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Researchers from academia and the corporate-sector rely on scholarly digital libraries to access articles. Attackers take advantage of innocent users who consider the articles' files safe and thus open PDF-files with little concern. In addition, researchers consider scholarly libraries a reliable, trusted, and untainted corpus of papers. For these reasons, scholarly digital libraries are an attractive-target and inadvertently support the proliferation of cyber-attacks launched via malicious PDF-files. In this study, we present related vulnerabilities and malware distribution approaches that exploit the vulnerabilities of scholarly digital libraries. We evaluated over two-million scholarly papers in the CiteSeerX library and found the library to be contaminated with a surprisingly large number (0.3-2%) of malicious PDF documents (over 55% were crawled from the IPs of US-universities). We developed a two layered detection framework aimed at enhancing the detection of malicious PDF documents, Sec-Lib, which offers a security solution for large digital libraries. Sec-Lib includes a deterministic layer for detecting known malware, and a machine learning based layer for detecting unknown malware. Our evaluation showed that scholarly digital libraries can detect 96.9% of malware with Sec-Lib, while minimizing the number of PDF-files requiring labeling, and thus reducing the manual inspection efforts of security-experts by 98%.

© 2013 IEEE. With the rapid growth of scientific publications, it is hard for researchers to acquire appropriate papers that meet their expectations. Recommendation system for scientific articles is an essential technology to overcome this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank and sparse matrix factorization-based paper recommendation (LSMFPRec) method for authors. The proposed method seamlessly combines low-rank and sparse matrix factorization method with fine-grained paper and author affinity matrixes that are extracted from heterogeneous scientific network. Thus, it can effectively alleviate the sparsity and cold start problems that exist in traditional matrix factorization based collaborative filtering methods. Moreover, LSMFPRec can significantly reduce the error propagated from intermediate outputs. In addition, the proposed method essentially captures the low-rank and sparse characteristics that exist in scientific rating activities; therefore, it can generate more reasonable predicted ratings for influential and uninfluential papers. The effectiveness of the proposed LSMFPRec is demonstrated by the recommendation evaluation conducted on the AAN and CiteULike data sets.

To improve the accuracy of user implicit rating prediction, we combine the traditional latent factor model (LFM) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network (BiGRU) model to propose a hybrid model that deeply mines the latent semantics in the unstructured content of the text and generates a more accurate rating matrix. First, we utilize the user’s historical behavior (favorites records) to build a user rating matrix and decompose the matrix to obtain the latent factor vectors of users and literature. We also apply the BERT model for word embedding of the research papers to obtain the sequence of word vectors. Then, we apply the BiGRU with the user attention mechanism to mine the research paper textual content and to generate the new literature latent feature vectors that are used to replace the original literature latent factor vectors decomposed from the rating matrix. Finally, a new rating matrix is generated to obtain users’ ratings of noninteractive research papers and to generate the recommendation list according to the user latent factor vector. We design experiments on the real datasets and verify that the research paper recommendation model is superior to traditional recommendation models in terms of precision, recall, F1-value, coverage, popularity and diversity.

Most existing studies and public datasets for handwritten Chinese text recognition are based on the regular documents with clean and blank background, lacking research reports for handwritten text recognition on challenging areas such as educational documents and financial bills. In this paper, we focus on examination paper text recognition and construct a challenging dataset named examination paper text (SCUT-EPT) dataset, which contains 50 000 text line images (40 000 for training and 10 000 for testing) selected from the examination papers of 2 986 volunteers. The proposed SCUT-EPT dataset presents numerous novel challenges, including character erasure, text line supplement, character/phrase switching, noised background, nonuniform word size, and unbalanced text length. In our experiments, the current advanced text recognition methods, such as convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) exhibits poor performance on the proposed SCUT-EPT dataset, proving the challenge and significance of the dataset. Nevertheless, through visualizing and error analysis, we observe that humans can avoid vast majority of the error predictions, which reveal the limitations and drawbacks of the current methods for handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR). Finally, three popular sequence transcription methods, connectionist temporal classification (CTC), attention mechanism, and cascaded attention-CTC are investigated for HCTR problem. It is interesting to observe that although the attention mechanism has been proved to be very effective in English scene text recognition, its performance is far inferior to the CTC method in the case of HCTR with large-scale character set.

Lifetime estimation of power semiconductor devices have been widely investigated to improve the reliability and reduce the cost of maintenance of power converters. However in most reported work, the aging effect is not considered in the lifetime evaluation process due to the omission or limitation of thermal cycle counting method. Additionally, the electrical/thermal simulation and lifetime estimation are usually implemented in different simulators/platforms, for the same reason. Thus, to tackle these problems, a concise but comprehensive MOSFET model that enables electro-thermal modeling, aging and lifetime estimation on LTspice® circuit simulator is proposed in this paper. The idea comes from the fact that, MOSFET on-state resistance Rds,on is not only temperature dependent, but also widely accepted as the device failure precursor. In other words, as it carries critical information about instantaneous temperature and aging progress. Hence, co-simulation can be achieved by constructing electrical, thermal, and aging and lifetime sub-modules exclusively first, and using Rds,on, to build linkages among them. Averaged modeling technique is adopted due to the ease of establishing links among these three sub-modules, and fast simulation speed as compared to a switched converter model. Behavioral models are employed to realize the thermal cycles counting, stress accumulation and degradation evaluation. This paper demonstrates that it is possible to use a single simulation software to monitor performances of devices and circuits, and their lifetime estimation simultaneously. High-stress thermal cycling and long-term random mission profiles are applied to verify the correctness of the model and to mimic a 10-year load respectively. An accelerated aging trend can be observed in the long-term mission profile simulation, which is in agreement with the theory. Facilitated by the employment of averaged circuits, the proposed method is a good simulation/analytical tool to implement a long-term mission profile that requires reliability assessment.

This paper discusses the development and implementation of the architecture of a Framework for Aerospace Vehicle Reasoning, ‘FAVER’. Integrated Vehicle Health Management systems require a holistic view of the aircraft to isolate faults cascading between aircraft systems. FAVER is a system-agnostic framework developed to isolate such propagating faults by incorporating Digital Twins (DTs) and reasoning techniques. The flexibility of FAVER to work with different types and scales of DTs and diagnostics, and its ability to adapt and expand for previously unknown faults and new systems are demonstrated in this paper. The paper also shows the novel combination of relationship matrix and fault attributes database used to structure the knowledge of FAVER’s expert system. The paper provides the working mechanism of FAVER’s reasoning and its ability to isolate faults at the system level, identify their root causes, and predict the cascading effects at the vehicle level. Four aircraft systems are used for demonstration purposes: i) the Electrical Power System, ii) the Fuel System, iii) the Engine, and iv) the Environmental Control System, and the use case scenarios are adapted from real aircraft incidents. The paper also discusses the pros and cons of FAVER’s reasoning via demonstrations and evaluates the performance of FAVER’s reasoning through a comparative study with a supervised neural network model.

