Abstract Global temperature is increasing at an alarming rate, which increases the number of heatwaves. Heatwaves have significant impacts, both directly and indirectly, on human and natural systems and can create considerable risk to public health. Predicting the occurrence of a heatwave can save lives, increase the production of crops, improve water quality, and reduce transportation restrictions. Because of its geographical location, Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to cyclones, droughts, earthquakes, floods, and heatwaves. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department collects temperature data at multiple weather stations, and we use data from 10 weather stations in this research. Data show that most heatwaves occur in the summer months, namely, April, May, and June. In this research, we develop Classification and Regression Tree (CART) models that use daily temperature data for the months of March, April, May, and June to predict the likelihood of a heatwave within the next 7 days, the next 28 days, and on any particular day based on daily high temperatures from the previous 14 days. We also use different model parameters to evaluate the accuracy of the models. Finally, we develop treed Stepwise Logistic Regression models to predict the probability of heatwaves occurring. Even though this research uses data from Bangladesh Meteorological Department, the developed modeling approach can be used in other geographic regions.

This study presents an efficient sparse learning-based pattern recognition framework to recognize the discrete states of three emotions—happy, angry, and neutral emotion—using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. In affective computing with massive spatiotemporal brainwave signals, a large number of features can be extracted to capture various information from multivariate brain data. However, it is often a challenge to model high-dimensional features efficiently in consideration of the intrinsic structure, such as channel location, feature group, time epoch, etc. In this study, features were extensively extracted from EEG signals and were applied on a structured sparse learning model to perform feature selection and classification simultaneously. An efficient ADMM-based algorithm with a closed-form solution was developed to solve the sparse group model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of selecting a small number of important neural features to discriminate the three emotion states with high classification accuracy. With greatly enhanced interpretability and efficiency to learn neural signatures of brain activity from high-dimensional-feature, low-sample-size brain imaging data, the presented computational framework is promising for handling emotion recognition problems with high-dimensional brain imaging data.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, communities faced two conflicting objectives: 1) minimizing infections among vulnerable populations with higher risk for severe illness and 2) enabling reopening to revive American livelihoods. The U.S. pandemic strategy myopically considered one objective at a time, with lockdowns that addressed the former, but was detrimental to the latter, and phased reopening that pursued the latter, but lost control over the former. How could we prioritize interventions to simultaneously minimize cases of severe illness and fatalities while reopening? A team of researchers anchored by the Center on Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, & Statistics (COSMOS), The University of Texas at Arlington, has formulated a computationally efficient optimization framework, referred to as COSMOS COVID-19 Linear Programming (CC19LP), to study the delicate balance between the expected fatality rate due to cases of severe illness and the level of normalcy in the community. The key to the CC19LP framework is a focus on “key contacts” that separate individuals at higher risk from the rest of the population. CC19LP minimizes expected fatalities by optimizing the use of available interventions, namely, COVID-19 testing, personal protective equipment (PPE), COVID-19 vaccines, and social precautions, such as distancing, handwashing, and face coverings. A C3.ai award-winning online CC19LP tool is accessible from the COSMOS COVID-19 project site (https://cosmos.uta.edu/projects/covid-19/) and has been tested for all 3142 U.S. county areas. Results are demonstrated for several metropolitan counties with a deeper investigation for Miami-Dade County in Florida.Note to Practitioners—In this article, a computationally fast optimization framework is presented to study the delicate balance between reopening U.S. communities and controlling severe cases of COVID-19 that lead to hospitalizations and fatalities. This framework can provide guidance to decision-makers on optimal intervention strategies for protecting high-risk individuals while reopening communities. This optimization framework demonstrates a practical approach to conduct decision-making in an uncertain environment and can be useful for the prioritization of resources and interventions in the case of future epidemics or pandemics. Resources on understanding and implementing the framework are publicly available, including an award-winning online optimization tool that automatically accesses county-level data from Census, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Johns Hopkins COVID-19 repositories.

Electroencephalography (EEG) source analysis is one of the most important noninvasive human brain imaging tools that provides millisecond temporal accuracy. However, discovering essential activated brain sources associated with different brain status is still a challenging problem. In this study, we propose for the first time that the ill-posed EEG inverse problem can be formulated and solved as a sparse over-complete dictionary learning problem. In particular, a novel supervised sparse dictionary learning framework was developed for EEG source reconstruction. A revised version of discriminative K-SVD (DK-SVD) algorithm is exploited to solve the formulated supervised dictionary learning problem. As the proposed learning framework incorporated the EEG label information of different brain status, it is capable of learning a sparse representation that reveal the most discriminative brain activity sources among different brain states. Compared to the state-of-the-art EEG source analysis methods, proposed sparse dictionary learning framework achieved significant superior performance in both computing speed and accuracy for the challenging EEG source reconstruction problem through extensive numerical experiments. More importantly, the experimental results also validated that the proposed sparse learning framework is effective to discover the discriminative task-related brain activation sources, which shows the potential to advance the high resolution EEG source analysis for real-time non-invasive brain imaging research.

EEG source imaging integrates temporal and spatial components of EEG to localize the generating source of electrical potentials based on recorded EEG data on the scalp. As EEG sensors can't directly measure activated brain sources, many approaches were proposed to estimate brain source activation pattern given EEG data. However, since most part of the brain activity is composed of the spontaneous non-task related activations, true task caused activation sources will be corrupted in strong background signal. For decades, the EEG inverse problem was solved in an unsupervised way without any utilization of the label information that represents different brain states. We propose that by leveraging label information, the task related discriminative sources can be much better retrieved among strong spontaneous background signals. A novel model for solving EEG inverse problem called Laplacian Graph Regularized Discriminative Source Reconstruction which aims to explicitly extract the discriminative sources by implicitly coding the label information into the graph regularization term. The proposed model can be generally extended with different assumptions. The extension of our framework is applied to VB-SCCD model which aim to estimate extended brain sources by including a spatial total variation regularization term. Simulated results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.