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Abstract The introduction of blockchain technology has brought about significant transformation in the realm of digital transactions, providing a secure and transparent platform for peer-to-peer interactions that cannot be tampered with. The decentralised and distributed nature of blockchains guarantees the integrity and authenticity of the data, eliminating the need for intermediaries. The applications of this technology are not limited to the financial sector, but extend to various areas, such as supply chain management, identity verification, and governance. At the core of these blockchains is the consensus mechanism, which plays a crucial role in ensuring the reliability and integrity of a system. Consensus mechanisms are essential for achieving an agreement amongst network participants regarding the validity of transactions and the order in which they are recorded on the blockchain. By incorporating consensus mechanisms, blockchains ensure that all honest nodes in the network reach a consensus on whether to accept or reject a block, based on predefined rules and criteria. The aim of this study is to introduce a novel consensus mechanism named Erdos, which seeks to address the shortcomings of existing consensus algorithms, such as the Proof of Work and Proof of Stake. Erdos emphasises security, decentralisation, and fairness. One notable feature of this mechanism is its equitable node-selection algorithm, which ensures equal opportunities for all nodes to engage in block creation and validation. In addition, Erdos implements a deterministic block finalisation process that guarantees the integrity and authenticity of the blockchain. The main contribution of this research lies in its innovative approach to deterministic block finalisation, which effectively mitigates the various security risks associated with blockchain systems.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is rapidly evolving, promising to revolutionize financial services through blockchain technology. Successful integration of asset transfers across diverse DeFi platforms hinges on effective interoperability and transaction finality, ensuring security and cost efficiency. This paper introduces CrossDeFi, a novel cross-chain communication protocol tailored to address the challenges posed by heterogeneity in consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, and token systems. CrossDeFi introduces two key mechanisms: Miner and bridge selection (MBS) and improved transfer confirmation (ITC). The MBS mechanism optimizes the selection of miners and bridges based on the unique characteristics of each blockchain, significantly improving transfer accuracy, cost efficiency, and speed. Meanwhile, the ITC mechanism leverages cryptographic primitives to secure asset transfer confirmations, ensuring robust transaction finality. The protocol’s effectiveness is demonstrated through detailed efficiency and security analyses, complemented by a prototype evaluation that showcases its capabilities in reducing transfer durations and costs. These findings underscore the potential of CrossDeFi to transform the DeFi ecosystem.

Water resource problems currently are much more important in proper planning especially for arid regions, such as Gansu in China. For agricultural and industrial activities, prediction of groundwater status is critical. As a main branch of neural network, shallow artificial neural network models have been deployed in prediction areas such as groundwater and rainfall since late 1980s. In this paper, artificial neural network (ANN) model within a newly proposed algorithm has been developed for groundwater status forecasting. Having considered previous algorithms for ANN model in time series forecast, this new Monte Carlo based algorithm demonstrated a good result. The experiments of this ANN model in predicting groundwater status were conducted on the Heihe River area dataset, which was curated on the collected data. When compared with its original physical based model, this ANN model was able to achieve a more stable and accurate result. A comparison and an analysis of this ANN model were also presented in this paper.

Data outsourcing is a major component for cloud computing that allows data owners to distribute resources to external services for users and organizations who can apply the resources. A crucial problem for owners is how to make sure their sensitive information accessed by legitimate users only using the trusted services but not authorized to read the actual information. With the increased development of cloud computing, it brings challenges for data security and access control when outsourcing users’ data and sharing sensitive data in cloud environment since it is not within the same trusted domain as data owners’. Access control policies have become an important issue in the security filed in cloud computing. Semantic web technologies represent much richer forms of relationships among users, resources and actions among different web applications such as clouding computing. However, Semantic web applications pose new requirements for security mechanisms especially in the access control models. This paper addresses existing access control methods and presents a semantic based access control model which considers semantic relations among different entities in cloud computing environment. We have enriched the research for semantic web technology with role-based access control that is able to be applied in the field of medical information system or e-Healthcare system. This work shows how the semantic web technology provides efficient solutions for the management of complex and distributed data in heterogeneous systems, and it can be used in the medical information systems as well.

Technology plays an important role in helping organizations control quality and costs, and take advantage of opportunities in a highly competitive and increasingly complex business environment. Cloud computing offers greater access to computing power, storage, software, and remote data centres through the web. This research aims to confirm the factors to be considered for cloud computing adoption in Australian regional municipal governments. The research involved data from interviews with IT managers from selected regional municipal governments, and survey data from 480 IT staff across 47 regional municipal governments. The major factors to be considered for the adoption of cloud computing in regional municipal governments were identified as Internet connectivity, Internet speed, availability, reliability, data storage location, security, data sovereignty, cost, integration, data backup, provider dependability, employees' knowledge, and transportability. The findings of this research may help managers increase their awareness about factors to be considered when regional municipal governments planning to adopt cloud computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology plays an important role in helping organisations control quality and costs, and taking advantage of opportunities in a highly competitive and increasingly complex business environment. Cloud computing offers greater access to computing power, storage, software, and remote data centres through the web. This research aims to investigate the factors to be considered for cloud computing adoption by Australian regional councils. The research employed in-depth interviews with IT managers from selected local government councils. The major factors to be considered for the adoption of cloud computing were identified as Internet connectivity, data storage location, cost, integration, data back-up, provider dependability, employees' knowledge, and transportability. The findings of this research may help managers increase their awareness about factors to be considered when planning to adopt cloud computing. Keywords: Cloud computing; factors; adoption; regional councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]