The scope of this paper is focused on the multidimensional poverty problem in Jordan. Household expenditure and income surveys provide data that are used for identifying and measuring the poverty status of Jordanian households. However, carrying out such surveys is hard, time consuming, and expensive. Machine learning could revolutionize this process. The contribution of this work is the proposal of an original machine learning approach to assess and monitor the poverty status of Jordanian households. This approach takes into account all the household expenditure and income surveys that took place since the early beginning of the new millennium. This approach is accurate, inexpensive, and makes poverty identification cheaper and much closer to real-time. Data preprocessing and handling imbalanced data are major parts of this work. Various machine learning classification models are applied. The LightGBM algorithm has achieved the best performance with 81% F1-Score. The final machine learning classification model could transform efforts to track and target poverty across the country. This work demonstrates how powerful and versatile machine learning can be, and hence, it promotes for adoption across many domains in both the private sector and government.

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Retinal prosthesis is steadily improving as a clinical treatment for blindness caused by retinitis pigmentosa. However, despite the continued exciting progress, the level of visual return is still very poor. It is also unlikely that those utilising these devices will stop being legally blind in the near future. Therefore, it is important to develop methods to maximise the transfer of useful information extracted from the visual scene. Such an approach can be achieved by digitally suppressing less important visual features and textures within the scene. The result can be interpreted as a cartoon-like image of the scene. Furthermore, utilising extravisual wavelengths such as infrared can be useful in the decision process to determine the optimal information to present. In this paper, we, therefore, present a processing methodology that utilises information extracted from the infrared spectrum to assist in the preprocessing of the visual image prior to conversion to retinal information. We demonstrate how this allows for enhanced recognition and how it could be implemented for optogenetic forms of retinal prosthesis. The new approach has been quantitatively evaluated on volunteers showing 112% enhancement in recognizing objects over normal approaches.