Highlights Educational institutes worldwide are facing closure owing to SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Online mode of learning is adopted by institutes worldwide. We compared access & use of online learning among Bruneians and Pakistanis. Bruneian are more satisfied with online learning as compared to Pakistanis.

Human activity recognition from multimodal body sensor data has proven to be an effective approach for the care of elderly or physically impaired people in a smart healthcare environment. However, traditional machine learning techniques are mostly focused on a single sensing modality, which is not practical for robust healthcare applications. Therefore, recently increasing attention is being given by the researchers on the development of robust machine learning techniques that can exploit multimodal body sensor data and provide important decision making in Smart healthcare. In this paper, we propose an effective multi-sensors-based framework for human activity recognition using a hybrid deep learning model, which combines the simple recurrent units (SRUs) with the gated recurrent units (GRUs) of neural networks. We use the deep SRUs to process the sequences of multimodal input data by using the capability of their internal memory states. Moreover, we use the deep GRUs to store and learn how much of the past information is passed to the future state for solving fluctuations or instability in accuracy and vanishing gradient problems. The system has been compared against the conventional approaches on a publicly available standard dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the available state-of-the-art methods.INDEX TERMS Multi-modal body sensor data, activity recognition, deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs), simple recurrent unit (SRU), gated recurrent unit (GRU), robust healthcare.

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Web Service Composition (WSC) can be defined as the problem of consolidating the services regarding the complex user requirements. These requirements can be represented as a workflow. This workflow consists of a set of abstract task sequence where each sub-task represents a definition of some user requirements. In this work, we propose a more efficient neighboring selection process and multi-pheromone distribution method named Enhanced Flying Ant Colony Optimization (EFACO) to solve this problem. The WSC problem has a challenging issue, where the optimization algorithms search the best combination of web services to achieve the functionality of the workflow's tasks. We aim to improve the computation complexity of the Flying Ant Colony Optimization (FACO) algorithm by introducing three different enhancements. We analyze the performance of EFACO against six of existing algorithms and present a summary of our conclusions.