Abstract
Speech recognition aims to convert human speech into text and has applications in security, healthcare, commerce, automobiles, and technology, just to name a few. Inserting residual neural networks before recurrent neural network cells improves accuracy and cuts training time by a good margin. Furthermore, layer normalization instead of batch normalization is more effective in model training and performance enhancement. Also, the size of the datasets presents tremendous influences in achieving the best performance. Leveraging these tricks, this article proposes an automatic speech recognition model with a stacked five layers of customized Residual Convolution Neural Network and seven layers of Bi-Directional Gated Recurrent Units, including a logarithmic so f tmax for the model output. Each of them incorporates a learnable per-element affine parameter-based layer normalization technique. The training and testing of the new model were conducted on the LibriSpeech corpus and LJ Speech dataset. The experimental results demonstrate a character error rate (CER) of 4.7 and 3.61% on the two datasets, respectively, with only 33 million parameters without the requirement of any external language model.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper describes the development of a mechanism to deal with time windows constraints. To the best of our knowledge, the time windows constraints are difficult to be fulfilled even for state-of-the-art methods. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper is to propose a new computational technique to deal with such constraints to ensure the algorithm convergence. We test such technique in two metaheuristics to solve the discrete and dynamic Berth Allocation Problem. A data set generator was created, resulting in a diversity of problems in terms of time windows constraints. A detailed computational analysis was carried out to compare the performance for each metaheuristic.

Abstract
Over the years, methods and algorithms have been extensively studied to solve variations of the rectangular twodimensional strip packing problem (2D-SPP), in which small rectangles must be packed inside a larger object denominated as a strip, while minimizing the space necessary to pack all rectangles. In the rectangular 2D-SPP, constraints are used to restrict the packing process, satisfying physical and real-life practical conditions that can impact the material cutting. The objective of this paper is to present an extensive literature review covering scientific publications about the rectangular 2D-SPP constraints in order to provide a useful foundation to support new research works. A systematic literature review was conducted, and 223 articles were selected and analyzed. Real-life practical constraints concerning the rectangular 2D-SPP were classified into seven different groups. In addition, a bibliometric analysis of the rectangular 2D-SPP academic literature was developed. The most relevant authors, articles, and journals were discussed, and an analysis made concerning the basic constraints (orientation and guillotine cutting) and the main solving methods for the rectangular 2D-SPP. Overall, the present paper indicates opportunities to address real-life practical constraints.

Abstract
In the field of immersive learning, instructors often find it challenging to match their pedagogical approaches and content knowledge with specific technologies. Unfortunately, this usually results in either a lack of technology use or inappropriate use of some technologies. Teachers and trainers wishing to use immersive learning environments face a diversity of technological and pedagogical alternatives. To scaffold educators in their planning of immersive learning educational activities, we devised a recommendation tool, which maps educational context variables to the dimensions of immersion and uses educators' contexts to identify the closest educational uses. Sample educational activities for those uses are then presented, for various types of educational methodologies. Educators can use these samples to plan their educational activities in line with their current resources or to innovate by pursuing entirely different approaches.

Abstract
A smart grid is the future vision of power systems that will be enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and the Internet of things (IoT), where digitalization is at the core of the energy sector transformation. However, smart grids require that energy managers become more concerned about the reliability and security of power systems. Therefore, energy planners use various methods and technologies to support the sustainable expansion of power systems, such as electricity demand forecasting models, stochastic optimization, robust optimization, and simulation. Electricity forecasting plays a vital role in supporting the reliable transitioning of power systems. This paper deals with short-term load forecasting (STLF), which has become an active area of research over the last few years, with a handful of studies. STLF deals with predicting demand one hour to 24 h in advance. We extensively experimented with several methodologies from machine learning and a complex case study in Panama. Deep learning is a more advanced learning paradigm in the machine learning field that continues to have significant breakthroughs in domain areas such as electricity forecasting, object detection, speech recognition, etc. We identified that the main predictors of electricity demand in the short term: the previous week's load, the previous day's load, and temperature. We found that the deep learning regression model achieved the best performance, which yielded an R squared (R-2) of 0.93 and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 2.9%, while the AdaBoost model obtained the worst performance with an R-2 of 0.75 and MAPE of 5.70%.