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Faced with the global crisis of COVID-19 and the strong increase in customer demands, competition is becoming more intense between companies, on the one hand, and supply chains on the other. This competition has led to the development of new strategies to manage demand and increase market share. Among these strategies are the growing interest in sustainable manufacturing and the need for customizable products that create an increasingly complex manufacturing environment. Sustainable manufacturing and the need for customizable products create an environment of increased competition and constant change. Indeed, companies are trying to establish more flexible and agile manufacturing systems through several systems of reconfiguration. Reconfiguration contributes to an extension of the manufacturing system's life cycle by modifying its physical, organizational and IT characteristics according to the changing market conditions. Due to the rapid development of new information technology (such as IoT, Big Data analytics, cyber-physical systems, cloud computing and artificial intelligence), digital twins have become intensively used in smart manufacturing. This paper proposes a digital twin design and simulation model for reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud Computing has revolutionized the way applications are developed, deployed, and maintained. Over the past decade, we have observed dynamically growing interest in Cloud Computing. The benefits of the cloud approach caused the increasing popularity of Cloud-native applications. Cloud-native is an approach to developing and deploying applications according to the concepts of DevOps, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), containers and microservices. The knowledge about Cloud Computing has become extensive and complex. Fortunately, before Cloud-native applications development, there was a great deal of effort to develop tools for effective knowledge representation. Ontologies are a convenient way to show the relations between domain-specific concepts. In this paper, we propose an ontology named CNOnt that describes the state-of-the-art of Cloud-native applications. CNOnt covers aspects from the clusterization perspective. First, this paper presents the engineering perspective of building the CNOnt ontology. Second, we demonstrate a use case of our ontology that proves the correctness of CNOnt development. This ontology is exhausted in CNOnt Broker. It is a system that applies the information in the OWL file into the Kubernetes cluster and in reverse. The knowledge representation makes Cloud-native applications understandable to third-party systems and increases interoperability between different microservices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serverless computing has gained significant popularity due to its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and ease of deployment. With the exponential growth of data, organizations face the challenge of efficiently processing and analyzing vast amounts of data in a serverless environment. Data pipelines play a crucial role in managing and transforming data within serverless architectures. This paper provides a taxonomy of data pipeline approaches in serverless computing. Classification is based on architectural features, data processing techniques, and workflow orchestration mechanisms, these approaches are categorized into three primary methods: heuristic-based approach, Machine learning-based approach, and framework-based approach. Furthermore, a systematic review of existing data pipeline frameworks and tools is provided, encompassing their strengths, limitations, and real-world use cases. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach, also the challenges and performance metrics that influence their effectuality have been examined. Every data pipeline approach has certain advantages and disadvantages, whether it is framework-based, heuristic-based, or machine learning-based. Each approach is suitable for specific use cases. Hence, it is crucial assess the trade-offs between complexity, performance, cost, and scalability, while selecting a data pipeline approach. In the end, the paper highlights a number of open issues and future investigations directions for data pipeline in the serverless computing, which involve scalability, fault tolerance, data real time processing, data workflow orchestration, function state management with performance and cost in the serverless computing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenges in managing cloud computing clusters is assigning resources based on the customers’ needs. For this mechanism to work efficiently, it is imperative that there are sufficient resources reserved to maintain continuous operation, but not too much to avoid overhead costs. Additionally, to avoid the overhead of acquisition time, it is important to reserve resources sufficiently in advance. This paper presents a novel reliable general-purpose mechanism for prediction-based resource usage reservation. The proposed solution should be capable of operating for long periods of time without drift-related problems, and dynamically adapt to changes in system usage. To achieve this, a novel signature-based ensemble prediction method is presented, which utilizes multiple distinct prediction algorithms suited for various use-cases, as well as an anomaly detection mechanism used to improve prediction accuracy. This ensures that the mechanism can operate efficiently in different real-life scenarios. Thanks to a novel signature-based selection algorithm, it is possible to use the best available prediction algorithm for each use-case, even over long periods of time, which would typically lead to drifts. The proposed approach has been evaluated using real-life historical data from various production servers, which include traces from more than 1,500 machines collected over more than a year. Experimental results have demonstrated an increase in prediction accuracy of up to 21.4 percent over the neural network approach. The evaluation of the proposed approach highlights the importance of choosing the appropriate prediction method, especially in diverse scenarios where the load changes frequently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing has become integral to modern computing infrastructure, offering scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Trust is a critical aspect of cloud computing, influencing user decisions in selecting Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). This paper provides a comprehensive review of existing trust models in cloud computing, including