In this study, a novel method about building Deep Knowledge Graph for the Plant Insect Pest and Disease, namely DKG-PIPD, was proposed. Specifically, the semi-automatic extraction of semi-structured and unstructured knowledge was carried out on the basis of domain ontology, and the knowledge graph was stored in the third-party knowledge database according to the corpus characteristic of the plant insect pest and disease, to realize the visual display of entity interactive relationship and knowledge inference. Furthermore, DKG-PIPD performed joint extraction about the entity and the relationship in unstructured knowledge in a corpus tagging method that is suitable for domain data. In this way, the entity and the relationship were annotated synchronically, and the triplet can be obtained directly through label matching and label mapping, which not only effectively improved the annotation efficiency, but also solved the problem of one-versus-many overlapping relation extraction. In addition, DKG-PIPD used a novel end-to-end model to train and predict on the crawled dataset. The experimental contrast results with other classical benchmark methods demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, the related work in this paper first introduced the general architecture required for the building of knowledge graph, and then summarized its key points, that is, named entity recognition, entity relationship extraction and knowledge inference using deep learning are emphatically introduced. Finally, the improvement direction of this paper was also introduced in the discussion section.

In the process of power transmission and distribution, non-technical losses are usually caused by users’ abnormal power consumption behavior. It will not only affect the dispatch and operation of the distribution network, bring hidden dangers to the security of the power grid, but also damage the operating costs of power companies and disrupt the operation of the power market. Aiming at users’ abnormal electricity consumption behavior, this paper proposes a model based on particle swarm optimization and long-short term memory with the attention mechanism (PSO-Attention-LSTM). Firstly, according to the actual electricity theft behavior, six typical electricity theft modes are summarized, and 4 composite modes are obtained by combining them, so as to comprehensively test the detection performance of the model for various electricity theft behaviors. Secondly, a detection model based on PSO-Attention-LSTM is proposed, and the model is built using the TensorFlow framework. The model uses the attention mechanism to give different weights to the hidden state of LSTM, which reduces the loss of historical information, strengthens important information and suppresses useless information. Use PSO to solve the difficult problem of model parameter selection, and optimize the hyperparameters to improve the model performance. Finally, the data set of the University of Massachusetts was used for simulation and compared with convolutional neural network-long short term memory (CNN-LSTM), attention mechanism-based long short term memory (Attention-LSTM), LSTM, gated recurrent unit (GRU), support vector regression (SVR), random forest (RF) and linear regression (LR) to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the method used in this article. In this paper, Matlab software is used to analyze and visualize the detection result data.

To prevent privacy leakage, cloud services need to take corresponding methods, so participants often face the dilemma of service utility and privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a dynamic adaptive access control model based on trust permission and privacy protection to solve the problem of privacy disclosure and utility in the cloud service. Firstly, we add the concept of obligation and purpose into access control and establish the privacy information tree and privacy policy tree. Secondly, we establish a new trust evaluation and give the corresponding weight algorithm. Thirdly, we quantify the privacy information with the normal space and correlation coefficient method. Further, we propose a tradeoff relationship model between trust permission and privacy protection, each participant can select the corresponding parameters according to the actual requirement and personal preference. Experimental analysis and comparison results verify the feasibility, effectiveness, and superiority of our method. Finally, we summarize the work of this paper and point out the future development direction.

In this paper, we explore Android applications’ file access characteristics, and find out that smartphone file accesses are different from traditional desktop applications in terms of the following aspects. 1) There exist a limited number of hot blocks, which are accessed consistently during the entire execution of an application. 2) Block accesses in Android are highly biased such that the top 20% blocks account for 80% of total accesses. 3) Hot blocks of the top 100 rankings are mostly involved in SQLite. 4) Unlike desktop applications, file accesses in Android applications are write-intensive. 5) In predicting future file accesses in Android applications, frequency is a better estimator than temporal locality. 6) The effect of traditional buffer cache is limited in Android as file I/O in Android has a lot of synchronous writes, which incurs immediate storage flushing. Based on these analyses, this paper presents the implication of buffer cache management in Android. Specifically, we add a small non-volatile write buffer and present how this write buffer can be managed efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the storage write traffic by an average of 21.7% and a maximum of 48.1% compared to the conventional buffer cache system.

Context: In this paper, we study distributed and decentralized systems in which each part is modeled as an agent in a multi-agent system. Those systems provide more scalable and easier ways to control complex, distributed and interconnected systems of embedded components. We are particularly interested in methods to secure these systems. Objectives: This study aims to identify the main security properties studied, the parts of a multi-agent architecture that are considered most often in security studies and the technical solutions used to secure those systems. Methods: We conducted a systematic mapping study on research works addressing the security of multi-agent systems with embedded agents. We identified which security features were addressed, and their roles in global security architecture. Results: We identified 70 papers published in journals and conferences. We classified the extracted data reporting a tendency to focus on securing the availability of systems under attack by means of trust schemes, sometimes supported by cryptographic primitives. Conclusion: The use of cryptography appears to be limited in decentralized systems. However, solutions should be provided to overcome those limits as other solutions such as trust schemes do not protect the system from the same type of attacks.

Multimedia sensors have recently become a significant data source in the Internet of Things (IoT), giving rise to the Internet of Media Things (IoMT). Since multimedia applications are usually latency-sensitive, data processing in the cloud is not always suitable. A strategy to minimize delay is processing multimedia streams closer to data sources, exploiting resources at the network edge. Moreover, virtualization is widely used to reduce complexity arising from heterogeneity in IoT environments. In this paper, we propose an edge-based architecture and platform to manage virtual multimedia sensors (VMS), enabling IoMT applications to be easily deployed. Our proposal encompasses V-PRISM, a software architecture tailored for IoMT, and ALFA, a distributed implementation of the architecture. V-PRISM components were designed to be deployed and executed in multiple edge nodes. VMSs are in charge of processing multimedia streams and provide an abstraction layer between IoMT applications and physical devices that produce those streams. This paper describes the proposal and the results of experiments showing that the proposed approach can successfully perform multimedia stream processing for applications that requires low-latency.

The rapid development of tools for communication such as social networks, tweeting and Whatsapp has generated a large mass of important textual data. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic has inflamed social networks, hence the automatic analysis of opinions has become paramount. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Arabic tweets in terms of positivity, negativity, or neutrality.In analyzing the opinions of the Arabic language, a real challenge is encountered, which lies in the use of different dialects (Egyptian, Saudian, Maghrebian, Gulfian, Levantine, Syrian $\ldots $ ). In this paper, we introduce two major components: The first employs six machine learning (ML) methods, including Decision Trees (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), k Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), Random Forests (RF), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Nave Bayes (NB), with the TF-IDF method acting as the feature extraction.While, the second part consists of testing three variants of Deep Learning (DL) based on multiplicative Long Short Term Memory (mLSTM), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) by applying word embedding as the input vector. The experimental study was validated using three Arabic language corpora (TEAD, ATSAD, and ASTD) and two learning modes (Hold out and 10-folds cross validation). The obtained results in terms of Accuracy (ACC), Precesion (PREC), Recall (REC), and F1-score (F1) show a clear performance for DL techniques based on a 10-folds strategy compared to the state-of-the-art. The experiments shown in the paper reveal that the proposed DL models accomplished the best results.

