diffusion, and multimodal architectures, focusing on methods that support scaling and transfer across domains. The paper also reviews key approaches to pretraining and fine-tuning, including self-supervised learning, instruction tuning, and parameter-efficient adaptation, which support these systems’ ability to generalize across tasks. In addition to the technical details, this review discusses how GenAI is being used for text generation, image synthesis, robotics, and biomedical research. The study also notes continuing challenges, such as the high computing and energy demands of large models, ethical concerns about data bias and misinformation, and worries about privacy, reliability, and responsible use of AI in real settings. This review brings together ideas about model design, training methods, and social implications to point future research toward GenAI systems that are efficient, easy to interpret, and reliable, while supporting scientific progress and ethical responsibility.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030093

Authors: Phumudzo Lloyd Seabe Claude Rodrigue Bambe Moutsinga Maggie Aphane

Accurate forecasting of equity returns remains fundamentally constrained by weak short-horizon predictability, pronounced noise, and structural non-stationarity. While deep learning models have been widely applied to financial time series, most studies prioritize point prediction and provide limited guidance on reliable uncertainty quantification, particularly in emerging markets. This study developed an uncertainty-aware forecasting framework for the South African equity market by integrating variational mode decomposition (VMD), gated recurrent units (GRUs), and temporal conformal prediction (TCP) to construct distribution-free prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage guarantees. Using daily returns from the FTSE/JSE All Share Index, we first confirmed that baseline recurrent models applied directly to raw returns exhibited negligible out-of-sample explanatory power, consistent with weak-form market efficiency. Incorporating VMD enhanced representation learning and improved point forecast accuracy by isolating latent frequency components. However, model-based predictive variance alone proved insufficient for reliable calibration. Embedding the models within a rolling conformal prediction framework restored near-nominal coverage across multiple confidence levels while allowing interval widths to adapt dynamically to changing volatility regimes. Robustness analyses, including walk-forward validation, stress-regime evaluation, and block permutation negative control experiments, indicated that the observed performance was not driven by temporal leakage or alignment artifacts. The results further highlight a trade-off between interval sharpness and tail-risk protection, particularly during extreme market events. Overall, the findings support a shift from return-level prediction toward calibrated uncertainty estimation as a more stable and economically meaningful objective in non-stationary financial environments.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030092

Authors: Bobur Saidov Vladimir Barakhnin Rakhmon Saparbaev Zayniddin Narmuratov Rustamova Manzura Ruzmetova Zilolakhon Anorgul Atajanova

This work proposes a hybrid Uzbek sentiment analysis model (sometimes referred to as tonality analysis in the local literature) that integrates contextual text representations with named-entity information from an NER module and emoji-based emotional cues that are common in short online messages. To provide a comprehensive baseline comparison, we evaluate seven approaches—SVM, LSTM, mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa-base, mDeBERTa-v3, LaBSE, and the proposed hybrid model—covering both classical machine learning and modern multilingual transformer architectures for low-resource sentiment tasks. The overall pipeline begins with Uzbek-specific text normalization to reduce noise from informal spellings, transliteration variants, and inconsistent apostrophe usage. In parallel, the system performs explicit emoji extraction to capture affective signals that are often expressed non-verbally in social media texts. Next, we construct three complementary feature streams: a context encoder for sentence-level semantics, NER-driven entity features that encode entity mentions and types, and an emotion module that models emoji priors and their interaction with contextual meaning. These streams are fused into a unified representation and fed to a final classifier to predict sentiment polarity. Experiments on an Uzbek test set demonstrate that the hybrid model reaches an F1-score of 0.92, consistently outperforming text-only baselines. The results indicate that entity-aware and emoji-informed features improve robustness under sarcasm/irony, mixed sentiment with multiple targets, and orthographic noise, making the approach suitable for social media analytics, public opinion monitoring, customer feedback triage, and recommendation-oriented text mining.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030091

Authors: Gang Cheng Hailin Pei Xiaokang Chen Xiaorong Pang Renzheng Sun

Spontaneous combustion in goaf areas poses a significant threat to coal mine safety. Traditional safety management systems, reliant on passive response and single-indicator thresholds, often suffer from delayed warnings and lack cognitive decision support. To address this challenge, this study proposes a big-data-driven cognitive computing framework for dynamic risk prediction of goaf spontaneous combustion, based on a “Cloud-Edge-End” collaborative architecture. The method leverages multi-sensor big data streams (CO, C2H4, O2, etc.) and deploys a lightweight Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network on underground edge computing nodes (STM32) for real-time analytics. The model demonstrates excellent predictive performance on imbalanced datasets, with a PR-AUC of 0.910 and a recall of 99.7%. The edge-deployed RBF model achieves a single-pass inference time of only 0.62 ms, enabling real-time cognitive risk mapping. Field application at Z Coal Mine validated the system’s effectiveness, providing an average pre-warning time of 48.5 h, achieving zero spontaneous combustion accidents, and reducing the Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR) by 15.2%. This work illustrates how edge-based cognitive computing can transform safety management from passive response to proactive prevention, offering a scalable and interpretable framework for intelligent mine safety.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030090

Authors: Abheek Pradhan Sana Alamgeer Rakesh Suvvari Syed Tousiful Haque Anne H. H. Ngu

Wearable fall detection systems face a fundamental challenge: while gyroscope data provide valuable orientation cues, naively combining raw gyroscope and accelerometer signals can degrade performance due to noise contamination. To overcome this challenge, we present a dual-stream transformer architecture that incorporates (i) Kalman-based sensor fusion to convert noisy gyroscope angular velocities into stable orientation estimates (roll, pitch, yaw), maintaining an internal state of body pose, and (ii) processing accelerometer and orientation streams in separate encoder pathways before fusion to prevent cross-modal interference. Our architecture further integrates Squeeze-and-Excitation channel attention and Temporal Attention Pooling to focus on fall-critical temporal patterns. Evaluated on the SmartFallMM dataset using 21-fold leave-one-subject-out cross-validation, the dual-stream Kalman transformer achieves 91.10% F1, outperforming single-stream Kalman transformers (89.80% F1) by 1.30% and single-stream baseline transformers (88.96% F1) by 2.14%. We further evaluate the model in real time using a watch-based SmartFall App on five participants, maintaining an average F1 score of 83% and an accuracy of 90%. These results indicate robust performance in both offline and real-world deployment settings, establishing a new state-of-the-art for inertial-measurement-unit-based fall detection on commodity smartwatch devices.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030089

Authors: Elena Ryumina Alexandr Axyonov Mikhail Dolgushin Dmitry Ryumin Alexey Karpov