agreement-based, SLA-based, certificate-based, feedback-based, domain-based, prediction-based, and reputation-based models. Building on this foundation, we propose a novel methodology for creating a trust model in cloud computing using digital twins for CSPs. The digital twin is augmented with a fuzzy inference system, which computes the trust score of a CSP based on trust-related parameters. The architecture of the digital twin with the fuzzy inference system is detailed, outlining how it processes security parameter values obtained through penetration testing mechanisms. These parameter values are transformed into crisp values using a linear ridge regression function and then fed into the fuzzy inference system to calculate a final trust score for the CSP. The paper also presents the outputs of the fuzzy inference system, demonstrating how different security parameter inputs yield various trust scores. This methodology provides a robust framework for assessing CSP trustworthiness and enhancing decision-making processes in cloud service selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of autonomous vehicles has changed the way of transmitting goods to users, with the potential to improve road safety and efficiency. One of the effective issues of self-driving vehicles is path planning issue. In this paper, a new system is proposed for addressing the potential of using multi-agent systems (MAS) to address path planning problems in autonomous vehicles. The system is called Cloud Multi-Agents for Self-Driving Vehicles as A Services (CMSV). It is used to solve the dependent delivery problem, where the vehicle transmits the goods/deliveries, that are dependent on each other, to specific locations in ordering or with specific directions. The new system consists of three phases: (1) converting the problem into TSP sub problems according to deliveries dependency, (2) applying GDC to select the good solutions (3) applying multi-agent system to select the optimal solution. The proposed system is compared with systems that use a genetic algorithm, Ant Colony algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization and The Harris hawk optimization (HHO) algorithm. From the findings, we find that the proposed system is more efficient than the other systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the quality and efficiency of machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages (LRLs), this paper analyzes the application of genetic algorithm (GA) under the background of cloud computing (CC). By using GA to optimize MT for LRL, this study aims to address the limitations and challenges of traditional methods on LRL. Firstly, GA under the background of the CC platform is analyzed in detail. The CC platform offers powerful computing and storage capabilities that provide the basis for large-scale optimization using GA. GA is an optimization algorithm based on the principle of biological evolution, which seeks the optimal solution by simulating genes' genetic and evolutionary processes. In MT of LRL, GA can be used to optimize model parameters, select translation rules, and improve translation quality, thereby improving translation results. Secondly, the present situation of MT for LRL is described. Finally, the traditional LRL-oriented MT and the GA-optimized LRL-oriented MT are compared and analyzed. The results reveal that the traditional LRL-oriented MT has low accuracy and low customer satisfaction (CS). Considering the translation time, accuracy, and resource utilization rate (RUR), the highest rate is only about 47%. In contrast, GA-optimized LRL-oriented MT significantly improves translation accuracy and CS, reaching approximately 94%. The final evaluation results indicate that the accuracy of the model is usually above 70%, and up to 94%. Therefore, GA plays an important role in optimization for LRL-oriented MT. This paper provides technical support for optimizing LRL-oriented MT and contributes to the further development of MT technology. By applying GA, the limitations of traditional methods in LRL can be overcome and the quality and efficiency of translation can be improved. It is of great significance to improve the development of translation technology of LRL, enhance cross-language communication, and promote global cultural exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bioinformatics allows and encourages the application of many different parallel computing approaches. This special issue brings together high-quality state-of-the-art contributions about parallel computing in bioinformatics, from different points of view or perspectives, that is, from high-performance, heterogeneous, and cloud computing. The special issue collects considerably extended and improved versions of the best papers, accepted and presented in PBio 2018 (6th International Workshop on Parallelism in Bioinformatics, and part of EuroMPI 2018). The domains and topics covered in these five papers are timely and important, and the authors have done an excellent job of presenting the material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by cloud computing, cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is a service-oriented manufacturing paradigm on an on-demand and pay-as-you-go business model through the internet. More specifically, new challenges for production planning and decision-making process have emerged in that resource scheduling and have gained the most attention, and there is an urgent need to determine the current status and identify issues and matters to be addressed in the future. This review paper is aiming to discuss aspects of the cloud-based resource scheduling problem through investigating the literature to date to identify the existing gaps and recommending the potential paths moving forward for researchers in this field. So far, literature reviews focused on a broad scope of cloud-based scheduling, as a new approach taking a "narrow scope" by focusing on resource scheduling and various steps of it in the cloud environment are considered. Using the data gathered from the popular databases, a comprehensive statistical analysis on the existing literatures is provided, and the rational sequences of the systematic literature review (SLR) are elaborated. The mathematical models in resource scheduling are thoroughly elucidated. Then, a comprehensive analysis of the main aspects of resource scheduling including the objective functions, constraints, and optimization algorithms is presented. Discussion of the findings of the review paper illustrates that time and cost gain more attention (almost 80%) among all objective functions, and the metaheuristic algorithms are the most widely used in the recent research papers. Finally, suggestions for potential future research to further consolidate this field have been enumerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the widespread adoption of mobile multimedia devices, the deployment of compute-intensive inference tasks on edge and resource-constrained devices, particularly in the context of low-light text detection, remains a formidable challenge. Existing deep learning approaches have shown limited effectiveness in restoring images for extremely dark scenes. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel cloud-based Low-light Attention Enhancement Generative Adversarial Network for unpaired text images (LAE-GAN) for the non-paired text image enhancement task in extremely low-light conditions. In the first stage, compressed low-light images are transmitted from edge devices to a cloud server for image enhancement. The LAE-GAN, an end-to-end network comprising a Zero-DCE and AGM-net generator, is designed with a global and local discriminator structure. The initial illumination restoration of extremely low-light images is accomplished using the Zero-DCE network. To enhance text details, we propose an Enhanced Text Attention Mechanism (ETAM) that transforms text information into a comprehensive text attention mechanism across the entire network. The Sobel operator is employed to extract text edge information, while attention is focused on text region details through constraints imposed on the attention map and edge map. Additionally, an AGM-Net module is integrated to reduce noise and fine-tune illumination. In the second stage, the cloud server makes decisions based on user requirements and processes requests in parallel, scaling with the quantity of requests. In the third stage, the enhanced results are transmitted back to edge devices for text detection. Experimental results on widely used LOL and SID low-light datasets demonstrate significant improvements in both quantitative and qualitative analysis, surpassing state-of-the-art enhancement methods in terms of image restoration and text detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trajectory anomalies serve as early indicators of potential issues and frequently provide valuable insights into event occurrence. Existing methods for detecting abnormal trajectories primarily focus on comparing the spatial characteristics of the trajectories. However, they fail to capture the temporal dimension's pattern and evolution within the trajectory data, thereby inadequately identifying the behavioral inertia of the target group. A few detection methods that incorporate spatiotemporal features have also failed to adequately analyze the spatiotemporal sequence evolution information; consequently, detection methods that ignore temporal and spatial correlations are too one-sided. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), especially gate recurrent unit (GRU) that design reset and update gate control units, process nonlinear sequence processing capabilities, enabling effective extraction and analysis of both temporal and spatial characteristics. However, the basic GRU network model has limited expressive power and may not be able to adequately capture complex sequence patterns and semantic information. To address the above issues, an abnormal trajectory detection method based on the improved GRU model is proposed in cloud computing in this paper. To enhance the anomaly detection ability and training efficiency of relevant models, strictly control the input of irrelevant features and improve the model fitting effect, an improved model combining the random forest algorithm and fully connected layer network is designed. The method deconstructs spatiotemporal semantics through reset and update gated units, while effectively capturing feature evolution information and target behavioral inertia by leveraging the integration of features and nonlinear mapping capabilities of the fully connected layer network. The experimental results based on the GeoLife GPS trajectory dataset indicate that the proposed approach improves both generalization ability by 1% and reduces training cost by 31.68%. This success do provides a practical solution for the task of anomaly trajectory detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of meteorology, the global radar network is indispensable for detecting weather phenomena and offering early warning services. Nevertheless, radar data frequently exhibit anomalies, including gaps and clutter, arising from atmospheric refraction, equipment malfunctions, and other factors, resulting in diminished data quality. Traditional radar blockage correction methods, such as employing approximate radial information interpolation and supplementing missing data, often fail to effectively exploit potential patterns in massive radar data, for the large volume of data precludes a thorough analysis and understanding of the inherent complex patterns and dependencies through simple interpolation or supplementation techniques. Fortunately, edge computing possesses certain data processing capabilities and cloud center boasts substantial computational power, which together can collaboratively offer timely computation and storage for the correction of radar beam blockage. To this end, an edge-cloud collaborative driven deep learning model named DenMerD is proposed in this paper, which includes dense connection module and merge distribution (MD) unit. Compared to existing models such as RC-FCN, DenseNet, and VGG, this model greatly improves key performance metrics, with 30.7 % improvement in Critical Success Index (CSI), 30.1 % improvement in Probability of Detection (POD), and 3.1 % improvement in False Alarm Rate (FAR). It also performs well in the Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) metrics compared to its counterparts. These findings underscore the efficacy of the design in improving feature propagation and beam blockage accuracy, and also highlights the potential and value of mobile edge computing in processing large-scale meteorological data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing has data leakage from all parties, security protection of private data, and existing solutions do not provide a trade-off between security and overhead. With distributed data communication due to data barriers, information interaction security and data computation security have become challenges for secure computing. Combining cloud computing with secure multiparty computation can provide a higher level of data protection while maintaining the benefits of cloud computing. In this case, data can be stored in the cloud and computed through SMPC protocols, thus protecting the privacy and security of the data. However, multiple rounds of information interaction are often required, increasing the