Abstract
Food waste is responsible for severe environmental, social, and economic issues and therefore it is imperative to prevent or at least minimize its generation. The main cause of food waste is poor demand forecasting and so it is essential to improve the accuracy of the tools tasked with these forecasts. The present work proposes four models meant to help food catering services predict food demand accurately and thus avoid overproducing or underproducing. Each model is based on a different machine learning technique. Two baseline models are also proposed to mimic how food catering services estimate future demand and to infer the added value of employing machine learning in this context. To verify the impact of the proposed models, they were tested on data from the three different canteens chosen as case studies. The results show that the models based on the random forest algorithm and the long short-term memory neural network produced the best forecasts, which would lead to a 14% to 52% reduction in the number of wasted meals. Furthermore, by basing their decisions on these forecasts, the food catering services would be able to reduce unmet demand by 3% to 16% when compared with the forecasts of the baseline models. Thus, employing machine learning to forecast future demand can be very beneficial to food catering services. These forecasts can increase the service level of food services and reduce food waste, mitigating its environmental, social, and economic consequences.

Abstract
The relationship between hydrogen and electricity has gained attention due to their interconnected roles in the energy transition. Existing joint electricity and hydrogen market models often overlook the dependence between electricity and hydrogen prices. Indeed, while electrolyzers production can raise electricity prices, electricity price significantly impacts the costs of hydrogen production. Considering this price-based interdependency, this study compares a Cournot equilibrium and a perfect competition market model for electricity and hydrogen integration. Both models are transformed into new quadratic optimization problems to facilitate resolution. The analysis highlights the potential of the Iberian region for hydrogen production. Furthermore, it is evident that, under conditions of perfect competition, renewable generation is given priority for meeting electricity demand, leading to a decrease in both electricity and hydrogen prices on a global scale compared to the Cournot scenario.

Abstract
This paper presents a usability evaluation of a companion application for managing older adults' physical activity sessions in an immersive multiuser virtual environment. The companion application was designed to facilitate the trainer ' s role and enhance the overall user experience in the virtual multiuser environment. Four trainers were recruited to participate in the study, they performed two tasks to prepare and manage training sessions with older adults using the companion application. Researchers used an open-ended questionnaire to interview the participants. The results revealed a high satisfaction and appreciation for the application features used to prepare and manage the training sessions. Participants found the application useful and intuitive, and they also recommended a list of future desirable features related to the application ' s feedback and help mechanisms, as well as its content. In addition to the necessity to provide mobile and tablet versions of the application. A few usability problems were detected related to information presentation and navigation. The future design of the companion application will consider all the detected usability problems and desired features.

Abstract

Abstract
This study focuses on the analysis of emulsion pictures to understand important parameters. While droplet size is a key parameter in emulsion science, manual procedures have been the traditional approach for its determination. Here we introduced the application of YOLOv7, a recently launched deep-learning model, for classifying emulsion droplets. A comparison was made between the two methods for calculating droplet size distribution. One of the methods, combined with YOLOv7, achieved 97.26% accuracy. These results highlight the potential of sophisticated image-processing techniques, particularly deep learning, in chemistry-related topics. The study anticipates further exploration of deep learning tools in other chemistry-related fields, emphasizing their potential for achieving satisfactory performance.

Abstract
Taxi demand prediction with scarce historic information is among the most encountered challenges of the present decade for the traffic network of a smart city. Lack of sufficient information results in the failure of conventional approaches in prediction for a new city. Additionally, the prevalent Deep Neural Network (DNN) Models resort to ineffectual approaches which fail to meet the required prediction performance for the network. Moreover, existing domain adaptation (DA) models could not sufficiently reap the domain-shared features well from multiple source, questioning the models' applicability. Complex structure of these DA models tends to a nominal performance gain due to inefficient resource utilization of the sources. The present paper introduces a domain adaptation deep neural network model, Bootstrap Zero-Shot (BTS-Z) learning model which focuses on capturing the latent spatio-temporal features of the whole city traffic network shared among every source city and maneuver them to predict for the target city traffic network with no prior information. The presented model proves the efficacy of the bootstrap algorithm in the prediction of demands for the unseen target over the computationally expensive MAML models. The experimental results on three real-world city taxi data on the standard benchmark metrics report a minimum of 23.41% improvement over the best performing competitive system. © 2024 IEEE.