Automated video-based detection of cognitive disorders can enable a scalable non-invasive health monitoring. However, existing methods focus on a single disease and provide limited interpretability, whereas real-world videos often contain co-occurring conditions. We propose a novel unified multi-task method to detect depression and Parkinson’s disease (PD) from in-the-wild video data called DEPART (DEpression and PArkinson’s Recognition Technique). It performs body region extraction, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP)-based visual encoding, Transformer-based temporal modeling, and prototype-aware classification with a gated fusion technique. Gradient-based attention maps are used to visualize task-specific regions that drive predictions. Experiments on the In-the-Wild Speech Medical (WSM) corpus demonstrate competitive performance: the multi-task model achieves Recall of 82.39% for depression and 78.20% for PD, compared with 87.76% and 78.20%, for the best single-task models. The multi-task learning initially increases false positives for healthy persons in the PD subset, mainly due to annotation–modality mismatches, static visual content misinterpreted as motor impairments, and occasional body detection failures. After cleaning the test data, Recall for healthy individuals becomes comparable across models; the multi-task model improves Recall for both depression (from 82.39% to 87.50%) and PD (from 78.20% to 86.14%), suggesting better robustness for real-life clinical applications.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030088

Authors: Saule Kudubayeva Yernar Seksenbayev Aigerim Yerimbetova Elmira Daiyrbayeva Bakzhan Sakenov Duman Telman Mussa Turdalyuly

Multimodal human–AI systems generally consider facial expressions and body motions as separate input streams, leading to disjointed interpretations and diminished emotional coherence. To overcome this issue, we offer the Engagement-Safe Expressive Alignment (ESEA) paradigm and the Unified Visual Synchrony (UVS) framework as its computational implementation. UVS models the coherence between facial expressions and gestures, offering an interpretable visual synchrony signal that can function as adaptive feedback in human–AI interactions. The framework’s key component is the Consistency Index for Affective Synchrony (CIAS), which correlates brief visual segments with scalar synchrony scores through a common latent representation. Facial and gestural signals are processed by modality-specific projection networks into a unified latent space, and CIAS is derived from the similarity and short-term temporal consistency of these latent trajectories. The synchrony index is regarded as an estimation of affective visual coherence within the ESEA paradigm. We formalize the UVS/CIAS framework and conduct a comparative experimental evaluation utilizing matched and mismatched face–gesture segments derived from rendered dialog footage. Utilizing ROC analysis, score distribution comparisons, temporal visualizations, and negative control tests, we illustrate that CIAS effectively captures structured face–gesture alignment that surpasses similarity-based baselines, while also delivering a persistent, time-resolved synchronization signal. These findings establish CIAS as a principled and interpretable feedback signal for future affect-aware, engagement-focused multimodal agents.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030087

Authors: Junyi Jiang Dong Li Qingyi Yang Zhenhua Zhang Lei Wang Wenru Zhao Mingliang Chen

Slope instability can cause severe disasters, making stability prediction essential. Machine learning has become a key tool for this purpose, as it avoids complex mechanical calculations and efficiently handles high-dimensional data. Currently, the data used in machine learning primarily originate from real-world cases. However, such cases are inherently limited in quantity and often fail to comprehensively represent all potential slope conditions. To address these limitations, this study proposes a method for constructing numerical simulation databases. Based on this, we develop a model establishment method for rapid evaluation of slope stability integrating numerical simulation with engineering cases. This study uses six characteristic parameters to assess slope stability, including unit weight γ, cohesion c, internal friction angle φ, slope angle α, slope height H, and pore pressure ratio ru. Through extensive literature mining, we established a database of 684 engineering cases. Based on statistical analysis of input parameters, a numerical simulation scheme was designed. Batch calculations were performed using MATLAB to determine simulation results. The engineering case database was then partitioned into training and testing sets for model development and validation. Subsequently, the numerical simulation database was incorporated into the training set for retesting. Results demonstrate that when considering all predictive indicators, the prediction accuracy of the GRNN-based model improved from 85% to 88.3%, while the PNN-based model showed an increase from 69% to 88.3%. This study offers new insights for optimizing numerical simulation design and enhancing machine learning performance in slope stability prediction.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030086

Authors: Langgao Cheng Yanying Mao Guowang Li Honghui Chen

Generative recommendation systems based on Large Language Models leverage their reasoning capabilities to capture users’ latent interests. However, aligning continuous user behavioral embeddings with the discrete semantic space of LLMs remains a challenge. Direct alignment often leads to semantic mismatch and hallucination issues. Furthermore, existing methods typically rely on multi-stage training strategies to adapt to variations in feature distributions, thereby limiting training efficiency. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose SBT-Rec, a structured behavioral tokenization framework. Specifically, we first design a hierarchical discrete structure discovery module, utilizing a recursive residual quantization mechanism to decompose continuous behavioral vectors into discrete behavioral atoms to resolve modality discrepancies. Second, the multi-scale behavioral semantic reconstruction module reconstructs behavioral representations via residual superposition, thereby reducing data noise. Third, a residual-aware modality distribution aligner is introduced to transform behavioral features into input tokens compatible with the LLM via non-linear mapping. Finally, based on structured discrete representations, we propose a single-stage behavioral-semantic adaptive optimization strategy, achieving end-to-end parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Experiments on the MovieLens, LastFM, and Steam datasets demonstrate that SBT-Rec outperforms existing baseline models in terms of recommendation accuracy, training efficiency, and noise robustness.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030085

Authors: Patrick Steinert Stefan Wagenpfeil Ingo Frommholz Matthias L. Hemmje

After the peak of the recent hype wave of interest surrounding the metaverse, virtual world applications remained in areas such as gaming, VR training, simulations, and collaboration. In this context, recordings are created which subsequently evolve into extensive collections that users may wish to access, search through, and retrieve items from. In order to facilitate searchability of metaverse recordings, it is necessary to adapt content analysis and indexing techniques to the specific characteristics of these recordings. This paper presents a reference model, the Processing Framework for Metaverse Recordings (PFMR), which details the phases of structural analysis, feature extraction, data mining, and feature fusion. The objective is to facilitate efficient retrieval of metaverse content. Our evaluation, based on a prototypical implementation, demonstrates the applicability and effectiveness of PFMR. This lays the groundwork for further integration of metaverse-specific content into Multimedia Information Retrieval systems. The evaluation of the 256 Metaverse Recording dataset shows that PFMRs’ domain-specific adaptability and integratability allows effective metaverse recording information retrieval for metaverse-specific features such as avatar detection, dialog mining, and toxicity classification.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030084

Authors: Zoltán Mészáros M. A. Hannan Bin Azhar Tasmina Islam Soumya Kanti Manna

Home based telerehabilitation has expanded after COVID-19, but delivering timely guidance and monitoring exercise performance outside the clinic remains difficult. Traditional physiotherapy often relies on repeated execution of simple routines, yet clinicians have limited visibility into adherence and movement quality during unsupervised sessions. From a systems perspective, many telerehabilitation approaches also face constraints in accessibility, bandwidth, and computational cost that can limit practical deployment. This paper presents a modular telerehabilitation framework and prototype that captures and records rehabilitation exercise sessions for asynchronous clinician review in a 3D visualisation environment. The system integrates skeletal motion capture with plantar pressure sensing, and stores sessions as portable artefacts to support replay, inspection, and downstream analysis. A connector-based architecture enables extension to additional sensors without redesigning the core application, and the design aims to support deployment under constrained home computing and networking conditions. The manuscript contributes an implementation blueprint and reference architecture for multimodal capture and replay. Clinical effectiveness, usability outcomes, and quantitative sensor accuracy benchmarking are outside the scope of this work and are identified as necessary future evaluation.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030083