Technology forecasting not only helps business managers to make the right decisions but also helps researchers to grasp the direction of technology development. Technology forecasting, which facilitates the identification of the development technologies with high potential, can be an effective tool to support the management and plan for the future research activities. For this purpose, this paper firstly constructs Multi-modal input based on deep learning (MIDL) text classification model to extract relevant SCI papers from Web of Science database from 1996 to 2019 for topic classification, and then apply the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks to build an EEMD-LSTM technology forecasting model to predict the future development of each research field. Besides, we verify the validity of the method by taking robotics as an example in this paper. The results show that the accuracy, recall and F1 of MIDL text classification model are 0.826, 0.822 and 0.824 respectively. As compared with the optimal results of other classification models, the accuracy, recall and F1 are improved by 4.1%, 3.5%, and 3.8% respectively. The mean MAPE of the EEMD-LSTM model is 7%, which is 11% lower than ARIMA, 8% lower than LSTM, and 10% lower than 2-layer-LSTM.

Anomaly detection has become an indispensable tool for modern society, applied in a wide range of applications, from detecting fraudulent transactions to malignant brain tumours. Over time, many anomaly detection techniques have been introduced. However, in general, they all suffer from the same problem: a lack of data that represents anomalous behaviour. As anomalous behaviour is usually costly (or dangerous) for a system, it is difficult to gather enough data that represents such behaviour. This, in turn, makes it difficult to develop and evaluate anomaly detection techniques. Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have attracted a great deal of attention in anomaly detection research, due to their unique ability to generate new data. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of the applications of GANs in anomaly detection, covering 128 papers on the subject. The goal of this review paper is to analyze and summarize: (1) which anomaly detection techniques can benefit from certain types of GANs, and how, (2) in which application domains GAN-assisted anomaly detection techniques have been applied, and (3) which datasets and performance metrics have been used to evaluate these techniques. Our study helps researchers and practitioners to find the most suitable GAN-assisted anomaly detection technique for their application. In addition, we present a research roadmap for future studies in this area., Comment: 34 pages,5 figures

As is the case in many big data mining scenarios with a large scale of samples, the heavy computation cost hinders the application of machine learning, which has to iteratively compute by passing over the whole dataset without considering the roles of different samples in training computation. However, we argue that most of the samples dominating computation resources contribute little to the gradient-based model update, particularly when the model is close to convergence. We define this observation as the Sample Contribution Pattern (SCP) in machine learning. This paper proposes two approaches to exploit SCP by detecting gradient characteristics and triggering the reuse of outdated gradients. In particular, this paper reports research results in (1) the definition and description of SCP to reveal an intrinsic gradient contribution pattern of different samples; (2) a novel SCP-based optimizing algorithm (SCPOA) that outperforms alternative tested algorithms in terms of computation overhead; (3) a variant of SCPOA that incorporates discarding-recovering mechanisms to carefully tradeoff between model accuracy and computation cost; (4) the implementation and evaluation of two algorithms based on popular distributed big data mining platforms running typical sample-sets; (5) intuitive convergence proof of the algorithms. Our experimental results illustrate that the proposed approaches can significantly reduce the computation cost with competitive accuracy.

In recent years, a variety of supervised manifold learning techniques have been proposed to outperform their unsupervised alternative versions in terms of classification accuracy and data structure capturing. Some dissimilarity measures have been used in these techniques to guide the dimensionality reduction process. Their good performance was empirically demonstrated; however, the relevant analysis is still missing. This paper contributes to a theoretical analysis on a) how dissimilarity measures affect maintaining manifold neighbourhood structure and b) how supervised manifold learning techniques could contribute to the reduction of classification error. This paper also provides a cross-comparison between supervised and unsupervised manifold learning approaches in terms of structure capturing using Kendall’s Tau coefficients and co-ranking matrices. Four different metrics (including three dissimilarity measures and Euclidean distance) have been considered along with manifold learning methods such as Isomap, ${t}$ -Stochastic Neighbour Embedding ( ${t}$ -SNE), and Laplacian Eigenmaps (LE), in two datasets: Breast Cancer and Swiss-Roll. This paper concludes that although the dissimilarity measures used in the manifold learning techniques can reduce classification error, they do not learn well or preserve the structure of the hidden manifold in the high dimensional space, but instead, they destroy the structure of the data. Based on the findings of this paper, it is advisable to use supervised manifold learning techniques as a pre-processing step in classification. In addition, it is not advisable to apply supervised manifold learning for visualization purposes since the two-dimensional representation using supervised manifold learning does not improve the preservation of data structure.

Controlled drugs are open to abuse, misuse, and diversion. Therefore, they are regulated and tracked across the healthcare sector to protect the health of the general public which is a highly prioritized rule in the health professional’s code of ethics. Healthcare centers that provide controlled medication to patients are still using manual papers to record controlled drugs production, delivery, prescription, administration, and disposal which causes delays in the system. Moreover, instances of controlled drugs misuse, abuse, and diversion still exist, which shows how the currently used system is inefficient in detecting such activities. Therefore, to ensure that the public health is safe and secure, an end-to-end system that tracks the whole healthcare supply chain is necessary. In this paper, we introduce a private Ethereum blockchain-based solution for the management of controlled medication. We ensure transparency, accountability, security, and data provenance by developing smart contracts that record all actions on an immutable ledger. We utilize off-chain storage, which is represented in the IPFS to store content that is large in size such as images. We present algorithms of the different phases in the proposed solution to illustrate how each phase will be carried out. We showcase the functionality of the proposed solution by performing tests and validating the smart contracts. We assess the performance of the proposed solution by conducting privacy, security, and confidentiality analysis. Performance evaluation shows that our solution is secure against common attacks and vulnerabilities and preserves the privacy and confidentiality of the patients. The smart contracts code is made publicly available along with the testing scripts.

Subjective paper evaluation is a tricky and tiresome task to do by manual labor. Insufficient understanding and acceptance of data are crucial challenges while analyzing subjective papers using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Several attempts have been made to score students’ answers using computer science. However, most of the work uses traditional counts or specific words to achieve this task. Furthermore, there is a lack of curated data sets as well. This paper proposes a novel approach that utilizes various machine learning, natural language processing techniques, and tools such as Wordnet, Word2vec, word mover’s distance (WMD), cosine similarity, multinomial naive bayes (MNB), and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) to evaluate descriptive answers automatically. Solution statements and keywords are used to evaluate answers, and a machine learning model is trained to predict the grades of answers. Results show that WMD performs better than cosine similarity overall. With enough training, the machine learning model could be used as a standalone as well. Experimentation produces an accuracy of 88% without the MNB model. The error rate is further reduced by 1.3% using MNB.