communication overhead, and the security strength is limited by the hardness assumption. In this paper, we work to achieve an optimal setting of the number of rounds in secure multi-party computation on the cloud to achieve a sublinear communication overhead and improve the security concept. A 2-round SMPC protocol is constructed in the framework of Universally Composable (UC). A 2-round SMPC protocol is constructed that uses multilinear maps based on the Learning from Errors (LWE) assumption. The participant encodes the input and sends it via broadcast to reduce the interaction, homomorphic computational encoding information for secure access to computational data and secure the SMPC protocol through UC security. This paper extends the participants to multiple parties, reduces the communication rounds to 2, the protocol achieves sublinear communication overhead in poly polynomial time, smaller setup size to poly(k), and static security is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the development of IOTA, a new type of Distributed Ledger (DL) for internet of things (IoT), has gained significant attention. IOTA DL offers key features like scalability, fast and free transactions, making it an optimal choice for IoT devices. However, a major concern with IOTA DL is its reliance on a single coordinator for transaction confirmation. This default coordinator introduces issues of single point of failure and incomplete distribution. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the Multiple Coordinator Selection (MCS) algorithm. MCS aims to overcome the problem by involving multiple coordinators in the consensus process. Four metrics, namely "trust level," "distance from input transactions," "node activity," and "transaction distribution," are defined as properties for coordinator selection. Additionally, a checklist is employed to minimize the probability of collusion within the system. Furthermore, the paper introduces a three-layered architecture based on cloud and fog computing, where the MCS algorithm is implemented. Experimental results demonstrate improved security and distribution of the system, while reducing the chances of collusion and single point of failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serverless computing is one of the recent compelling paradigms in cloud computing. Serverless computing can quickly run user applications and services regardless of the underlying server architecture. Despite the availability of several commercial and open-source serverless platforms, there are still some open issues and challenges to address. One of the key concerns in serverless computing platforms is security. Therefore, in this paper, we present a multi-layer abstract model of serverless computing for an security investigation. We conduct a quantitative analysis of security risks for each layer. We observe that the Attack Tree and Attack-Defense Tree methodologies are viable approaches in this regard. Consequently, we make use of the Attack Tree and the Attack-Defense Tree to quantify the security risks and countermeasures of serverless computing. We also propose a novel measure called the Relative Risk Matrix (RRM) to quantify the probability of attack success. Stakeholders including application developers, researchers, and cloud providers can potentially apply these findings and implications to better understand and further enhance the security of serverless computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In human microbiome studies, mediation analysis has recently been spotlighted as a practical and powerful analytic tool to survey the causal roles of the microbiome as a mediator to explain the observed relationships between a medical treatment/environmental exposure and a human disease. We also note that, in a clinical research, investigators often trace disease progression sequentially in time; as such, time-to-event (e.g., time-to-disease, time-to-cure) responses, known as survival responses, are prevalent as a surrogate variable for human health or disease. In this paper, we introduce a web cloud computing platform, named as microbiome mediation analysis with survival responses (MiMedSurv), for comprehensive microbiome mediation analysis with survival responses on user-friendly web environments. MiMedSurv is an extension of our prior web cloud computing platform, named as microbiome mediation analysis (MiMed), for survival responses. The two main features that are well-distinguished are as follows. First, MiMedSurv conducts some baseline exploratory non-mediational survival analysis, not involving microbiome, to survey the disparity in survival response between medical treatments/environmental exposures. Then, MiMedSurv identifies the mediating roles of the microbiome in various aspects: (i) as a microbial ecosystem using ecological indices (e.g., alpha and beta diversity indices) and (ii) as individual microbial taxa in various hierarchies (e.g., phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, species). To illustrate its use, we survey the mediating roles of the gut microbiome between antibiotic treatment and time-to-type 1 diabetes. MiMedSurv is freely available on our web server (http://mimedsurv.micloud.kr). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The processing of personal data gives a rise to many privacy concerns, and one of them is to ensure the transparency of data processing to end users. Usually this information is communicated to them using privacy policies. In this paper, the problem of user notification in case of data breaches and policy changes is addressed, besides an ontology-based approach to model them is proposed. To specify the ontology concepts and properties, the requirements and recommendations for the legislative regulations as well as existing privacy policies are evaluated. A set of SPARQL queries to validate the correctness and completeness of the proposed ontology are developed. The proposed approach is applied to evaluate the privacy policies designed by cloud computing providers and IoT device manufacturers. The results of the analysis show that the transparency of user notification scenarios presented in the privacy policies is still very low, and the companies should reconsider the notification mechanisms and provide more detailed information in privacy policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling IoT applications in distributed computing systems as workflows enables automating their procedure. There are different types of workflow-based applications in the literature. Executing IoT applications using device-to-device (D2D) communications in distributed computing systems especially edge paradigms requiring direct communication between devices in a