Authors: Giuseppe Ciaburro Virginia Puyana-Romero

Sound Event Detection (SED) is a growing area with vast prospects for understanding and designing the sonic fabric of smart cities. In this paper, the latest advances in SED are summarized, focusing on models, datasets, and applications from scientific papers listed on Scopus and Web of Science. The paper provides a clear view of how SED is being used in smart cities, public safety, environment monitoring, and home security. The paper also addresses the challenges of SED, including dataset representativeness, model robustness under noisy or complex acoustic scenes, event rarity detection, as well as the ethics of using automatic listening. The paper also provides a view of future work to be undertaken in SED. The focus of the paper is on self-supervised learning, multi-modal fusion, neuro-inspired approaches, as well as privacy-preserving analytics. The paper provides a view of SED as a key technology to make smart cities safe, secure, and sustainable. SED has vast prospects as a key technology to enable artificial perception of smart cities.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030082

Authors: Xiyun Yang Han Chen Xiangjun Li Xiaoyu Liu

Accurate carbon price forecasting is vital for risk management but is hindered by high volatility and sensitivity to external shocks. Existing multivariate models typically overlook unstructured news sentiment, failing to capture irrational fluctuations driven by market public opinion. To address this, this paper proposes VBN-Net, a hybrid model integrating carbon-specific news sentiment with Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD). Two core innovations are presented: First, a multi-modal input mechanism combines structured financial data with unstructured carbon news sentiment to effectively capture policy-driven shocks. Second, a Sequential Beluga Whale Optimization strategy is designed to adaptively optimize feature engineering in steps. Unlike conventional approaches, the VBN-Net first employs VMD for denoising and frequency decomposition, and then optimizes the fusion weights of news sentiment across different frequency components derived from multi-source news. This strategy effectively overcomes the subjectivity of manual parameter selection, providing high-quality features for a fixed CNN-BiLSTM backbone. By integrating VMD-based denoising with optimized multi-source news fusion, the model achieves consistent performance improvements across multiple evaluation metrics. The empirical findings validate the effectiveness of the proposed model in enhancing forecasting performance, thereby providing a reliable analytical tool for participants in the carbon market.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030081

Authors: Chongwen Tian Rong Li

This study proposes the Double-Ensemble Learning Classification with SMOTE (DELC-SMOTE), a novel hierarchical framework designed to address the critical challenge of severe class imbalance in financial bond default prediction. The model integrates the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) into a two-phase ensemble architecture. The first phase employs introspective stacking, where six heterogeneous base learners are individually enhanced through algorithm-specific balancing and meta-learning. The second phase fuses these optimized experts via performance-weighted voting. Empirical analysis utilizes a comprehensive dataset of 10,440 Chinese corporate bonds (522 defaults, ~5% default rate) sourced from Wind and CSMAR databases. Given the high cost of both false negatives and false positives in risk assessment, the Geometric Mean (G-mean) and Specificity are employed as primary evaluation metrics. Results demonstrate that the proposed DELC-SMOTE model significantly outperforms individual base classifiers and benchmark ensemble variants, achieving a G-mean of 0.9152 and a Specificity of 0.8715 under the primary experimental setting. The model exhibits robust performance across varying imbalance ratios (2%, 10%, 20%) and strong resilience against data noise, perturbations, and outliers. These findings indicate that the synergistic integration of data-level resampling within a diversified, two-tiered ensemble structure effectively mitigates class imbalance bias and enhances predictive reliability. The framework offers a robust and generalizable tool for actionable default risk assessment in imbalanced financial datasets.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030080

Authors: Abu Anas Ibn Samad Tanvir Ahmed Md Nazmul Huda

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) primarily rely on flow rate and occupancy to estimate traffic states. However, in heterogeneous traffic conditions characterized by weak lane discipline and diverse vehicle classes, these conventional metrics fail to capture the true operational efficiency of signalized intersections. High flow rates can mask underlying inefficiencies, while low flow rates do not necessarily indicate free-flow conditions. This paper introduces a novel computer vision-based metric, the Effective Flow Ratio (EFR), designed to quantify the actual discharge efficiency of mixed traffic. By leveraging Bird’s-Eye View (BEV) vehicle tracking using You Only Look Once version 11 (YOLOv11) and ByteTrack, EFR distinguishes between kinematic movement and effective discharge, resolving the ambiguity of “moving but not clearing” states. We analyze 21 days of continuous footage from a rooftop-mounted camera overlooking a congested intersection in Dhaka, Bangladesh, exhibiting distinct non-linear behaviors compared to raw flow counts. Our results demonstrate that: (i) Flow rate and discharge efficiency are dynamically decoupled, evidenced by significant variance in EFR within identical flow bins; (ii) Temporal rolling correlations reveal transient regimes where traditional signal control logic would misinterpret congestion severity; and (iii) EFR provides a more robust proxy for intersection performance than occupancy or volume alone. The proposed metric offers a granular, physics-informed input for next-generation adaptive traffic signal control in developing urban environments.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030079

Authors: Volodymyr Dubetskyy Maria-Dolores Cano

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) provides strong data confidentiality during computation but often suffers from high latency on Central Processing Units (CPUs). This study evaluates Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration for modern FHE libraries across a laptop (NVIDIA GTX 1650 Ti), a server (NVIDIA RTX 4060), and a Jetson Nano 2 GB embedded GPU. We benchmark key generation, arithmetic operations, Boolean-gate evaluation and scheme-specific tasks such as relinearization and key switching, using library-provided benchmarks with an explicit baseline (operation scope, timing boundaries, and parameter tuples). Moreover, we compare GPU-native libraries (NuFHE, Phantom-FHE, and Troy-Nova) with CPU-oriented ones (Microsoft SEAL, HElib, OpenFHE, Cupcake, and TFHE-rs). Results show GPUs deliver significant speedups for targeted operations. For example, NuFHE’s NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) backend achieves about 1.4× faster Boolean-gate evaluation on the laptop and 3.4× faster on the server compared to its OpenCL backend. Likewise, RLWE (Ring Learning With Errors)-based schemes (BFV, CKKS, and BGV) see marked gains for polynomial arithmetic such as Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) when executed via Phantom-FHE. However, attempts to add CUDA support to Microsoft SEAL reveal four main challenges: high-precision modular arithmetic on GPUs, sequential dependencies in SEAL’s design, limited GPU memory and complex build-system changes. In light of these findings, we propose revised guidelines for GPU-first FHE libraries and practical recommendations for deploying high-throughput, privacy-preserving solutions on modern GPUs.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030078

