This article assesses the effects of internal and external factors on the profitability of Jordanian commercial banks. A panel data set of thirteen commercial banks between 2000 and 2018 was used. Pooled ordinary least squares, random and fixed models were applied. Moreover, a Hausman test was performed to confirm the suitability of models, which was preferred on the random effect model. Also, a Wooldridge test for serial correlation and a modified Wald test for groupwise Heteroskedasticity were used and both of their null hypotheses were rejected. However, to deal with these problems, a robustness analysis was performed using feasible generalized least square. The findings suggested that internal factors and in particular, bank size and diversification, had positive effects on bank profitability, while credit risk, operational risk and leverage risk were negatively related to bank performance. However, capital risk had a positive but insignificant impact on bank profitability. As for the effect of external factors, the results suggested that financial development and inflation had a positive and significant impact on bank profitability, while market concentration and stock market volatility had a significant negative effect on bank profitability. Further, a negative and insignificant impact were found for GDP and refugee crisis on bank profitability in Jordan. The findings would help managers of commercial banks, investors, government, policy makers and shareholders to make better decisions and improve performance by highlighting areas of weaknesses. In general, policy makers should become more aware with these insights on profit determinants in Jordanian commercial banks.

<p>In computer vision, image classification is one of the potential image processing tasks. Nowadays, fish classification is a wide considered issue within the areas of machine learning and image segmentation. Moreover, it has been extended to a variety of domains, such as marketing strategies. This paper presents an effective fish classification method based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The experiments were conducted on the new dataset of Bangladesh’s indigenous fish species with three kinds of splitting: 80-20%, 75-25%, and 70-30%. We provide a comprehensive comparison of several popular optimizers of CNN. In total, we perform a comparative analysis of 5 different state-of-the-art gradient descent-based optimizers, namely adaptive delta (AdaDelta), stochastic gradient descent (SGD), adaptive momentum (Adam), adaptive max pooling (Adamax), Root mean square propagation (Rmsprop), for CNN. Overall, the obtained experimental results show that Rmsprop, Adam, Adamax performed well compared to the other optimization techniques used, while AdaDelta and SGD performed the worst. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrated that Adam optimizer attained the best results in performance measures for 70-30% and 80-20% splitting experiments, while the Rmsprop optimizer attained the best results in terms of performance measures of 70-25% splitting experiments. Finally, the proposed model is then compared with state-of-the-art deep CNNs models. Therefore, the proposed model attained the best accuracy of 98.46% in enhancing the CNN ability in classification, among others.</p>

With the advent of the number of smart devices across the globe, increasing the number of users using the Internet. The main aim of the fog computing (FC) paradigm is to connect huge number of smart objects (billions of object) that can make a bright future for smart cities. Due to the large deployments of smart devices, devices are expected to generate huge amounts of data and forward the data through the Internet. FC also refers to an edge computing framework that mitigates the issue by applying the process of knowledge discovery using a data analysis approach to the edges. Thus, the FC approaches can work together with the internet of things (IoT) world, which can build a sustainable infrastructure for smart cities. In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm namely the weighted round-robin (WRR) scheduling algorithm to execute the task from one fog node (FN) to another fog node to the cloud. Firstly, a fog simulator is used with the emergent concept of FC to design IoT infrastructure for smart cities. Then, spanning-tree routing (STP) protocol is used for data collection and routing. Further, 5G networks are proposed to establish fast transmission and communication between users. Finally, the performance of our proposed system is evaluated in terms of response time, latency, and amount of data used.

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