Recent years have led the path to the evolution of automotive technology and with these new developments, modern vehicles are getting increasingly astute and offering growing quantities of innovative applications that cover various functionalities. These functionalities are controlled by hundreds of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) which are connected to each other via the Control Area Network (CAN) bus. Although ECUs are designed to offer various amenities that are associated with modern vehicles including comfort, such features expose new attack surfaces that can be harnessed by attackers. This trend is exacerbated by the fact that many of these ECUs rely on wireless communication for interacting with the outside world. Therefore, making them vulnerable to common threats such as malware injection that can compromise the overall security of modern vehicles. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of the architecture associated with intelligent vehicles, and identify various security issues and vulnerabilities that impact such systems. We provide an overview of different malware types and the vectors of attacks they leverage for infecting modern vehicles. This work also presents a detailed survey of available defenses against such attacks including: signature, behavior, heuristic, cloud, and machine learning-based detection measures. Furthermore, this paper intends to assist researchers in becoming familiar with the available defenses and how they can be applied to secure intelligent vehicles against emerging malware threats that can compromise the security of today’s vehicles. It also provides future directions for researchers who are interested in developing new defenses that can safeguard intelligent vehicles systems against malware attacks.

It is expected that peer to peer energy trading will constitute a significant share of research in upcoming generation power systems due to the rising demand of energy in smart microgrids. However, the on-demand use of energy is considered a big challenge to achieve the optimal cost for households. This paper proposes a blockchain-based predictive energy trading platform to provide real-time support, day-ahead controlling, and generation scheduling of distributed energy resources. The proposed blockchain-based platform consists of two modules; blockchain-based energy trading and smart contract enabled predictive analytics modules. The blockchain module allows peers with real-time energy consumption monitoring, easy energy trading control, reward model, and unchangeable energy trading transaction logs. The smart contract enabled predictive analytics module aims to build a prediction model based on historical energy consumption data to predict short-term energy consumption. This paper uses real energy consumption data acquired from the Jeju province energy department, the Republic of Korea. This study aims to achieve optimal power flow and energy crowdsourcing, supporting energy trading among the consumer and prosumer. Energy trading is based on day-ahead, real-time control, and scheduling of distributed energy resources to meet the smart grid’s load demand. Moreover, we use data mining techniques to perform time-series analysis to extract and analyze underlying patterns from the historical energy consumption data. The time-series analysis supports energy management to devise better future decisions to plan and manage energy resources effectively. To evaluate the proposed predictive model’s performance, we have used several statistical measures, such as mean square error and root mean square error on various machine learning models, namely recurrent neural networks and alike. Moreover, we also evaluate the blockchain platform’s effectiveness through hyperledger calliper in terms of latency, throughput, and resource utilization. Based on the experimental results, the proposed model is effectively used for energy crowdsourcing between the prosumer and consumer to attain service quality.

The epidemic increase in online reviews’ growth made the sentiment classification a fascinating domain in academic and industrial research. The reviews assist several domains, which is complicated to gather annotated training data. Several sentiment classification methodologies are devised for performing the sentiment analysis, but retrieval of information is not accurately performed, less effective, and less convergence speed. In this paper, we propose a sentiment paper proposes a sentiment classification model, namely Spider Monkey Crow Optimization algorithm (SMCA), for training the deep recurrent neural network (DeepRNN). In this method, the telecom review is employed to remove stop words and stemming to eliminate inappropriate data to minimize user’s seeking time. Meanwhile, the feature extraction is performed using SentiWordNet to derive the sentiments from the reviews. The extracted SentiWordNet features and other features, like elongated words, punctuation, hashtag, and numerical values, are employed in the DeepRNN for classifying sentiments. To retrieve the required review, the Fuzzy K-Nearest neighbor (Fuzzy-KNN) is employed to retrieve the review based on a distance measure. With rigorous assessments and experimentation, it is observed that the proposed SMCA-based DeepRNN performs better in terms of accuracy of 97.7%, precision of 95.5%, recall of 94.6%, and F1-score 96.7%, respectively.

Aiming at the shortcoming that the basic beetle antennae search algorithm fails to consider differences between individuals and the dynamic information in the searching process, this paper proposed a new beetle antennae search algorithm based on the elite selection mechanism and the neighbor mobility strategy. The elite selection mechanism will be used to weaken beetles having bad performances and generate new beetles to ensure diversities and abilities in the whole population. The neighbor mobility strategy will guide the algorithm to open up a wider searching area to ensure that individuals having good positions own a chance to infect individuals with poor performances. To verify the searching ability and the optimization speed of the proposed algorithm in this paper, different testing functions were selected for numerical testing experiments, and the iteration figures, box plots, and searching path figures were given. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm in this paper was superior to the original algorithm in the solving accuracy, the convergence speed, and the stability.

Accident causal scenario can describe the process logic of the accident clearly and concretely from the perspective of the control mechanism. Only by improving the quality of the causal scenario can the effective control measures be taken. Combining the technical characteristics of the fully automatic operation (FAO) system, the paper proposes an automated accident causal scenario identification method for FAO system based on the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) method. Aiming at the problem that there are too many layers in the hierarchical control structure diagram of STPA method, which makes it impossible to effectively trace the cause and the problem that the basic control structure model only contains the control structural information and lacks the cause information, a new basic control structure model is defined to model multiple control processes in time sequence, and then the paper extends it from four aspects: control action, input variables, external disturbance, and synchronous timing to add more system cause information. For the lack of a unified standard description problem for the causal scenario, a four-stage causal scenario description method is defined, this paper has developed the first timing, non-first timing, synchronous timing, and external disturbance causal scenario search rules to ensure the automatic identification of the causal scenarios. Applying the automated safety analysis method to the case study of the operational scenarios of parking in a station of Beijing Yanfang Line, the automated identification of related causal scenarios is successfully completed through the Auto-STPA platform, and corresponding safety requirements are added. The feasibility of the method and the applicability to the analysis of operational scenarios are verified.

As Blockchain innovation picks up popularity in many areas, it is frequently hailed as a sound innovation. Because of the decentralization and encryption, many imagine that data put away in a Blockchain is and will consistently be protected. Among various abstraction layers of Blockchain architecture, the consensus layer is the core component behind the performance and security measures of the Blockchain network. Consensus mechanisms are a critical component of a Blockchain system’s long-term stability. Consensus forms the core of blockchain technology. Therefore, a range of consensus protocols has been introduced to maximize Blockchain systems’ efficiency and meet application domains’ individual needs. This research paper describes the layered architecture of Blockchain. A comprehensive review of mainstream consensus protocols mainly Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), Proof of Activity (PoA) is presented in the paper. These mainstream consensus protocols have been explained and detailed performance analysis of these consensus protocols has been done. We have proposed a performance matrix of these consensus protocols based on different parameters like Degree of decentralization, Latency, Fault Tolerance Rate, Scalability, etc. Consensus protocols being the core of a strong fault-tolerant secured blockchain system, the proposed work intends to help inappropriate protocol selection and further research on strengthening trust and ownership in the technology. Depending upon different parameters like decentralization which is low in POA compared to other protocols, whereas POW is non-scalable, so depending on the priority of a particular performance parameter, the paper will help in the selection of a specific protocol.