Authors: M. Hadi Sepanj Benyamin Ghojogh Saed Moradi Paul Fieguth

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for representation learning by optimizing geometric objectives, such as invariance to augmentations, variance preservation, and feature decorrelation, without requiring labels. However, most existing methods operate in Euclidean space, limiting their ability to capture nonlinear dependencies and geometric structures. In this work, we propose Kernel VICReg, a novel self-supervised learning framework that pulls the VICReg objective into a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). By kernelizing each term of the loss, variance, invariance, and covariance, we obtain a general formulation that operates on double-centered kernel matrices and Hilbert–Schmidt norms, enabling nonlinear feature learning without explicit mappings. We demonstrate that Kernel VICReg mitigates the risk of representational collapse under challenging conditions and improves performance on datasets exhibiting nonlinear structure or limited sample regimes. Empirical evaluations across MNIST, CIFAR-10, STL-10, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet100 show consistent gains over Euclidean VICReg, with particularly strong improvements on datasets where nonlinear structures are prominent. UMAP visualizations are provided only as a qualitative illustration of embedding geometry and are not used as a calibration or statistical validation. Our results suggest that kernelizing SSL objectives is a promising direction for bridging classical kernel methods with modern representation learning.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030077

Authors: Manlika Seefong Panuwat Wisutwattanasak Kestsirin Theerathitichaipa Pattarawadee Prasomsab Nisa Dackuntod Thanapong Champahom Rattanaporn Kasemsri

Hospital transport services represent a vital alternative for addressing inequities in access to medical care, particularly in countries where public transportation systems are inadequate, such as Thailand. This approach enables equitable and widespread access to healthcare services for residents in underserved areas. The objective of this study is to analyze the factors influencing the choice of hospital transport travel mode by comparing various machine learning algorithms. The findings reveal that the categorical boosting model outperformed the other models across all performance metrics. The model results indicate that waiting time, travel time, travel cost, and comfortability significantly influence the decision to use hospital transport services. Furthermore, demographic data analysis highlights critical factors such as age, gender, income, travel frequency, occupation, and time of travel, all of which significantly affect the choice of hospital transport service. To maximize the practical implications of this study, policy recommendations and implementation strategies are proposed to support decision-makers in promoting equitable travel options and eliminating barriers to fair access to healthcare services.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030076

Authors: Aminu Musa Rajesh Prasad Peter Onwualu Monica Hernandez

Deep learning has achieved expert-level performance in medical imaging analysis. However, models often fail to generalize across patient populations due to cross-population domain shifts, distributional differences arising from demographic variability, variations in imaging protocols, scanner hardware, and differences in disease prevalence. This challenge limits the real-world deployment and can increase health inequities. This review systematically examines the nature, causes, and impact of cross-population domain shift in deep learning-based medical imaging analysis. We analyzed 50 peer-reviewed studies from 2020 to 2025, evaluating the proposed methodologies for handling population shifts, the datasets employed, and the metrics used to assess performance. Our findings demonstrate that performance degradation ranged from 10–25% when models were tested on unseen populations, emphasizing the substantial impact of domain shifts on model generalizability. The literature reveals that mitigation strategies broadly fall into two categories: data-centric approaches, such as augmentation and harmonization, and model-centric approaches, including domain adaptation, transfer learning, adversarial learning, multi-task learning, and continual learning. While domain adaptation and transfer learning are the most widely used, their performance gains across populations remain modest, ranging from 5–15%, and are not supported by external validation. Our synthesis reveals a significant reliance on large, publicly available datasets from limited regions, with an underrepresentation of data from low- and middle-income countries. Evaluation practices are inconsistent, with few studies employing standardized external test sets. This review provides a structured taxonomy of mitigation techniques, a refined analysis of domain shift characteristics, and an in-depth critique of methodological challenges. We highlight the urgent need for more geographically and demographically inclusive datasets, adaptable modeling techniques, and standardized evaluation protocols to enable accurate and equitable AI-driven diagnostics across diverse populations. Finally, we outline future research directions to guide the development of robust, generalizable, and fair models for medical imaging analysis.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030075

Authors: Tanmay Sunil Hatkar Abhinav Pandey Saad B. Ahmed

Semantic segmentation plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving, enabling pixel-level understanding of road scenes. Although transformer-based models such as SegFormer have shown exceptional performance on large datasets, their generalization to smaller and geographically diverse datasets remains underexplored. In this work, we analyze the scalability and transferability of SegFormer variants (B3, B4, B5) using CamVid as the base dataset. We perform cross-dataset transfer learning to KITTI and IDD, evaluate class-level performance, and explore explainable AI via confidence heatmaps. Our findings show that SegFormer-B5 achieves the highest accuracy (82.4% mIoU) on CamVid, while transfer learning from CamVid improves mIoU on KITTI by 2.57% and enhances class-specific predictions in IDD by over 70%. These results highlight the practical potential of SegFormer in real-world segmentation systems and the interpretability benefits of confidence-based visual analysis.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030074

Authors: Nikitas Gerolimos Vasileios Alevizos Georgios Priniotakis

Ergonomic load in human–autonomy teams is commonly treated as a static score or a post-hoc audit, even though modern sensing and communication enable real-time regulation of operator effort. We model ergonomic load as a dissipative dynamical state inferred online from multimodal effort proxies and task context, and couple it to autonomy through load-dependent gain moderation and compliance shaping. The method is evaluated on public human–swarm and human–robot interaction traces together with effort-proximal wearable and myographic datasets using a unified, windowed pipeline and controlled stress tests that emulate latency, downsampling, packet loss, and channel dropouts. On a large human–swarm benchmark, the estimator achieves strong discrimination and calibration for rare high-load events (up to AUROC 0.87, AUPRC 0.41, ECE 0.031 at q=0.90) and degrades predictably under delay, with a knee around 300–400ms (AUROC 0.87→0.80, ECE 0.031→0.061 at 500ms). Embedding the estimate in the adaptation schedule reduces overload incidence and oscillatory redistribution while preserving coordination proxies in surrogate closed-loop simulation: overload time drops from 7.8% to 4.1% (relative reduction ≈ 47%) with throughput maintained near baseline (1.00→0.97) and oscillation power reduced (0.26→0.14) under nominal timing. These results provide a reproducible pathway for making ergonomics a control-relevant feedback signal, together with explicit operational constraints on estimator calibration (target ECE ≤0.05) and end-to-end latency (effective τ≤300ms) required to avoid regime switching and maintain stable, interpretable adaptation.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030073

