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The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming almost every industry, including agriculture, food processing, health care, oil and gas, environmental protection, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, home automation, and safety. Cost-effective, small-sized batteries are often used to power IoT devices being deployed with limited energy capacity. The limited energy capacity of IoT devices makes them vulnerable to battery depletion attacks designed to exhaust the energy stored in the battery rapidly and eventually shut down the device. In designing and deploying IoT devices, the battery and device specifications should be chosen in such a way as to ensure a long lifetime of the device. This paper proposes diffusion approximation as a mathematical framework for modelling the energy depletion process in IoT batteries. We applied diffusion or Brownian motion processes to model the energy depletion of a battery of an IoT device. We used this model to obtain the probability density function, mean, variance, and probability of the lifetime of an IoT device. Furthermore, we studied the influence of active power consumption, sleep time, and battery capacity on the probability density function, mean, and probability of the lifetime of an IoT device. We modelled ghost energy depletion attacks and their impact on the lifetime of IoT devices. We used numerical examples to study the influence of battery depletion attacks on the distribution of the lifetime of an IoT device. We also introduced an energy threshold after which the device's battery should be replaced in order to ensure that the battery is not completely drained before it is replaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a Neurocomputing application that reorders the Web results obtained from different Web Search Engines emulating the way our brain takes decisions. The proposed application is based on the Random Neural Network with Deep Learning Clusters that evaluates and adapts Web result relevance by associating independently each Deep Learning Cluster to a specific Web Search Engine. In addition, this paper presents a Deep Learning Cluster to perform as a Management Cluster that decides the final result relevance based on the inputs from each independent Deep Learning cluster. The performance of the proposed Management Cluster is evaluated when included as an additional layer to the Deep Learning Clusters. On average; the proposed Deep Learning cluster structure improves Smart Search performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cognitive Packet Network (CPN) bases its routing decisions and flow control on the Random Neural Network (RNN) Reinforcement Learning algorithm; this paper proposes the addition of a Deep Learning (DL) Cluster management structure to the CPN for Quality of Service metrics (Delay Loss and Bandwidth), Cyber Security keys (User, Packet and Node) and Management decisions (QoS, Cyber and CEO). The RNN already models how neurons transmit information using positive and negative impulsive signals whereas the proposed additional Deep Learning structure emulates the way the brain learns and takes decisions; this paper presents a brain model as the combination of both learning algorithms, RNN and DL. The proposed model has been simulated under different network sizes and scenarios and it has been validated against the CPN itself without DL clusters. The simulation results are promising; the presented CPN with DL clusters as a mechanism to transmit, learn and make packet routing decisions is a step closer to emulate the way the brain transmits information, learns the environment and takes decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web users are not assured that the results provided by Web search engines or recommender systems are either exhaustive, or even the most relevant to their search needs. Businesses that provide services through the web have a commercial interest to rank higher on results or recommendations to attract more customers, while Web search engines and recommender systems make a profit based on the advertisers that can offer a higher payment for their advertisements. Thus we propose a neuro-computing application that addresses these issues from the perspective of end-users. We present an Intelligent Search Assistant (ISA) that acts as an interface between the user and different search engines. Using the Random Neural Network as a learning engine that operates with learned by gradient descent and reinforcement learning, the ISA learns how to reorder results and present them to the end-user, according to the perceived relevance of the results for the end-user's benefit. We also present a new relevance metric, which combines both relevance and rank, to validate and compare the performance of our proposed solution against other Web search engines and recommender systems. The resulting rank relevance provided by different Web search engines, metasearch engines, academic databases and recommender systems are compared with the ISA, which appears to outperform commercial search tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a wireless sensor node that gathers energy through harvesting and reaps data through sensing. The node has a wireless transmitter that sends out a data packet whenever there is at least one "energy packet" and one "data packet", where an energy packet represents the amount of accumulated energy at the node that can allow the transmission of a data packet. We show that such a system is unstable when both the energy storage space and the data backlog buffer approach infinity, and we obtain the stable stationary solution when both buffers are finite. We then show that if a single energy packet is not sufficient to transmit a data packet, there are conditions under which the system is stable, and we provide the explicit expression for the joint probability distribution of the number of energy and data packets in the system. Since the two flows of energy and data can be viewed as flows that are instantaneously synchronised, this paper also provides a mathematical analysis of a fundamental problem in computer science related to the stability of the "join" synchronisation primitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel direction based shortest path search algorithm to guide evacuees during an emergency. It uses opportunistic communications (oppcomms) with low-cost wearable mobile nodes that can exchange packets at close range of a few to some tens of meters without help of an infrastructure. The algorithm seeks the shortest path to exits which are safest with regard to a hazard, and is integrated into an autonomous Emergency Support System (ESS) to guide evacuees in a built environment. The algorithm proposed that ESSs are evaluated with the DBES (Distributed Building Evacuation Simulator) by simulating a shopping centre where fire is spreading. The results show that the directional path finding