Several hypovigilance detection systems (HDx) were developed to avoid road-side accidents due to driver fatigue. They have suffered from several limitations. Notably many of these are focused on center-head position to define an area of interest (often referred to as PERCLOS (percentage eye closure)) without considering the face occlusion problem, light illumination, and suffer poor response time. These HDx systems mostly depend on image processing, vision-based, and multisensor-based features. To address these problems, the author utilized vision, sensors, environmental, and vehicular-based features that integrated together by fusion to predict multistage of HDx. Lately, few studies have utilized the combination of multimodal features and deep learning (DL) architectures. Those multimodal-based features (M-HDx) were feasible to predict stages of driver fatigue (multi-stage). However, there is a need to critically measure the performance of these M-HDx by carrying out a comparative analysis to recognize multi-stage of fatigue in terms of hardware-based benchmarks. Moreover, it is important to evaluate the M-HDx systems using different features-set with respect to traditional and advanced machine learning techniques. Therefore, the primary aim of this work is in algorithm and feature modeling, then compare the advantages and differences with other work. In this paper, a different study is conducted compare to state-of-the-art survey articles by statistically measuring the performance. After experiments on M-HDx systems, this paper concludes that there is still a research gap to real-time development of multistage M-HDx systems. In the end, the paper summarizes the directions, challenges, and applications in the development of HDx systems to assist other researchers for further research.

Probabilistic forecasts of electrical loads and photovoltaic generation provide a family of methods able to incorporate uncertainty estimations in predictions. This paper aims to extend the literature on these methods by proposing a novel deep-learning model based on a mixture of convolutional neural networks, transformer models and dynamic Bayesian networks. Further, the paper also illustrates how to utilize Stochastic Variational Inference for training output distributions that allow time series sampling, a possibility not given for most state-of-the-art methods which do not use distributions. On top of this, the model also proposes an encoder-decoder topology that uses matrix transposes in order to both train on the sequential and the feature dimension. The performance of the work is illustrated on both load and generation time series obtained from a site representative of distributed energy resources in Norway and compared to state-of-the-art methods such as long-short-term memory. With a single-minute prediction resolution and a single-second computation time for an update with a batch size of 100 and a horizon of 24 hours, the model promises performance capable of real-time application. In summary, this paper provides a novel model that allows generating future scenarios for time series of distributed energy resources in real-time, which can be used to generate profiles for control problems under uncertainty. INDEX TERMS deep learning, generation forecasting, load forecasting, neural networks, probabilistic methods, renewable power

Big Data (BD), Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to have a large impact on Smart Farming and involve the whole supply chain, particularly for rice production. The increasing amount and variety of data captured and obtained by these emerging technologies in IoT offer the rice smart farming strategy new abilities to predict changes and identify opportunities. The quality of data collected from sensors greatly influences the performance of the modelling processes using ML algorithms. These three elements (e.g., BD, ML and IoT) have been used tremendously to improve all areas of rice production processes in agriculture, which transform traditional rice farming practices into a new era of rice smart farming or rice precision agriculture. In this paper, we perform a survey of the latest research on intelligent data processing technology applied in agriculture, particularly in rice production. We describe the data captured and elaborate role of machine learning algorithms in paddy rice smart agriculture, by analyzing the applications of machine learning in various scenarios, smart irrigation for paddy rice, predicting paddy rice yield estimation, monitoring paddy rice growth, monitoring paddy rice disease, assessing quality of paddy rice and paddy rice sample classification. This paper also presents a framework that maps the activities defined in rice smart farming, data used in data modelling and machine learning algorithms used for each activity defined in the production and post-production phases of paddy rice. Based on the proposed mapping framework, our conclusion is that an efficient and effective integration of all these three technologies is very crucial that transform traditional rice cultivation practices into a new perspective of intelligence in rice precision agriculture. Finally, this paper also summarizes all the challenges and technological trends towards the exploitation of multiple sources in the era of big data in agriculture.

Communication between the nodes in a vehicle is performed using many protocols. The most common of these is known as the Controller Area Network (CAN). The functionality of the CAN protocol is based on sending messages from one node to all others throughout a bus. Messages are sent without either source or destination addresses. Consequently, it is simple for an attacker to inject malicious messages. This may lead to some nodes malfunctioning or total system failure, which can affect the safety of the driver as well as the vehicle. Detecting intrusions is a challenging problem in the context of using CAN bus for in-vehicle communication. Most existing work focuses on the physical aspects without taking into consideration the data itself. Machine Learning (ML) tools, especially classification techniques, have been widely used to address similar problems. In this paper, we use and compare several ML techniques to deal with the problem of detecting intrusions in in-vehicle communication. An experimental study is performed using a real dataset extracted from a KIA Soul car. Compared to previous work, which focuses on detecting intrusions based on the physical aspect, this paper aims to concentrate on the application of data analysis and statistical learning techniques. Furthermore, the paper provides a comparative study of the most common ML techniques. The results show that the techniques under consideration in this paper outperform other techniques that have been used previously.

Recently, development in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) requires the input of various kinds of data in real-time and from multiple sources, which imposes additional research and application challenges. Ongoing studies on Data Fusion (DF) have produced significant improvement in ITS and manifested an enormous impact on its growth. This paper reviews the implementation of DF methods in ITS to facilitate traffic flow analysis (TFA) and solutions that entail the prediction of various traffic variables such as driving behavior, travel time, speed, density, incident, and traffic flow. It attempts to identify and discuss real-time and multi-sensor data sources that are used for various traffic domains, including road/highway management, traffic states estimation, and traffic controller optimization. Moreover, it attempts to associate abstractions of data level fusion, feature level fusion, and decision level fusion on DF methods to better understand the role of DF in TFA and ITS. Consequently, the main objective of this paper is to review DF methods used for real-time and multi-sensor (heterogeneous) TFA studies. The review outcomes are (i) a guideline of constructing DF methods which involve preprocessing, filtering, decision, and evaluation as core steps, (ii) a description of the recent DF algorithms or methods that adopt real-time and multi-sensor sources data and the impact of these data sources on the improvement of TFA, (iii) an examination of the testing and evaluation methodologies and the popular datasets and (iv) an identification of several research gaps, some current challenges, and new research trends.