Authors: Yujie Liu Zhenyang Dong Yante Li Guoying Zhao

Large-scale pretrained foundation models are increasingly essential for affective analysis in user-generated videos. However, current approaches typically reuse generic multi-modal representations directly with task-specific adapters learned from scratch, and their performance is limited by the large affective domain gap and scarce emotion annotations. To address these issues, we introduce a novel paradigm that leverages auxiliary cross-modal priors to enhance unimodal emotion modeling, effectively exploiting modality-shared semantics and modality-specific inductive biases. Specifically, we propose a progressive prototype evolution framework that gradually transforms a neutral prototype into discriminative emotional representations through fine-grained cross-modal interactions with visual cues. The auxiliary prior serves as a structural constraint, reframing the adaptation challenge from a difficult domain shift problem into a more tractable prototype shift within the affective space. To ensure robust prototype construction and guided evolution, we further design category-aggregated prompting and bidirectional supervision mechanisms. Extensive experiments on VideoEmotion-8, Ekman-6, and MusicVideo-6 validate the superiority of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results and demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging auxiliary modality priors for foundation-model-based emotion recognition.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030072

Authors: Michalis Pingos Artemis Photiou Andreas S. Andreou

The exponential growth of data over the past decade has created new challenges in transforming raw information into actionable knowledge, particularly through the development of data products. The latter is essentially the result of querying and retrieving specific portions of data from a data storage architecture at various levels of granularity. Traditionally, this transformation depends on domain experts manually analyzing datasets and providing feedback to effectively describe or annotate data that facilitates data retrieval. Nevertheless, this is a very time-consuming process that highlights the need for its potential automation. To address this challenge, the present paper proposes a framework which utilizes Large Language Models to support data product discovery through semantic metadata reasoning and executable query prototyping. The framework is evaluated across two domains and three levels of concept complexity to assess the LLM’s ability to identify relevant datasets and generate executable data product queries under varying analytical demands. The findings indicate that LLMs perform effectively in simpler scenarios, but their performance declines as conceptual complexity and dataset volume increase.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030071

Authors: Yida Bao Mohammad Arifuzzaman Tran Duc Le Tao Jiang Jing Hou Yuan Xing Dongfang Hou

Modern Hopfield networks are energy-based associative memory models whose performance critically depends on the structure and optimization of their energy functions. While recent formulations substantially improve storage capacity, the resulting non-convex energy landscapes are often optimized using heuristic update rules that can be sensitive to initialization and may not provide monotonic energy descent or rigorous convergence guarantees. In this work, we propose a new energy formulation for modern Hopfield networks together with a principled iterative optimization scheme. The proposed energy admits a natural decomposition that allows optimization via the concave–convex procedure (CCCP), yielding well-defined network dynamics with guaranteed energy descent beyond classical Hopfield updates. We establish fundamental theoretical properties of the proposed framework, including non-negativity, boundedness, and monotonic decrease in the energy along iterations. In particular, we prove that the induced dynamics converge to a stationary point of the energy function, providing explicit convergence guarantees for the resulting Hopfield-type model. We further evaluate the proposed approach on synthetic classification tasks and compare its optimization behavior with that of the original Hopfield network and several standard machine learning baselines. Experimental results demonstrate improved stability, convergence behavior, and competitive classification performance. We also validate the approach on real-world benchmark datasets to demonstrate utility beyond controlled experiments. Overall, this work provides a theoretically grounded energy-based optimization framework for modern Hopfield networks, clarifying the role of principled optimization in achieving stable and convergent associative memory dynamics.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030070

Authors: Danying Zhang Yixin Liu Jie Zhao Cai Xu

Machine translation with large language models has recently attracted growing attention due to its flexibility and strong zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. However, most prompt-based LLM translation methods rely on linear generation or shallow self-refinement, implicitly committing to a single reasoning path. Such designs are brittle when translating long and syntactically complex sources, where reliable translation often requires structured planning and hypothesis exploration. In this paper, we propose TransGoT, a novel machine translation framework inspired by the graph-of-thoughts paradigm, which formulates translation as a structured, multi-stage reasoning process over a graph of intermediate thoughts. TransGoT explicitly decomposes translation into constraint identification, draft generation, and culture- and style-aware refinement, enabling systematic exploration and aggregation of alternative translation hypotheses. To better adapt graph-based reasoning to translation, we design two key mechanisms: (1) Uncertainty-driven thought transformation. Unlike general reasoning tasks, translation uncertainty is often localized and unevenly distributed across tokens, making holistic regeneration inefficient. We therefore design uncertainty-driven thought transformation, which leverages model-internal confidence signals to guide targeted token-level revision; (2) Dispersion-adaptive thought scoring. It emphasizes evaluation criteria with stronger inter-candidate variance to enable robust multi-criteria thought selection. We evaluate TransGoT on the WMT22 benchmarks and experimental results demonstrate that TransGoT consistently outperforms strong LLM-based translation baselines, validating the effectiveness of structured graph-based reasoning for machine translation.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030069

Authors: Maikel Leon

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transitioned from a research milestone to a general-purpose technology with wide-ranging implications for organizations, labor markets, and information systems. Thanks to improvements in deep learning, generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders (VAEs), diffusion models, transformer-based language models, and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), generative AI can now create high-quality text, images, audio, code, and other types of content. This review synthesizes the core technical foundations and best practices for training, evaluation, and governance, with an emphasis on scalability and human oversight. The paper examines applications across customer service, marketing, software development, healthcare, finance, law, logistics, and the creative industries, and assesses the labor implications of generative AI using a sociotechnical lens. This study also develops a disruption index that integrates task exposure, adoption rates, time savings, and skill complementarity. The paper concludes with actionable recommendations for policymakers, organizations, and workers, emphasizing the importance of reskilling, algorithmic transparency, and inclusive innovation. Taken together, these contributions situate generative AI within broader debates about automation, augmentation, and the future of work.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030068

Authors: Sheng Yang Shengyuan Li Yuan Fu Wei Jiang Wenlong You Min Chen

With the increasing complexity of power grid operations, operator training requires timely feedback and objective assessment. Traditional approaches based on lectures and scripted simulations provide limited personalization and weak explainability. This paper presents AI Instructors, an intelligent simulation training system for power-grid control and dispatching. The system is organized into learning, training, assessment, and analysis modules, and is built around two core technical components: (i) parameterized item generation from rule/knowledge bases using a phrase-enhanced transformer (PET), and (ii) solver-grounded, topology-aware grading with hierarchical feedback for both numeric and free-text responses. A voice interaction module is integrated to simulate telephone-based dispatch orders. We validate the system through a pilot deployment with licensed dispatch operators and scenario experiments on benchmark cases. Compared with a conventional scripted DTS workflow, AI Instructors achieves higher stepwise procedure accuracy (68%→90%), a lower topology-violation rate (32%→11%), and shorter response time (120 s→72 s), while increasing the proportion of parameterized questions and accelerating skill acquisition. These results suggest that combining adaptive sequencing with topology-safe, explainable evaluation can improve training effectiveness and operational safety.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10030067