network with a graph topology. This paper introduces a toolkit for simulating resource management of scientific workflows with different structures in distributed environments with graph topology called WIDESim. The proposed simulator enables dynamic resource management and scheduling. We have validated the performance of WIDESim in comparison to standard simulators, also evaluated its performance in real-world scenarios of distributed computing. The results indicate that WIDESim’s performance is close to existing standard simulators besides its improvements. Additionally, the findings demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the extended features incorporated within WIDESim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text-to-image (TTI) models provide huge innovation ability for many industries, while the content security triggered by them has also attracted wide attention. Considerable research has focused on content security threats of large language models (LLMs), yet comprehensive studies on the content security of TTI models are notably scarce. This paper introduces a systematic tool, named EvilPromptFuzzer, designed to fuzz evil prompts in TTI models. For 15 kinds of fine-grained risks, EvilPromptFuzzer employs the strong knowledge-mining ability of LLMs to construct seed banks, in which the seeds cover various types of characters, interrelations, actions, objects, expressions, body parts, locations, surroundings, etc. Subsequently, these seeds are fed into the LLMs to build scene-diverse prompts, which can weaken the semantic sensitivity related to the fine-grained risks. Hence, the prompts can bypass the content audit mechanism of the TTI model, and ultimately help to generate images with inappropriate content. For the risks of violence, horrible, disgusting, animal cruelty, religious bias, political symbol, and extremism, the efficiency of EvilPromptFuzzer for generating inappropriate images based on DALL.E 3 are greater than 30%, namely, more than 30 generated images are malicious among 100 prompts. Specifically, the efficiency of horrible, disgusting, political symbols, and extremism up to 58%, 64%, 71%, and 50%, respectively. Additionally, we analyzed the vulnerability of existing popular content audit platforms, including Amazon, Google, Azure, and Baidu. Even the most effective Google SafeSearch cloud platform identifies only 33.85% of malicious images across three distinct categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an in-depth discussion on the comprehensive requirements analysis, design implementation, algorithm optimization, and experimental evaluation of an electric power marketing information system, aiming to build a modern information system that is efficient, secure, and user-friendly. In the requirements analysis phase, the importance of business process optimization, data management analysis, security compliance, system integration and scalability is emphasized, while the diversified needs of end customers are considered. For the design and implementation part, the system architecture is based on microservices and cloud-native technologies to ensure high performance and security; and modularized development is achieved through Spring Boot, Vue.js and other technology stacks. For algorithm optimization, LSTM is used for power demand prediction and anomaly detection by combining integrated learning and self-encoder, which improves the prediction accuracy and anomaly identification capability. Experimental evaluation shows that the system demonstrates good performance, security and scalability in cloud computing environment, and the cost-effectiveness is significantly better than traditional deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of cloud computing, cybersecurity has assumed paramount importance. As organizations transition to cloud-based solutions, cyberattackers increasingly target cloud services as a lucrative avenue for unauthorized access to sensitive information. The traditional security perimeter, once robust, now exhibits porosity, necessitating a reevaluation of security strategies to counter these evolving threats. This paper delves into the critical role of artificial intelligence (AI) within zero trust security technologies. The convergence of AI and zero trust has garnered significant attention, particularly in the domains of security enhancement, risk mitigation, and the redefinition of trust paradigms. My exploration aims to uncover how AI actively observes and supports various technologies in zero trust model. By evaluating existing research findings, I illuminate the transformative potential of AI in fortifying security within zero trust security models. This scholarly perspective underscores the critical interplay between AI and zero trust technologies, highlighting their collective potential in safeguarding digital ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With development of blockchain technology, clouding computing and Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain and cloud of things (BCoT) has become development tendency. But the security has become the most development hinder of BCoT. Attack detection model is a crucial part of attack revelation mechanism for BCoT. As a consequence, attack detection model has received more concerned. Due to the great diversity and variation of network attacks aiming to BCoT, tradition attack detection models are not suitable for BCoT. In this paper, we propose a novel attack detection model for BCoT, denoted as cVAE-DML. The novel model is based on contrastive variational autoencoder (cVAE) and deep metric learning (DML). By training the cVAE, the proposed model generates private features for attack traffic information as well as shared features between attack traffic information and normal traffic information. Based on those generated features, the proposed model can generate representative new samples to balance the training dataset. At last, the decoder of cVAE is connected to the deep metric learning network to detect attack aiming to BCoT. The efficiency of cVAE-DML is verified using the CIC-IDS 2017 dataset and CSE-CIC-IDS 2018 dataset. The results show that cVAE-DML can improve attack detection efficiency even under the condition of unbalanced samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is becoming increasingly dependant in computing intensive applications. The appearance of new paradigms, such as Internet of Things (IoT), and advances in technologies such as Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are creating a demand for high-performance applications. In this regard, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have the ability to provide better performance by allowing