Social engineering attacks have posed a serious security threat to cyberspace. However, there is much we have yet to know regarding what and how lead to the success of social engineering attacks. This paper proposes a conceptual model which provides an integrative and structural perspective to describe how social engineering attacks work. Three core entities (effect mechanism, human vulnerability and attack method) are identified to help the understanding of how social engineering attacks take effect. Then, beyond the familiar scope, we analyze and discuss the effect mechanisms involving 6 aspects (persuasion, social influence, cognition & attitude & behavior, trust and deception, language & thought & decision, emotion and decision-making) and the human vulnerabilities involving 6 aspects (cognition and knowledge, behavior and habit, emotions and feelings, human nature, personality traits, individual characters), respectively. Finally, 16 social engineering attack scenarios (including 13 attack methods) are presented to illustrate how these mechanisms, vulnerabilities and attack methods are used to explain the success of social engineering attacks. Besides, this paper offers lots of materials for security awareness training and future empirical research, and the model is also helpful to develop a domain ontology of social engineering in cybersecurity.

A well-known limitation of existing rule-based text augmentation is that it cannot be applied to other languages because it depends on grammatical and structural characteristics. Moreover, most text Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are unstable in training due to inefficient generator optimization and rely on maximum likelihood pre-training. This paper addresses the above problems by proposing a novel augmentation method with a Sentence Generator (SG) and Sentence Discriminator (SD) for Iterative Translation-based Data Augmentation (ITDA). This paper makes three original contributions. First, the ITDA SG is designed to provide universal multiple-language support by generating comprehensive augmented sentences through serial and parallel iterations of an existing translator, such as Google Translate. Second, given that the quality of the generated sentences varies depending on the translation combination or the type of sentence, the ITDA addresses this issue using a discriminator to achieve sentence augmentation, which can select high-quality augmented data using a text classifier. Third, the ITDA can perform sentence augmentation for 109 different languages using discriminators based on text classifiers trained for a specific language or type of data set. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the ITDA using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), CNN-BiLSTM, and self-attention. The results demonstrate that when the ITDA is applied to 480 sentence classification tasks, the average accuracy increases by 4.24%.

Site planning and building design results are generally managed in Geographic Information System (GIS) and Building Information Modeling/Model (BIM) separately. The incompatibility of data has brought potential challenges for the assessment and delivery of the results. A data integration and simplification framework for improving site planning and building design is proposed in this paper. A BIM-GIS integrated model with a multi-scale data structure is developed to link the results of site planning and building design together. Geometric optimization algorithms are then designed to generate simplified building models with different levels of details (LODs) based on the information required at each scale. This paper provides a feasible way to integrate planning and design data from different sources to enhance the evaluation and delivery of the results. The proposed approach is validated by a village construction project in east China, and results show that the method is capable to integrate site planning and building design results from different platforms and support seamless visualization of multi-scale geometric data. It is also found that a seamless database facilitates understanding of planning and design results and improves communication efficiency. Currently, the main limitation of this paper is the limited access to 3D real-world data, and data collection techniques like point cloud are expected to solve the problem.

Handwritten character recognition is a challenging research in the field of document image analysis over many decades due to numerous reasons such as large writing styles variation, inherent noise in data, expansive applications it offers, non-availability of benchmark databases etc. There has been considerable work reported in literature about creation of the database for several Indic scripts but the Tamil script is still in its infancy as it has been reported only in one database [5]. In this paper, we present the work done in the creation of an exhaustive and large unconstrained Tamil Handwritten Character Database (uTHCD). Database consists of around 91000 samples with nearly 600 samples in each of 156 classes. The database is a unified collection of both online and offline samples. Offline samples were collected by asking volunteers to write samples on a form inside a specified grid. For online samples, we made the volunteers write in a similar grid using a digital writing pad. The samples collected encompass a vast variety of writing styles, inherent distortions arising from offline scanning process viz stroke discontinuity, variable thickness of stroke, distortion etc. Algorithms which are resilient to such data can be practically deployed for real time applications. The samples were generated from around 650 native Tamil volunteers including school going kids, homemakers, university students and faculty. The isolated character database will be made publicly available as raw images and Hierarchical Data File (HDF) compressed file. With this database, we expect to set a new benchmark in Tamil handwritten character recognition and serve as a launchpad for many avenues in document image analysis domain. Paper also presents an ideal experimental set-up using the database on convolutional neural networks (CNN) with a baseline accuracy of 88% on test data., 30 pages, 18 figures, in IEEE Access

Due to the rapid developments in technology and the sudden expansion of social media use, Dialect Arabic has become an important source of data that needs to be addressed when building Arabic corpora. In this paper, thirty-three Arabic corpora are surveyed to show that despite all of the developments in the literature, Saudi dialect (SD) corpora still need further expansion. This paper contributes to the literature on SD corpora by creating the largest Saudi corpus – the King Saud University Saudi Corpus (KSUSC) – with +1B total words, including +119M SD words. The KSUSC not only is the newest and largest SD corpus but is also diverse, covering 26 domains in text collected from five different sources. This paper also contributes to the literature by developing a new incremental preprocessing system that is used to create relevant lexicons that are then used to clean and normalize the collected data. This incremental system is scalable and can be adapted for different resources and dialects. Moreover, the collection process for building the KSUSC is discussed in detail, and the challenges in collecting SD text with respect to each platform are highlighted. By the end of this paper, different design criteria are proposed and used with the KSUSC to conclude that the resulting corpus can be of great benefit to researchers who are interested in integrating the corpus with their own work or using its resulting lexicons with Saudi-based NLP tasks.

In recent years, the rapid development of computer and network technology has produced various positive and negative effects on the mental health of college students. This also brings challenges to mental health education in colleges. In order to strengthen the research on the mental health education model under the network environment, this paper proposes the architecture of the college student mental health education system based on the privacy and security of the Internet of Things. First of all, this article combines the 3DES-RC4 hybrid security encryption algorithm based on the Internet of Things. This article uses the C/S architecture, MQTT protocol and SIP protocol based on the Internet of Things structure to design and implement instant messaging IoT security for mental health education Architecture. The extreme learning machine method combined with the differential privacy method is used in this article. By adding noise to the query results and adding an appropriate amount of noise to the analysis results, the protection of private data can be achieved. Finally, the data set experiment proves that compared with the existing algorithms, the algorithm and model proposed in this paper can better balance the level of privacy protection and classification accuracy.

In the era of paper-based contract, a lot of time, human labor and expenses are required to handle the process of contract drafting, contract signing, contract execution, and payment settlement. The emerging of electronic contract enhances the tedious signing process of paper-based contract and improves the efficiency of contract management. However, due to the centralized system architecture and the database-based storage schema, the stored contract data is at high risk of information leaking, data tampering and hacker attacks. In this study, we introduce Blockchain technology to the contract management, and develop a process-oriented contract management system (BEcontractor) for a Hangzhou-located power grid enterprise X, aiming to solve a series of security issues existing in the traditional electronic contract system. By deploying BEcontractor, procurement activities could be resumed online among X and its nation-widely commodity suppliers during COVID-19 epidemic. Up to September 2020, 6336 electronic contracts have been signed, with an accumulated amount of $\yen ~6.5$ billion. It is showed that the cost for accomplishing the contract signing process was significantly reduced, and the payment period was shortened from three months to around one month.