Authors: Kazuki Kodaki Minoru Sasaki

In semantic classification of katakana words using large language models and pre-trained language models, semantic divergences from original English meanings, such as those found in Wasei-Eigo which is Japanese-made English, and the inherent sense ambiguity in katakana words may affect model accuracy. To analyze the impact of these loanword semantic characteristics on classification accuracy, we created a large-scale dataset from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. We extracted 403,819 sentences covering 230 katakana words defined in dictionaries and suitable for word sense disambiguation tasks, and used the gpt-4.1-mini model to predict the meaning of the target words based on their context, to create annotation data. We then fine-tuned the pre-trained language model DeBERTa V3 with this data. We compared baseline and fine-tuned model accuracy, dividing data into four quadrants based on frequency and polysemy to conduct statistical analysis and explore strategies for improving accuracy. We also tested the hypothesis that high-frequency, low-polysemy words would achieve the highest accuracy, while low-frequency, high-polysemy words would achieve the lowest. As a result, the fine-tuned model showed an average accuracy improvement of approximately 53% compared to the baseline model. As hypothesized, high-frequency, low-polysemy words achieved the highest accuracy (93.93%), while low-frequency, high-polysemy words achieved the lowest (81.14%). Our analysis quantitatively revealed that both frequency and polysemy contributed to accuracy improvement, but polysemy had a greater impact on accuracy than frequency.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020066

Authors: Jovita Urnikienė Vaida Steponavičienė Svetoslav Atanasov

This paper presents a comparative analysis of read performance for PostgreSQL and MongoDB in e-commerce scenarios, using identical datasets in a resource-constrained single-host environment. The results demonstrate that PostgreSQL executes complex analytical queries 1.6–15.1 times faster, depending on the query type and data volume. The study employed synthetic data generation with the Faker library across three stages, processing up to 300,000 products and executing each of 6 query types 15 times. Both filtering and analytical queries were tested on non-indexed data in a controlled localhost environment with PostgreSQL 17.5 and MongoDB 7.0.14, using default configurations. PostgreSQL showed 65–80% shorter execution times for multi-criteria queries, while MongoDB required approximately 33% less disk space. These findings suggest that normalized relational schemas are advantageous for transactional e-commerce systems where analytical queries dominate the workload. The results are directly applicable to small and medium e-commerce developers operating in budget-constrained, single-host deployment environments when choosing between relational and document-oriented databases for structured transactional data with read-heavy analytical workloads. A minimal indexed validation confirms that the baseline trends remain consistent under a simple indexing configuration. Future work will examine broader indexing strategies, write-intensive workloads, and distributed deployment scenarios.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020065

Authors: Mohammad Shahin Mazdak Maghanaki F. Frank Chen

The convergence of Lean manufacturing principles with Industry 4.0 has yielded significant operational improvements, yet the emerging paradigm of Industry 6.0—characterized by antifragile, autonomous, and sustainable systems—demands a fundamental rethinking of existing analytical frameworks. This paper introduces the Industry 6.0 Lean Analytics (I6LA) Framework, a novel meta-theoretical approach that integrates Lean principles with the core concepts of Industry 6.0. By systematically analyzing the limitations of current Lean analytics in the context of Industry 6.0 requirements, we identify critical gaps in areas such as system resilience, AI-driven autonomy, and circular economy integration. The I6LA Framework addresses these gaps through four new theoretical pillars: Antifragile Lean Systems Theory, generative AI-Orchestrated Value Streams, Circular–Regenerative Analytics, and Hyper-Connected Ecosystem Integration. This research provides a new set of mathematical models for measuring antifragility, generative orchestration efficiency, and circularity, offering a comprehensive analytical toolkit for the next generation of manufacturing. The framework’s primary contribution is a paradigm shift from optimizing stable, human-in-the-loop systems to managing dynamic, autonomous ecosystems that thrive on volatility and are regenerative by design. This paper provides both a robust theoretical foundation and practical implementation guidance for organizations navigating the transition to Industry 6.0.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020064

Authors: Heba Helal Mohamed A. Sharaf

Visual exploration of time series data is essential for uncovering meaningful insights in domains such as healthcare monitoring and financial analysis, yet it remains computationally challenging due to the combinatorial explosion of potential subsequence comparisons. For long time series, an exhaustive comparison of all possible subsequence pairs becomes prohibitively expensive, limiting interactive exploration. This paper presents the TiVEx (Time Series Visual Exploration) family of algorithms for efficiently discovering the top-k most dissimilar subsequence pairs in comparative time series analysis. TiVEx achieves scalability through three complementary strategies: TiVEx-sharing exploits computational reuse across overlapping subsequence windows, eliminating redundant distance calculations; TiVEx-pruning employs distance-based upper bounds to eliminate unpromising candidates without exhaustive evaluation; and TiVEx-hybrid integrates both mechanisms to maximize efficiency gains. The key observation is that overlapping subsequences share a substantial computational structure, which can be systematically exploited while maintaining result optimality through provably correct pruning bounds. Extensive experiments on six diverse datasets demonstrate that TiVEx-hybrid achieves up to 84% reduction in distance calculations compared to exhaustive search while producing identical top-k results. Compared to state-of-the-art subsequence comparison methods, TiVEx-hybrid achieves 2.3× improvement in computational efficiency. Our effectiveness analysis confirms that TiVEx achieves result quality within 5% of exhaustive search even when exploring only a subset of candidate positions, enabling scalable visual exploration without compromising insight quality.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020063

Authors: Stéphane Grumbach

The rapid expansion of algorithmic systems has transformed cognition into an increasingly distributed and collective enterprise, giving rise to what can be described as cognitive assemblages, dynamic constellations of humans, institutions, data infrastructures, and artificial agents. This paper traces the historical and conceptual evolution that has led to this shift. First, we show how cognition, once conceived as the property of autonomous individuals, has progressively become embedded in socio-technical networks in which algorithmic processes participate as co-agents. Second, we revisit the progressive awareness of human cognitive limits, from bounded rationality to contemporary theories of extended mind. These frameworks anticipate and help explain today’s hybrid cognitive ecologies. Third, we assess the philosophical implications for Enlightenment ideals of autonomy, rationality, and self-governance, showing how these concepts must be reinterpreted in light of pervasive algorithmic intermediation. Finally, we examine global initiatives that seek to integrate augmented cognitive capacities into large-scale cybernetic forms of societal coordination, ranging from digital platforms and data spaces to AI-driven governance systems. These developments offer new opportunities for steering complex societies under conditions of globalization, environmental disruption, and the rise of autonomous intelligent systems, yet they also raise profound questions regarding control, accountability, and democratic legitimacy. We argue that understanding cognitive assemblages is essential to designing socio-technical systems capable of supporting collective intelligence while preserving human values in an era of accelerating complexity.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020062