algorithm can offer significant improvements for the evacuees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency navigation systems for buildings and other built environments, such as sport arenas or shopping centres, typically rely on simple sensor networks to detect emergencies and, then, provide automatic signs to direct the evacuees. The major drawbacks of such static wireless sensor network (WSN)-based emergency navigation systems are the very limited computing capacity, which makes adaptivity very difficult, and the restricted battery power, due to the low cost of sensor nodes for unattended operation. If static wireless sensor networks and cloud-computing can be integrated, then intensive computations that are needed to determine optimal evacuation routes in the presence of time-varying hazards can be offloaded to the cloud, but the disadvantages of limited battery life-time at the client side, as well as the high likelihood of system malfunction during an emergency still remain. By making use of the powerful sensing ability of smart phones, which are increasingly ubiquitous, this paper presents a cloud-enabled indoor emergency navigation framework to direct evacuees in a coordinated fashion and to improve the reliability and resilience for both communication and localization. By combining social potential fields (SPF) and a cognitive packet network (CPN)-based algorithm, evacuees are guided to exits in dynamic loose clusters. Rather than relying on a conventional telecommunications infrastructure, we suggest an ad hoc cognitive packet network (AHCPN)-based protocol to adaptively search optimal communication routes between portable devices and the network egress nodes that provide access to cloud servers, in a manner that spares the remaining battery power of smart phones and minimizes the time latency. Experimental results through detailed simulations indicate that smart human motion and smart network management can increase the survival rate of evacuees and reduce the number of drained smart phones in an evacuation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Searching the Internet for some object characterized by its attributes in the form of data, such as a hotel in a certain city whose price is lower than some amount, is one of our most common activities when we access the web. We discuss this problem in a general setting, and compute the average amount of time and energy it takes to find an object in an infinitely large search space. We consider the use of N search agents that act concurrently in both the case where the search agent knows which way it needs to go to find the object, and the case where the search agent is completely ignorant and may even head away from the object being sought. We show that under mild conditions regarding the randomness of the search and the use of a time-out, the search agent will always find the object in spite of the fact that the search space is infinite. We obtain a formula for the average search time and the average energy expended by N search agents acting concurrently and independent of each other. We see that the time-out itself can be used to minimize the search time and the amount of energy that is consumed to find an object. An approximate formula is derived for the number of search agents that can help us guarantee that an object is found in a given time, and we discuss how the competition between search agents and other agents that try to hide the data object can be used by opposing parties to guarantee their own success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The short latency required by IoT devices that need to access specific services have led to the development of Fog architectures that can serve as a useful intermediary between IoT systems and the Cloud. However, the massive numbers of IoT devices that are being deployed raise concerns about the power consumption of such systems as the number of IoT devices and Fog servers increase. Thus, in this paper, we describe a software-defined network (SDN)-based control scheme for client–server interaction that constantly measures ongoing client–server response times and estimates network power consumption, in order to select connection paths that minimize a composite goal function, including both QoS and power consumption. The approach using reinforcement learning with neural networks has been implemented in a test-bed and is detailed in this paper. Experiments are presented that show the effectiveness of our proposed system in the presence of a time-varying workload of client-to-service requests, resulting in a reduction of power consumption of approximately 15% for an average response time increase of under 2%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Checkpoints are widely used to improve the performance of computer systems and programs in the presence of failures, and they significantly reduce the overall cost of running a program, if the program or the underlying system, are subject to failures. Thus application level checkpointing has been proposed for programs which may execute on platforms which are prone to failures, and also to reduce the execution time of programs which are prone to internal failures. This paper develops a mathematical model to estimate the average execution time of a program in the presence of failures, without and with application level checkpointing, and we use it to predict the optimum interval number of instructions which should be executed between the placement of successive checkpoints. The case of programs with loops and nested loops is also discussed. The results are illustrated with several numerical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)-based techniques have dominated state-of-the-art results in most problems related to computer vision, audio recognition, and natural language processing in the past few years, resulting in strong industrial adoption from all leading technology companies worldwide. One of the major obstacles that have historically delayed large-scale adoption of ANNs is the huge computational and power costs associated with training and testing (deploying) them. In the mean-time, Neuromorphic Computing platforms have recently achieved remarkable performance running the bio-realistic Spiking Neural Networks at high throughput and very low power consumption making them a natural alternative to ANNs. Here, we propose using the Random Neural Network, a spiking neural network with both theoretical and practical appealing properties, as a general purpose classifier that can match the classification power of ANNs on a number of tasks while enjoying all the features of being a spiking neural network. This is demonstrated on a number of real-world classification datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Size-based routing policies are known to perform well when the variance of the distribution of the job size is very high. We consider two size-based policies in this paper: Task Assignment with Guessing