The number of deaths caused by alcohol-related diseases may be reduced by predicting alcohol use disorder (AUD). Many researchers have worked on AUD prediction using machine learning (ML) techniques. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of a comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) that summarizes the existing studies on AUD prediction using ML in the last ten years. To address this knowledge gap, this article provides an SLR of academic articles on AUD prediction using ML techniques dated from January 2010 to July 2021. This SLR highlights technical decision analysis related to five aspects: data collection site, characteristics, and type of dataset; data sampling and data pre-processing techniques; feature types and feature engineering techniques; and characteristics of ML techniques and evaluation metrics. Six bibliographic databases were searched, and the identified studies were rigorously reviewed based on the above five aspects. In the selected studies, public datasets were not used very often for AUD prediction. Given that, the current paper identified two different types of data collection sites for review. Imbalanced class distribution in datasets was the primary focus of the pre-processing and sampling steps. Various features, including demographics, family history, drinking behaviour, and electronic health records, were introduced as the more widely used AUD prediction features. The filter, wrapper, and embedded methods were identified as the primary feature selection methods. Support vector machine was the most widely employed algorithm for predicting AUD; however, the lack of deep neural network techniques is evident in this field. Moreover, considering gender disparities, early detection of AUD, and identifying trajectories towards AUD are suggested for future work. For the purpose of evaluating the performance of the prediction approaches, most studies considered the overall accuracy and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Nevertheless, external validation was not performed in any of the selected studies. This paper also discusses challenges and open issues of AUD prediction for future research. This SLR represents a valuable resource for scholars investigating the prediction of AUD.

Every individual’s perception of multimedia content varies based on their interpretation. Therefore, it is quite challenging to predict likability of any multimedia just based on its content. This paper presents a novel system for analysis of facial expressions of subject against the multimedia content to be evaluated. First, we developed a dataset by recording facial expressions of subjects under uncontrolled environment. These subjects are volunteers recruited to watch the videos of different genre, and provide their feedback in terms of likability. Subject responses are divided into three categories: Like, Neutral and Dislike. A novel multimodal system is developed using the developed dataset. The model learns feature representation from data based on the three provided categories. The proposed system contains ensemble of time distributed convolutional neural network, 3D convolutional neural network, and long short term memory networks. All the modalities in proposed architecture are evaluated independently as well as in distinct combinations. The paper also provides detailed insight into learning behavior of the proposed system.

The standardization and digitalization of nine constitutions of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) have promoted the development of TCM automation. The keys to constitution identification are tongue diagnosis and consultation diagnosis. In this paper, a tongue detection method based on the combination of the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and the support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. To separate the tongue body and tongue coating, a k-means segmentation method based on the Lab color space is proposed. Based on the clustering analysis of the difference between the color components of the tongue body and tongue coating in the Lab color space, the separation is realized. Thus, the relationship between the tongue image and constitution can be analyzed. The method for consultation diagnosis is divided into a questionnaire scale and a question answering system. The questionnaire includes 29 quantified items with corresponding weights and answer scores, so the final score of each type of constitution is calculated. The final constitution type is determined on the basis of the scores of both diagnoses. In addition, the key of question answering system is text similarity calculation. First, a sentence similarity calculation method combining the n-gram language model and word2vec is proposed. Then, a multifeature fusion sentence similarity calculation method combining the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) and editing distance is proposed. Finally, the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, and a constitution identification application is developed based on the content of this paper.

Watermarking is an important technique for protecting sensitive e-multimedia data and intellectual property. Watermarking techniques are used for many applications such as ownership protection, which is a popular area of research as compared to others such as authentication and local temper localization. There are many image watermarking schemes that have been recently published based on the frequency domain as it can fulfill watermarking requirements such as high robustness and imperceptibility. Singular-value decomposition (SVD) is one of them and is used in many frequency transform-based image watermarking schemes due to its stability and mathematical simplicity. However, there are many schemes that lack robustness against malicious cyberattacks, whereby the watermarks are easy to detect and destroy. Consequently, the proposed watermarking schemes became more complicated and cannot resist various geometric and non-geometric attacks. Thus, there are many existing hybrid SVD-based image watermarking schemes found be insecure. As there is also a lack of in-depth reviews in this domain, the focus of this paper is the analysis of the state-of-the-art in hybrid SVD-based image watermarking. We perform efficiency comparisons to highlight various security problems, open issues, and research gaps. Based on our findings, we additionally provide some recommendations for the development of more robust schemes in the future. This paper provides essential information for researchers and practitioners alike to advance the field of image watermarking.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an innovative technology with a broad range of applications and highly attractive benefits, such as low cost of implementation and data transmission, unmonitored access to the network, autonomous and long-term operation. With extensive demand for the advancement of related technologies (cloud computing, near-field communications and cellular mobile networks), the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a very exciting paradigm. By using communication technologies in sensors and sensing features in web devices, WSNs have begun interaction with the Iot devices. IoT provides access to a large amount of information gathered by WSNs. However, the security of WSN and IoT comes at a cost, mainly due to privacy management issues. Therefore, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of security threats against WSN and IoT, along with the strategies for preventing, detecting and mitigating those threats. The related defense mechanisms can help in building a safe IoT expansion and widespread understanding by getting familiar with the details of these attacks. The aim of this paper is to address and demonstrate the impact of the security problems on WSNs from the viewpoint of the IoT and its applications. In the analysis carried out for this work, a classification of available attacks and threats against these requirements has also been included.

Stress is an escalated psycho-physiological state of the human body emerging in response to a challenging event or a demanding condition. Environmental factors that trigger stress are called stressors. In case of prolonged exposure to multiple stressors impacting simultaneously, a person’s mental and physical health can be adversely affected which can further lead to chronic health issues. To prevent stress-related issues, it is necessary to detect them in the nascent stages which are possible only by continuous monitoring of stress. Wearable devices promise real-time and continuous data collection, which helps in personal stress monitoring. In this paper, a comprehensive review has been presented, which focuses on stress detection using wearable sensors and applied machine learning techniques. This paper investigates the stress detection approaches adopted in accordance with the sensory devices such as wearable sensors, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electroencephalography (EEG), and Photoplethysmography (PPG), and also depending on various environments like during driving, studying, and working. The stressors, techniques, results, advantages, limitations, and issues for each study are highlighted and expected to provide a path for future research studies. Also, a multimodal stress detection system using a wearable sensor-based deep learning technique has been proposed at the end.