Authors: Yung-Hoh Sheu Cheng-Yu Huang Li-Wei Tai Tzu-Hsuan Tai Sheng K. Wu

This study addresses the issue of inaccurate results in traditional table tennis player classification, which is often influenced by subjective judgment and environmental factors, by proposing a youth table tennis player classification system based on sensor fusion and the random forest algorithm. The system utilizes an embedded intelligent table tennis racket equipped with an ICM20948 nine-axis sensor and a wireless transmission module to capture real-time acceleration and angular velocity data during players’ strokes while synchronously employing a camera with OpenPose to extract joint angle variations. A total of 40 players’ stroke data were collected. Due to the limited sample size of top-tier players, the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) was applied, resulting in a final dataset of 360 records. Multiple key motion indicators were then computed and stored in a dedicated database. Experimental results showed that the proposed system, powered by the random forest algorithm, achieved a classification accuracy of 91.3% under conventional cross-validation, while subject-independent LOSO validation yielded a more conservative accuracy of 70.89%, making it a valuable reference for coaches and referees in conducting objective player classification. Future work will focus on expanding the dataset of domestic high-performance athletes and integrating precise sports science resources to further enhance the system’s performance and algorithmic models, thereby promoting the scientific selection of national team players and advancing the intelligent development of table tennis.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020061

Authors: Jinkun Li Lingyu Sun Minglu Zhang Xinbao Li

To meet the requirements for the automatic alignment, insertion, and inspection of guide-tube opening pins on the upper core plate in a component pool during refueling outages of nuclear power units, this paper proposes a cognition-enhanced visual-servoing framework that integrates geometric cognition-based compensation, observation-confidence modeling, and constraint-aware optimal control. The framework addresses the key challenge posed by the coexistence of long-term geometric drift and underwater observation uncertainty. Specifically, historical closed-loop data are leveraged to learn and compensate for systematic geometric errors online, substantially improving coarse-positioning accuracy. In addition, an explicit confidence model is introduced to quantitatively assess the reliability of visual measurements. Building on these components, a confidence-driven, finite-horizon, constrained model predictive control strategy is designed to achieve safe and efficient finite-step convergence while strictly respecting actuator physical constraints. Ground experiments and deep-water component-pool validations demonstrate that the proposed method reduces coarse-positioning error by approximately 75%, achieves stable sub-millimeter alignment with an ample engineering safety margin, and effectively decreases erroneous insertions and the need for manual intervention. These results confirm the engineering applicability and safety advantages of the proposed cognition-enhanced visual-servoing framework for underwater alignment tasks in nuclear component pools.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020060

Authors: Hongwei Li Yongjun Wang

Large Language Model (LLM) inference engines are becoming critical system infrastructure, yet their increasing architectural complexity makes defects difficult to be diagnosed and repaired. Existing reliability studies predominantly focus on model behavior or training frameworks, leaving inference engine bugs underexplored, especially in settings where execution-based debugging is impractical. We present a static, issue-centric approach for automated root cause analysis and repair suggestion generation for LLM inference engines. Based solely on issue reports and developer discussions, we construct a real-world defect dataset and annotate each issue with a semantic root cause category and affected system module. Leveraging text-based representations, our framework performs root cause classification and coarse-grained module localization without requiring code execution or specialized runtime environments. We further integrate structured repair patterns with a large language model to generate interpretable and actionable repair suggestions. Experiments on real-world issues concerning vLLMs demonstrate that our approach achieves effective root cause identification and module localization under limited and imbalanced data. A cross-engine evaluation further shows promising generalization to TensorRT-LLM. Human evaluation confirms that the generated repair suggestions are correct, useful, and clearly expressed. Our results indicate that static, issue-level analysis is a viable foundation for scalable debugging assistance in LLM inference engines. This work highlights the feasibility of static, issue-level defect analysis for complex LLM inference engines and explores automated debugging assistance techniques. The dataset and implementation will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020059

Authors: Hai Yang Hainan Chen Chang Jiang Juntao He Pengyang Li

Financial sentiment analysis leverages natural language processing techniques to quantitatively assess sentiment polarity and emotional tendencies in financial texts. Its practical application in investment decision-making and risk management faces two major challenges: the scarcity of high-quality labeled data due to expert annotation costs, and semantic drift caused by the continuous evolution of market language. To address these issues, this study proposes PLTA-FinBERT, a pseudo-label generation-based test-time adaptation framework that enables dynamic self-learning without requiring additional labeled data. The framework consists of two modules: a multi-perturbation pseudo-label generation mechanism that enhances label reliability through consistency voting and confidence-based filtering, and a test-time dynamic adaptation strategy that iteratively updates model parameters based on high-confidence pseudo-labels, allowing the model to continuously adapt to new linguistic patterns. PLTA-FinBERT achieves 0.8288 accuracy on the sentiment classification dataset of financial sentiment analysis, representing an absolute improvement of 2.37 percentage points over the benchmark. On the FiQA sentiment intensity prediction task, it obtains an R2 of 0.58, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 3 percentage points.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020058

Authors: Xianming Yang Qi Li Chengdong Qian Haitao Wang Yonghui Wu Wei Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in natural language generation; however, their real-world deployment is frequently hindered by the generation of factually incorrect or biased content, along with an inherent deficiency in transparency. To address these critical limitations and thereby enhance the reliability and explainability of LLM outputs, this study proposes a novel integrated framework, namely the Adaptive Knowledge-Driven Correction Network (AKDC-Net), which incorporates three core algorithmic innovations. Firstly, the Hierarchical Uncertainty-Aware Bias Detector (HUABD) performs multi-level linguistic analysis (lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) and, for the first time, decomposes predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components. This decomposition enables principled, interpretable bias detection with clear theoretical underpinnings. Secondly, the Neural-Symbolic Knowledge Graph Enhanced Corrector (NSKGEC) integrates a temporal graph neural network with a differentiable symbolic reasoning module, facilitating logically consistent and factually grounded corrections based on dynamically updated knowledge sources. Thirdly, the Contrastive Learning-driven Multimodal Explanation Generator (CLMEG) leverages a cross-modal attention mechanism within a contrastive learning paradigm to generate coherent, high-quality textual and visual explanations that enhance the interpretability of LLM outputs. Extensive evaluations were conducted on a challenging medical domain dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed AKDC-Net framework. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines: specifically, a 14.1% increase in the F1-score for bias detection, a 19.4% enhancement in correction quality, and a 31.4% rise in user trust scores. These findings establish a new benchmark for the development of more trustworthy and transparent artificial intelligence (AI) systems, laying a solid foundation for the broader and more reliable application of LLMs in high-stakes domains.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020057

