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This paper presents a study on traffic flow models in one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) lattices. The models incorporate generalized look-ahead rules that consider nonlocal slowdown effects. The proposed cellular automata (CA) models use stochastic rules to determine the movement of cars based on the traffic configuration ahead of each car. Specifically, a look-ahead rule is used that considers both the car density ahead and a generalized interaction function based on the distance between cars. The CA models are simulated using an efficient kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) algorithm. The numerical results in 1D demonstrate that the flows from the KMC simulations align with the macroscopic averaged fluxes for the look-ahead rule, across various parameter settings. In the 2D results, a sharp phase transition is observed from freely flowing traffic to global jamming, depending on the initial density of cars. 

Background and Objectives: Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality in intensive care units (ICUs). The development of a robust prognostic model utilizing patients’ clinical data could significantly enhance clinicians’ ability to make informed treatment decisions, potentially improving outcomes for septic patients. This study aims to create a novel machine-learning framework for constructing prognostic tools capable of predicting patient survival or mortality outcome. Methods: A novel dataset is created using concatenated triples of static data, temporal data, and clinical outcomes to expand data size. This structured input trains five machine learning classifiers (KNN, Logistic Regression, SVM, RF, and XGBoost) with advanced feature engineering. Models are evaluated on an independent cohort using AUROC and a new metric, 𝛾, which incorporates the F1 score, to assess discriminative power and generalizability. Results: We developed five prognostic models using the concatenated triple dataset with 10 dynamic features from patient medical records. Our analysis shows that the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model (AUROC = 0.777, F1 score = 0.694) and the Random Forest (RF) model (AUROC = 0.769, F1 score = 0.647), when paired with an ensemble under-sampling strategy, outperform other models. The RF model improves AUROC by 6.66% and reduces overfitting by 54.96%, while the XGBoost model shows a 0.52% increase in AUROC and a 77.72% reduction in overfitting. These results highlight our framework’s ability to enhance predictive accuracy and generalizability, particularly in sepsis prognosis. Conclusion: This study presents a novel modeling framework for predicting treatment outcomes in septic patients, designed for small, imbalanced, and high-dimensional datasets. By using temporal feature encoding, advanced sampling, and dimension reduction techniques, our approach enhances standard classifier performance. The resulting models show improved accuracy with limited data, offering valuable prognostic tools for sepsis management. This framework demonstrates the potential of machine learning in small medical datasets. 

Road authorities worldwide can leverage the advances in vehicle technology by continuously monitoring their roads’ conditions to minimize road maintenance costs. The existing methods for carrying out road condition surveys involve manual observations using standard survey forms, performed by qualified personnel. These methods are expensive, time-consuming, infrequent, and can hardly provide real-time information. Some automated approaches also exist but are very expensive since they require special vehicles equipped with computing devices and sensors for data collection and processing. This research aims to leverage the advances in vehicle technology in providing a cheap and real-time approach to carry out road condition monitoring (RCM). This study developed a deep learning model using the You Only Look Once, Version 5 (YOLOv5) algorithm that was trained to capture and categorize flexible pavement distresses (FPD) and reached 95% precision, 93.4% recall, and 97.2% mean Average Precision. Using vehicle built-in cameras and GPS sensors, these distresses were detected, images were captured, and locations were recorded. This was validated on campus roads and parking lots using a car featured with a built-in camera and GPS. The vehicles’ built-in technologies provided a more cost-effective and efficient road condition monitoring approach that could also provide real-time road conditions.