Live work is a dangerous and complex operation that endangers the lives of operators. This paper presents an autonomous live-line maintenance robot (ALMR), which is applied to 10 kV overhead lines. The ALMR can complete most of the operations automatically, requiring only a small amount of correction and operation. The paper briefly introduces the overall design of the ALMR. The main part of the paper describes the work carried out to realize automatic operation: (1) Propose a dynamic hierarchical task planning method that can decompose complex operations into a sequence of instructions that the robot can directly execute and can effectively deal with unexpected situations during operation; (2) solve the problem of recognition and positioning of cables under outdoor sunlight interference and complex backgrounds; (3) realize the robot’s motion planning in the live-line scene; (4) build a virtual environment to solve the telepresence problem of remote operation. Field experiments show that the ALMR can replace manual operations such as connecting and disconnecting lead-flow lines, and the operating efficiency is close to that of manual operations.

Smartphones and Internet have become prevalent in our society with various applications in businesses, education, healthcare, gaming, and research. One of the major issues with the Internet today is its lack of security since an eavesdropper can potentially intercept the communication. This has contributed towards an increased number of cyber-crime incidents, resulting in an increase in users’ consciousness about the security and privacy of their communication. One example is the shift towards using private browsers such as Tor. Tor is a well-recognized and widely used privacy browser based on The Onion Router network that provisions anonymity over the insecure Internet. This functionality of Tor has been a major hurdle in cybercrime investigations due to the complex nature of its anonymity. This paper investigates artifacts from the Tor privacy browser on the latest Windows 10 and Android 10 devices to determine potential areas where evidence can be found. We examine the registry, storage, and memory of Windows 10 devices and the memory, storage, logs, and Zram of Android 10 devices for three possible scenarios i.e. before, during, and after use of the Tor browser. Our results do not support the claims made by the Tor Project regarding user privacy and anonymity. We find that it is possible to retrieve significant details about a user’s browsing activities while the Tor browser is in use as well as after it is closed (on both operating systems). This paper also provides an investigative methodology for the acquisition and analysis of Tor browser artifacts from different areas of the targeted operating systems. Therefore, it can serve as a base to expand research in the forensic analysis of other privacy browsers and improve the efficiency of cybercrime investigations efficiency.

The advantages of IoT are incontrovertible; however, significant risks and uncertainties over the protection of best practices and their related costs prevent many companies from adopting the technology. Also, users are aware of the consequences of breaches of IoT protection. Recent research indicates that 90% of consumers lack confidence in the safety of IoT devices. IoT defense has been described as one of the weakest areas. In this respect, significant efforts have been made, often through traditional cryptographic methods, to overcome security and privacy issues in IoT systems. The list of security issues (confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and availability) must be addressed to secure IoT devices from attack. IoT nodes’ specific features do not adequately protect the whole security spectrum of IoT networks through existing solutions. This paper aims to provide security to the IoT devices using nature-inspired Gravitational Search-guided artificial neural key. In this paper, artificial neural synchronization is used to create a neural key exchange protocol between two IoT devices over a public channel for cryptographic purposes. This proposed technique has many benefits, such as 1) it provides an optimized design of the neural network that facilitates the development and establishment of a neural key between the two approved IoT devices. 2) It offers the sharing of the private neural key over the public channel via artificial neural synchronization 3)Three hidden layers of the neural network contribute to the deep internal design. So, it’s going to be hard for the intruder to infer the internal layout. 4) The increase in the weight spectrum of the neural network raises the complexity of an effective attack exponentially, but the effort to create a neural key decreases over polynomial time. Various parametric experiments have been conducted out on the proposed methodology. The simulations of the procedure demonstrate efficacy in terms of the findings cited in the paper.

Semantic segmentation is a task that covers most of the perception needs of intelligent vehicles in an unified way. Recent studies witnessed that attention mechanisms achieve impressive performance in computer vision task. Current attention mechanisms based segmentation methods differ with each other in position and form of the attention mechanism, and perform differently in practice. This paper firstly introduces the effectiveness of multi-scale context features and attention mechanisms in segmentation tasks. We find that multi-scale and channel attention can play a vital role in constructing effective context features. Based on this analysis, this paper proposes an efficient attention pyramid network (EAPNet) for semantic segmentation. Specifically, to efficient handle the problem of segmenting objects at multiple scales, we design efficient channel attention pyramid (ECAP) which employ atrous convolution with channel attention in cascade or in parallel to capture multi-scale context by using multiple atrous rates. Furthermore, we propose a residual attention fusion block (RAFB), whose purpose is to simultaneously focus on meaningful low-level feature maps and spatial location information. At the same time, we will explore different channel attention modules and spatial attention modules, and describe their impact on network performance. We empirically evaluate our EAPNet on two semantic segmentation datasets, including PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes datasets. Experimental results show that without MS COCO pre-training and any post-processing, EAPNet achieved 81.7% mIoU on the PASCAL VOC 2012 validation set. With deeplabv3+ as the benchmark, EAPNet improve the model performance of more than 1.50% mIoU.

A detection model of Internet of Things encrypted traffic based on edge intelligence is proposed in the paper, which can reduce the communication times of distributed Internet of Things gateways in the process of edge intelligence as well as the encrypted traffic detection model establishment time, in order to solve the problems that it is difficult to carry out efficient classification and accurate identification of the encrypted traffic of Internet of Things. In this paper, four new classification and identification methods for encrypted traffic are put forward, namely time-sequence behavior analysis, dynamic behavior analysis, key behavior analysis and two-round filtering analysis. The experimental results show that when the sample size is 1600, the encrypted traffic detection model establishment time is less than 100 seconds, and the accuracy of all the four new traffic classification methods is more than 92% and the recall rates of them are more than 83%.

Recent advances in the cyber-physical smart grid (CPSG) have enabled a broad range of new devices based on the information and communication technology (ICT). However, these ICT-enabled devices are susceptible to a growing threat of cyber-physical attacks. This paper performs a thorough review of the state-of-the-art cyber-physical security of the smart grid. By focusing on the physical layer of the CPSG, this paper provides an abstracted and unified state-space model, in which cyber-physical attack and defense models can be effectively generalized. The existing cyber-physical attacks are categorized in terms of their target components. We then discuss several operational and informational defense approaches that present the current state-of-the-art in the field, including moving target defense, watermarking, and data-driven approaches. Finally, we discuss challenges and future opportunities associated with the smart grid cyber-physical security.

Identifying human activities using short-range and low-power radars has attracted much attention among the researchers and consumer electronics industry. This paper considers human activity recognition in the context of a single Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar as the measurement tool. A classification pipeline is proposed to handle the data pre-processing and feature extraction and a machine-learning based solution is devised to undertake the activity classification. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated under both unseen subjects and new room layouts. We show how the accuracy of the activity classification will be affected by situations such as poor aspect-angle and occlusions created by furniture that normally arise in realistic scenarios where an unseen layout is considered. A two-stage classifier will be then proposed to enhance the generalization of the model, especially, to unseen rooms. Besides, an extensive feature exploration will be conducted and the importance of features in the generalization will be studied. The results in this paper will conclude a machine learning pipeline that will generalize well to unseen subjects and new room layouts, which are two main difficulties that arise in most radar-based activity classification tasks.