Authors: Mohammad Almseidin

Metaheuristic optimization algorithms have demonstrated their effectiveness in solving complex optimization tasks, such as those related to Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). It was widely used to enhance the detection rate of various types of cyber attacks by reducing the feature space or tuning the model’s hyperparameters. The Artificial Rabbit Optimizer (ARO) mimics rabbits’ intelligent foraging and hiding behavior. The ARO algorithm has seen widespread adoption in the optimization field. The widespread use of the ARO algorithm occurs due to its simple design and ease of implementation. However, ARO can get trapped in local optima due to its limited diversity in population dynamics. Although the transition between phases is managed via an energy shrink factor, fine-tuning this balance remains challenging and unexplored. These limitations could limit the ARO algorithm’s effectiveness in high-dimensional space, as with IDS systems. This paper introduces a novel enhancement of the original ARO by integrating Fuzzy Rule Interpolation (FRI) to compute the energy factor during the optimization process dynamically. In this work, we integrate the FRI along with the ARO algorithm to improve solution accuracy, maintain population diversity, and accelerate convergence, particularly in high-dimensional and complex problems such as IDS. The integration of the FRI and ARO aimed to control the exploration-exploitation balance in the IDS application area. To validate our proposed hybrid approach, we tested it on a diverse set of intrusion datasets, covering eight different benchmark intrusion detection datasets. The suggested hybrid approach has been demonstrated to be effective in handling various intrusion classification tasks. For binary intrusion classification tasks, it achieved accuracy rates ranging from 96% to 99.9%. In the case of multiclass intrusion classification tasks, the accuracy was slightly more consistent, falling between 91.6% and 98.9%. The suggested approach effectively reduced the number of feature spaces, achieving reduction rates from 56% up to 96%. Furthermore, the proposed approach outperformed other state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection rate.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020056

Authors: Yuezhao Liu Wei Li Yijie Wang Ningtong Chen Min Chen

Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology mitigates the hallucination issue in large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge, and combining reasoning models can further enhance RAG system performance, retrieval noise and attention bias still lead to the diffusion of factual errors in problems such as factual queries, multi-hop questions, and unanswerable questions. Existing methods struggle to effectively suppress “high-confidence hallucinations” in long-chain reasoning due to their failure to decouple knowledge bias effects from causal reasoning paths. To address this, this paper proposes the ISFJ-RAG framework, which dynamically intervenes in hallucinations through counterfactual joint decoding. First, a structural causal model (SCM) reveals three root causes of hallucinations in RAG systems: irrelevant knowledge interference, reasoning path bias, and spurious correlations in self-attention mechanisms. A dual-decoder architecture is further designed: the total causal effect decoder models the global relationship between user queries and knowledge, while the knowledge bias effect decoder captures potential biases induced by external knowledge. A dynamic modulation module converts the latter’s output into a proxy measure of hallucination bias. By computing individual treatment effects (ITEs), the bias component is removed from the full generation distribution, achieving simultaneous suppression of knowledge-irrelevant and reasoning-irrelevant hallucinations. Ablation experiments validate the robustness of average token log-probability as a confidence metric. Experiments demonstrate that on the RAGEval benchmark, ISFJ-RAG improves generation completeness to 86.89% (+5.49%) while reducing hallucination rates to 10.39% (−2.5%) and irrelevance rates to 4.44% (−2.99%).

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020055

Authors: Georgios P. Georgiou

Large language models (LLMs) are now routine writing tools across various domains, intensifying questions about when text should be treated as human-authored, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated, or collaboratively produced. This rapid review aims to identify cue families reported in empirical studies as distinguishing AI from human-authored text and to assess how stable these cues are across genres/tasks, text lengths, and revision conditions. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines, we searched four online databases for peer-reviewed empirical articles (1 January 2022–1 January 2026). After deduplication and screening, 40 studies were included. Evidence converged on five cue families: surface, discourse/pragmatic, epistemic/content, predictability/probabilistic, and provenance. Surface cues dominated the literature and were the most consistently operationalized. Discourse/pragmatic cues followed, particularly in discipline-bound academic genres where stance and metadiscourse differentiated AI from human writing. Predictability/probabilistic cues were central in detector-focused studies, while epistemic/content cues emerged primarily in tasks where grounding and authenticity were salient. Provenance cues were concentrated in watermarking research. Across studies, cue stability was consistently conditional rather than universal. Specifically, surface and discourse cues often remained discriminative within constrained genres, but shifted with register and discipline; probabilistic cues were powerful yet fragile under paraphrasing, post-editing, and evasion; and provenance signals required robustness to editing, mixing, and span localization. Overall, the literature indicates that AI–human distinction emerges from layered and context-dependent cue profiles rather than from any single reliable marker. High-stakes decisions, therefore, require condition-aware interpretation, triangulation across multiple cue families, and human oversight rather than automated classification in isolation.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020054

Authors: Tao Jin Shiyao Liu Baorong Yan Xiang Jiang Wei Guo Yu Hua Shougang Zhang Lu Xu

The enhanced long-range navigation (eLoran) system serves as an important backup method for the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) system. In long-distance transmission scenarios, the signal propagation delay of the eLoran system is affected by fluctuations in meteorological factors along the path. Regarding these issues, such as the potential timing system errors caused by meteorological factors and the limitation on the accuracy of the timing system, in this paper, an innovative prediction model is proposed to predict the propagation delay data by fusing the propagation delay data of multiple differential reference stations on the path and the path-weighted meteorological data. By collecting and processing actual data, four types of prediction tasks were designed. Comparative analyses of the prediction performance of eight common models were conducted on a unified dataset. The results show that the Pucheng–Zhengzhou path-weighted ten-factor back-propagation neural network (PZWT-BPNN) model performs the best, achieving a balance between prediction accuracy and training efficiency. This model effectively suppresses the timing errors caused by meteorological fluctuations and improves the prediction accuracy of the propagation delay of the system, providing corresponding technical support for key fields such as low-altitude economy and transportation.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing doi: 10.3390/bdcc10020053

Authors: Martin Mičiak Dominika Toman Milan Kubina Tatiana Poljaková Klaudia Ivanovič Kvetoslava Šimová Anna Majchráková Ivana Bystrická Linda Kováčik Tibor Furmánek

Active athletes represent a specific target for learning and development. Their schedules, including training sessions and competitions, leave little time for education. However, athletes still need skills beyond sports to ensure they are prepared for future employment. Our study approaches this issue by identifying appropriate settings for athletes’ learning and development. (1) Based on the background of current athletes’ education, it addresses the gap of not enough attention being paid to transferable practices from corporate attitudes to learning and development. (2) The study’s methodology primarily uses the case study concept because this conveys the video content we created for the athletes’ learning and development. This is combined with the method of content analysis of selected examples from corporate learning and development and the design thinking workshop, with the engagement of important stakeholder groups: athletes (2 participants), lecturers (2 participants), and representatives of sports organizations (1 participant). The other 9 workshop participants were master’s students in a managerial study programme because of their age similarities with the current athletes and the applicability of the courses they were studying to athletes’ education. (3) The designed process was created as a digital twin using haptic artefacts and the S2M technology (version 1.0) within the OMiLAB platform (version 1.6). Our results show that video content tailored to the athletes’ constraints is a viable solution that improves their career prospects. (4) The study’s practical implications are supported by the expert validation of the model provided by the inside of the large sports organizations’ management.