Size (TAGS) and Size Interval Task Assignment (SITA). The latter assumes that the size of jobs is known, whereas the former does not. Recently, it has been shown by our previous work that when the ratio of the largest to shortest job tends to infinity and the system load is fixed and low, the average waiting time of SITA is, at most, two times less than that of TAGS. In this article, we first analyze the ratio between the mean waiting time of TAGS and the mean waiting time of SITA in a non-asymptotic regime, and we show that for two servers, and when the job size distribution is Bounded Pareto with parameter α = 1 , this ratio is unbounded from above. We then consider a system with an arbitrary number of servers and we compare the mean waiting time of TAGS with that of Size Interval Task Assignment with Equal load (SITA-E), which is a SITA policy where the load of all the servers are equal. We show that in the light traffic regime, the performance ratio under consideration is unbounded from above when (i) the job size distribution is Bounded Pareto with parameter α = 1 and an arbitrary number of servers as well as (ii) for Bounded Pareto distributed job sizes with α ∈ (0 , 2) \ { 1 } and the number of servers tends to infinity. Finally, we use the result of our previous work to show how to design decentralized systems with quality of service constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cloud computing paradigm has revolutionised the computer science horizon during the past decade and has enabled the emergence of computing as the fifth utility. It has captured significant attention of academia, industries, and government bodies. Now, it has emerged as the backbone of modern economy by offering subscription-based services anytime, anywhere following a pay-as-you-go model. This has instigated (1) shorter establishment times for start-ups, (2) creation of scalable global enterprise applications, (3) better cost-to-value associativity for scientific and high-performance computing applications, and (4) different invocation/execution models for pervasive and ubiquitous applications. The recent technological developments and paradigms such as serverless computing, software-defined networking, Internet of Things, and processing at network edge are creating new opportunities for Cloud computing. However, they are also posing several new challenges and creating the need for new approaches and research strategies, as well as the re-evaluation of the models that were developed to address issues such as scalability, elasticity, reliability, security, sustainability, and application models. The proposed manifesto addresses them by identifying the major open challenges in Cloud computing, emerging trends, and impact areas. It then offers research directions for the next decade, thus helping in the realisation of Future Generation Cloud Computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Common software vulnerabilities can result in severe security breaches, financial losses, and reputation deterioration and require research effort to improve software security. The acceleration of the software production cycle, limited testing resources, and the lack of security expertise among programmers require the identification of efficient software vulnerability predictors to highlight the system components on which testing should be focused. Although static code analyzers are often used to improve software quality together with machine learning and data mining for software vulnerability prediction, the work regarding the selection and evaluation of different types of relevant vulnerability features is still limited. Thus, in this paper, we examine features generated by SonarQube and CCCC tools, to identify those that can be used for software vulnerability prediction. We investigate the suitability of thirty-three different features to train thirteen distinct machine learning algorithms to design vulnerability predictors and identify the most relevant features that should be used for training. Our evaluation is based on a comprehensive feature selection process based on the correlation analysis of the features, together with four well-known feature selection techniques. Our experiments, using a large publicly available dataset, facilitate the evaluation and result in the identification of small, but efficient sets of features for software vulnerability prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Increased digitalization of healthcare comes along with the cost of cybercrime proliferation. This results to patients' and healthcare providers' skepticism to adopt Health Information Technologies (HIT). In Europe, this shortcoming hampers efficient cross-border health data exchange, which requires a holistic, secure and interoperable framework. This study aimed to provide the foundations for designing a secure and interoperable toolkit for cross-border health data exchange within the European Union (EU), conducted in the scope of the KONFIDO project. Particularly, we present our user requirements engineering methodology and the obtained results, driving the technical design of the KONFIDO toolkit.Methods: Our methodology relied on four pillars: (a) a gap analysis study, reviewing a range of relevant projects/initiatives, technologies as well as cybersecurity strategies for HIT interoperability and cybersecurity; (b) the definition of user scenarios with major focus on cross-border health data exchange in the three pilot countries of the project; (c) a user requirements elicitation phase containing a threat analysis of the business processes entailed in the user scenarios, and (d) surveying and discussing with key stakeholders, aiming to validate the obtained outcomes and identify barriers and facilitators for HIT adoption linked with cybersecurity and interoperability.Results: According to the gap analysis outcomes, full adherence with information security standards is currently not universally met. Sustainability plans shall be defined for adapting existing/evolving frameworks to the state-of-the-art. Overall, lack of integration in a holistic security approach was clearly identified. For each user scenario, we concluded with a comprehensive workflow, highlighting challenges and open issues for their application in our pilot sites. The threat analysis resulted in a set of 30 user goals in total, documented in detail. Finally, indicative barriers of HIT acceptance include lack of awareness regarding HIT risks and legislations, lack of a security-oriented culture and management commitment, as well as usability constraints, while important facilitators concern the adoption of standards and current efforts for a common EU legislation framework.Conclusions: Our study provides important insights to address secure and interoperable health data exchange, while our methodological framework constitutes a paradigm for investigating diverse cybersecurity-related risks in the health sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]