Abstract
The signal processing (SP) landscape has been enriched by recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), yielding new tools for signal estimation, classification, prediction, and manipulation. Layered signal representations, nonlinear function approximation and nonlinear signal prediction are now feasible at very large scale in both dimensionality and data size. These are leading to significant performance gains in a variety of long-standing problem domains like speech and Image analysis. As well as providing the ability to construct new classes of nonlinear functions (e.g., fusion, nonlinear filtering). This book will help academics, researchers, developers, graduate and undergraduate students to comprehend complex SP data across a wide range of topical application areas such as social multimedia data collected from social media networks, medical imaging data, data from Covid tests etc. This book focuses on AI utilization in the speech, image, communications and yirtual reality domains. © 2021 River Publishers. All rights reserved.

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Abstract
Up to one third of the global food production depends on the pollination of honey bees, making them vital. This study defines a methodology to create a bee hive health monitoring system through image processing techniques. The approach consists of two models, where one performs the detection of bees in an image and the other classifies the detected bee’s health. The main contribution of the defined methodology is the increased efficacy of the models, whilst maintaining the same efficiency found in the state of the art. Two databases were used to create models based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The best results consist of 95% accuracy for health classification of a bee and 82% accuracy in detecting the presence of bees in an image, higher than those found in the state-of-the-art.

Abstract
In real manufacturing environments, scheduling can be defined as the problem of effectively and efficiently assigning tasks to specific resources. Metaheuristics are often used to obtain near-optimal solutions in an efficient way. The parameter tuning of metaheuristics allows flexibility and leads to robust results, but requires careful specifications. The a priori definition of parameter values is complex, depending on the problem instances and resources. This paper implements a novel approach to the automatic specification of metaheuristic parameters, for solving the scheduling problem. This novel approach incorporates two learning techniques, namely, racing and case-based reasoning (CBR), to provide the system with the ability to learn from previous cases. In order to evaluate the contributions of the proposed approach, a computational study was performed, focusing on comparing our results previous published results. All results were validated by analyzing the statistical significance, allowing us to conclude the statistically significant advantage of the use of the novel proposed approach.

Abstract
Europe and, more particularly, the European Union (EU) has been pursuing ambitious goals in terms of energy, with pioneering energy policy pushing for more clean and affordable energy and highly competitive electricity markets. Electricity market design proved to be a challenge since the first models intended for further competition in the sector have been launched. With the increasing use of distributed and renewable-based electricity generation, electricity models became increasingly challenging. Other distributed energy resources, namely demand flexibility, distributed storage, and electric vehicles, are also bringing new requirements for electricity markets and open the way for local electricity markets. Although still an emerging concept, local electricity markets have huge potential, namely regarding increased gathering of the demand flexibility potential and to bring significant benefits to consumers. This chapter addresses the EU vision for electricity markets in the new context and discusses its benefits, risks, and future perspectives, highlighting the most important legislation, and some practical advances and implementations. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.