In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a pandemic. Soon afterwards, people began sharing millions of posts on social media without considering their reliability and truthfulness. While there has been extensive research on COVID-19 in the English language, there is a lack of research on the subject in Arabic. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting fake news surrounding COVID-19 in Arabic tweets. We collected more than seven million Arabic tweets related to the corona virus pandemic from January 2020 to August 2020 using the trending hashtags during the time of pandemic. We relied on two fact-checkers: the France-Press Agency and the Saudi Anti-Rumors Authority to extract a list of keywords related to the misinformation and fake news topics. A small corpus was extracted from the collected tweets and manually annotated into fake or genuine classes. We used a set of features extracted from tweet contents to train a set of machine learning classifiers. The manually annotated corpus was used as a baseline to build a system for automatically detecting fake news from Arabic text. Classification of the manually annotated dataset achieved an F1-score of 87.8% using Logistic Regression (LR) as a classifier with the n-gram-level Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) as a feature, and a 93.3% F1score on the automatically annotated dataset using the same classifier with count vector feature. The introduced system and datasets could help governments, decision-makers, and the public judge the credibility of information published on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The presence of a high ripple in the inductor current of a DC-DC converter in a photovoltaic converter chain leads to a considerable decrease in the energy efficiency of the converter. To solve this problem, we consider a current-mode control and for economic reasons we used a single inductor current sensor with a low-pass filter. The purpose of the low-pass filter is to minimize the effect of ripple in the inductor current by taking only the DC component of the signal at the output of the sensor for tracking the maximum power point. The objective of this paper is therefore to study the stability of the photovoltaic system as a function of the filter frequency while maintaining a good power level. First, we propose a general modeling of the whole system by linearizing the PV around the maximum power point. Floquet theory is used to determine analytically the stability of the overall system. The fourth-order Runge–Kutta method is used to plot bifurcation diagrams and Lyapunov exponents in MATLAB/SIMULINK when the filter frequency varies in a limited range and the ramp amplitude is taken as a control parameter. Secondly, the PSIM software is used to design the device and validate the results obtained in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The results depicted in MATLAB/SIMULINK are in perfect agreement with those obtained in PSIM. We found that not only is the energy level maintained at the maximum power level of 85.17 W, but also that the stability range of the photovoltaic system increased with the value of the filter cut-off frequency. This research offers a wider range of parameters for stability control of photovoltaic systems contrarily to others found in literature.

In recent years, we have seen an increasing interest in developing and designing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSNs consist of large number of nodes, with wireless communications and computation abilities that can be used in variety of domains. It has been used in areas that have direct contact with monitoring and gathering data, to name few, health monitoring, military surveillance, geological monitoring (Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Tsunami), agriculture control and many more. However, the design and implementation of WSNs face many challenges, due to the power limitation of sensor nodes, deployment and localization, data routing and data aggregation, data security, limited bandwidth, storage capacity and network management. It is known that Operation Research (OR) has been widely used in different areas to solve optimization problems; such as improving network performance and maximizing lifetime of system. In this survey, we present the most recent OR based techniques applied to solve different WSNs problems: the node scheduling problem, energy management problems, nodes allocating issues and other WSNs related complex problems. Different Operational Research techniques are presented and discussed in details here, including graph theory based techniques, linear programing and mixed integer programming related approaches.

In this paper, two new versions of modified active disturbance rejection control (MADRC) are proposed to stabilize a nonlinear quadruple tank system and control the water levels of the lower two tanks in the presence of exogenous disturbances, parameter uncertainties, and parallel varying input set-points. The first proposed scheme is configured from the combination of a modified tracking differentiator (TD), modified super twisting sliding mode (STC-SM), and modified nonlinear extended state observer (NLESO), while the second proposed scheme is obtained by aggregating another modified TD, a modified nonlinear state error feedback (MNLSEF), and a fal-function-based ESO. The MADRC schemes with a nonlinear quadruple tank system are investigated by running simulations in the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment and several comparison experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes. Furthermore, the genetic algorithm (GA) is used as a tuning algorithm to parametrize the proposed MADRC schemes with the integral time absolute error (ITAE), integral square of the control signal (ISU), and integral absolute of the control signal (IAU) as an output performance index (OPI). Finally, the simulation results show the robustness of the proposed schemes with a noticeable reduction in the OPI.