a high degree of data parallelism. These devices are also beneficial in specialized fields of manufacturing industry such as CAD/CAM. For all these applications, there is a recent tendency to offload these computations to the Cloud, using a computing offloading Cloud architecture. However, the use of GPUs in the Cloud presents some inefficiencies, where GPU virtualization is still not fully resolved, as our research on what main Cloud providers currently offer in terms of GPU Cloud instances shows. To address these problems, this paper first makes a review of current GPU technologies and programming techniques that increase concurrency, to then propose a Cloud computing outsourcing architecture to make more efficient use of these devices in the Cloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the popularity of the media cloud computing industry, individuals and organizations outsource image computation and storage to the media cloud server to reduce the storage burden. Media images usually contain a large amount of private information. To prevent disclosure of privacy of the image owners, media images are encrypted before uploading to the server. However, this operation will greatly limit the utilization of the image for the user, such as content-based image retrieval. We propose an efficient similarity query algorithm with access control based on Bkd-tree in this paper, in which a searchable encryption scheme is designed for similarity image retrieval, and the encrypted image is used to extract image features by a pre-trained CNN model. The Bkd-tree is utilized to generate an index tree for the image features to speed up retrieval and make it faster than linear indexing. Finally, the security performances of the proposed scheme is analyzed and the performance of this scheme is evaluated by experiments. The results show that the security of the image content and image features can be ensured, and it has a shorter retrieval time and higher retrieval efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many IoT technologies have been applied in the logistics industry in recent years, and they have had a substantial impact on many sectors such as shipping, air freight, warehousing, inventory, etc. Exploring technology opportunities and carrying out technological trend analysis are essential for IoT's evolution, and there are many techniques or methods for doing so. In this paper, data analysis and text mining techniques, technology opportunity analysis (TOA) and technology-service evolution analysis (TSEA) have been applied to analyze and observe IoT technologies' and services' evolution. Academic journals, market reports, and patents have been collected and reviewed on the topic of IoT in the logistics field in this paper. Moreover, by using TOA, technology opportunities have been analyzed to explore IoT-related logistics services. The results of TOA, for example, show that cloud technology is essential to develop smart logistics services, and communication RFID technologies are key to developing information logistics services. Finally, TSEA enables the observation of IoT technology and logistics service evolution by combining unstructured and semi-structured data from text documents. Observing the results of TSEA, the evolution of IoT in logistics is identified, and the results of TSEA also confirm those of TOA using unstructured or semi-structured text data from documents only. The results of this paper are discussed and compared with those of some previous review studies. In summary, the results of this paper provide methodological guidelines on this topic for a comprehensive understanding of IoT-related logistics services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live migration is an essential feature in virtual infrastructure and cloud computing datacenters. Using live migration, virtual machines can be online migrated from a physical machine to another with negligible service interruption. Load balance, power saving, dynamic resource allocation, and high availability algorithms in virtual data-centers and cloud computing environments are dependent on live migration. Live migration process has six phases that result in live migration cost. Several papers analyze and model live migration costs for different hypervisors, different kinds of workloads and different models of analysis. In addition, there are also many other papers that provide prediction techniques for live migration costs. It is a challenge for the reader to organize, classify, and compare live migration overhead research papers due to the broad focus of the papers in this domain. In this survey paper, we classify, analyze, and compare different papers that cover pre-copy live migration cost analysis and prediction from different angels to show the contributions and the drawbacks of each study. Papers classification helps the readers to get different studies details about a specific live migration cost parameter. The classification of the paper considers the papers' research focus, methodology, the hypervisors, and the cost parameters. Papers analysis helps the readers to know which model can be used for which hypervisor and to know the techniques used for live migration cost analysis and prediction. Papers comparison shows the contributions, drawbacks, and the modeling differences by each paper in a table format that simplifies the comparison. Virtualized Data-center and cloud computing clusters admins can also make use of this paper to know which live migration cost prediction model can fit for their environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As is well known that the global optimization ability of the Fruit fly Optimization Algorithm (FOA)is weak because it is easy to fall into local optimum. In this paper, a Fruit Fly Optimization Algorithm based on Locality Sensitive Hashing-aware (LSHFOA)was proposed. The locality sensitive hashing mechanism to optimize the generation mechanism for swarm population individuals was used, which can improve the individual diversity of the population. Meanwhile, when the fruit fly population falls into the local optimum, the locality sensitive hashing mechanism was adopted to change the population location, which is used for jumping out of local optimal limits. To verify the performance of LSHFOA, it was compared with FOA and its improvement algorithms CFOA, and IFFO with 8 representative benchmark functions. A large number of experimental results showed that LSHFOA has a faster convergence speed and higher precision of optimization for function optimization, especially in high-dimensional multi-peak functions. In addition to the theoretical evaluation, we also evaluate its performance in a real-world scenario. Generally, an edge computing environment, as an extension of cloud computing, can allow the users to access the network in a low-latency manner. In this way, to capture the high-speed convergence advantage, this paper makes the first attempt to tackle a classic research problem in the edge computing environment, i.e., the edge server placement problem. The experimental results show that the new algorithm has an excellent application effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring the agricultural production environment is crucial for optimal crop growth and resource efficiency. Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Big Data have revolutionized traditional agriculture, promising improved output and product quality. The popularity of these technologies drives their application in safety monitoring. This system facilitates data collection and transmission among equipment, overcoming challenges of traditional systems like investment, costs, and maintenance. In this paper, cloud computing-based AI optimization technology and big data network were proposed to monitor the safety of the agricultural production environment, and the shortcomings of traditional distance vector hop (DV hop) positioning algorithms were analyzed in depth. RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) technology improved the traditional DV Hop location method. The paper analyses direct and indirect transmission for data transmission between WSN and cloud nodes and favors indirect transmission because it consumes less invalid energy. Finally, the article compares several evaluations of alternative algorithms for monitoring system performance, including data transmission reliability, data reception rate, and data delay. The experimental results in this paper showed that in the data reception rate test, the data reception rate of System 2 was 97% at the lowest and 99% at the highest, both exceeding 95%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the construction of mountain tunnels, there are often various intricate and mutable potential hazards, the management and control of which are crucial to ensuring the safety of such construction. With the rapid advancement of engineering information technologies, including Building Information Model (BIM), the internet, big data, and cloud computing, dynamic management of mountain tunnel construction will inevitably become a prevailing trend. This paper proposes a new digital approach to realize the informatization and visualization of risk management in mountain tunnel construction, by combining monitoring measurement with advanced geological prediction based on BIM technology. The proposed approach suggests a BIM-based digital platform architecture for mountain tunnel construction, which is comprised of five layers—basic, model, data, application, and user. The integration of these five layers can realize risk management information during the construction of mountain tunnels. In addition, a set of dynamic risk management systems, including risk monitoring, identification, and assessment, can be established based on the digital platform. The digital platform and dynamic risk management system proposed in this paper have certain advantages in the construction of mountain tunnels, providing a new and significant way for the management of safety risks in such construction projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An independent university refers to an institution of higher learning that has a bachelor's degree or higher education, and cooperates with social organizations other than state institutions or individuals to use non-state financial funds to establish and implement undergraduate education. While welcoming the arrival of the fifth-generation communication technology (5G) era, China's independent universities are also carrying out educational reforms to adapt to social development. 5G has created new opportunities for the development of students. Cloud computing refers to a system with extremely strong computing power formed through computer networks (mostly the Internet), which can store, collect relevant resources and configure them as needed to provide personalized services to users. Therefore, this paper studied and discussed the application of 5G and cloud computing in English vocabulary learning in independent universities. This paper explores the impact of 5G and cloud computing environments on independent college English vocabulary learning. With the assistance of 5G technology and a cloud computing environment, students' vocabulary mastery and application abilities have achieved certain improvements. Students' vocabulary learning can not only effectively break through the constraints of region and time, but also improve the interaction of learning and promote the communication and exchange between learners. This can not only deepen the understanding of vocabulary but also stimulate students' learning initiative and improve their learning ability and level. Given the current situation of English vocabulary acquisition, this paper used the fuzzy evaluation method to establish an evaluation model. The learning platform built by 5G and cloud computing technology has been utilized to study the effect of applying it to learners' vocabulary learning. In the questionnaire survey, 43.00% of the students are generally satisfied with the current English vocabulary teaching, 33.20% of the students think that their learning effect is average, 43.00% of the students think that the arrangement of teaching content is not reasonable, and 35.40% of the students think that the arrangement of class hours is generally reasonable. Before the experiment, the vocabulary of 68 and 65 students in the experimental group and the control group were between 1500–3500. Through the experiment, 67 students in the experimental group had vocabularies in the range of 3501–6500, while the vast majority of students in the control group still had vocabularies in the range of 1500–3500. In addition, through the experiment, the average total score of English test scores increased from 67 to 87 for the experimental group and from 69 to 72 for the control group. Based on the above data, it can be seen that the learning of English vocabulary through independent learning platforms built on 5G and cloud computing has a significant effect on the learning of English vocabulary of independent university students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we present a highly practical marketing course. Through learning marketing, we can cultivate students’ ability to analyze, solve and practice problems. Therefore, this paper would study the problems encountered in the marketing course through cloud computing technology and propose corresponding countermeasures, so as to better improve students’ ability to analyze and solve problems and enhance the effectiveness of the classroom. This paper also analyzed the data aggregation algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The results showed that when other conditions were the same, only 6 students approve of the traditional marketing teaching mode, accounting for 12%; there were 44 people who did not approve, accounting for 88%. This number was more than half; 49 students recognized the optimized marketing teaching mode, accounting for 98%; there was 1 person who did not approve, accounting for 2%. The proportion of people who did not approve after optimization was far less than that of the traditional model, which showed that cloud computing data aggregation algorithm could find out the problems in marketing teaching and provide correct countermeasures to solve them, so that the teaching model could be optimized. (1) The data aggregation algorithm based on cloud computing has a good optimization effect on the evaluation of marketing teaching problems and countermeasures, indicating a new direction for future research. (2) The combination of cloud computing and data aggregation algorithm is not only a novel research perspective, but also a perfect idea. (3) Marketing course is a very important course in today’s society. The study of its teaching problems and countermeasures evaluation will help students improve their learning efficiency and enhance their ability to adapt to the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, cloud computing provides users all over the globe with Information and Communication Technology facilities that are utility-oriented. This technology is trying to drive the development of data center design by designing and building them as networks of cloud machines, enabling users to access and run the application from any part of the globe. Cloud computing provides considerable benefits to organizations by providing rapid and adaptable ICT software and hardware systems, allowing them to concentrate on creating innovative business values for the facilities they provide. The right to privacy of big data has acquired new definitions with the continued advancement of cloud computing, and the techniques available to protect citizens' personal information under administrative law have managed to grow in a multitude. Because of the foregoing, internet fraud is a new type of crime that has emerged over time and is based on network technology. This paper analyzed and studied China's internet fraud governance capabilities, and made a comprehensive evaluation of them using cloud computing technology and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This paper discussed personal information security and the improvement of criminal responsibility from the perspective of citizens' information security and designed and analyzed cases. In addition, this paper also analyzed and studied the ability of network fraud governance in the era of cloud computing. It also carried out a comprehensive evaluation and used the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to carry out the evaluation. A questionnaire survey was used to survey 100 residents in district X of city Z and district Y of the suburban area. Among the 100 people, almost all of them received scam calls or text messages, accounting for 99%, of which 8 were scammed. Among the people, more than 59.00% of the people expressed dissatisfaction with the government's Internet fraud satisfaction survey. Therefore, in the process of combating Internet fraud, the government still needs to step up its efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the introduction of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, the railway communication network has the characteristics of complex structure and blurred boundaries, which leads to a series of security threats including information leakage and malicious access. Specifically, the third-party cloud services are difficult to be supervised, and network traffic is untrustworthy. To ensure system security, we propose a zero-trust security model in this paper. Then, we introduce blockchain and Merkle tree to build a distributed identity storage scheme for guaranteeing reliable, confidential and efficient data updates, and improving authentication efficiency. Furthermore, the proxy was introduced for two-way authentication with cloud servers, so that internal and external threats could be counteracted. Moreover, reputation assessment mechanism has been adopted to reduce the possibility of nodes accessing malicious cloud services. Performance analysis demonstrated that the proposed security model is able to enhance the security, efficiency and stability of the system, and consequently can guarantee the safety and reliability of railway transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a medical emergency situation, real-time patient data sharing may improve the survivability of a patient. In this paper, we explore how Digital Twin (DT) technology can be used for real-time data storage and processing in emergency healthcare. We investigated various enabling technologies, including cloud platforms, data transmission formats, and storage file formats, to develop a feasible DT storage solution for emergency healthcare. Through our analysis, we found Amazon AWS to be the most suitable cloud platform due to its sophisticated real-time data processing and analytical tools. Additionally, we determine that the MQTT protocol is suitable for real-time medical data transmission, and FHIR is the most appropriate medical file storage format for emergency healthcare situations. We propose a cloud-based DT storage solution, in which real-time medical data are transmitted to AWS IoT Core, processed by Kinesis Data Analytics, and stored securely in AWS HealthLake. Despite the feasibility of the proposed solution, challenges such as insufficient access control, lack of encryption, and vendor conformity must be addressed for successful practical implementation. Future work may involve Hyperledger Fabric technology and HTTPS protocol to enhance security, while the maturation of DT technology is expected to resolve vendor conformity issues. By addressing these challenges, our proposed DT storage solution has the potential to improve data accessibility and decision-making in emergency healthcare settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, surveillance systems have significantly increased in various environments. The Internet of Things (IoT), which interconnects objects through the Internet, enhances the capabilities of these systems. Typically, in IoT-enabled surveillance systems, the recorded videos should be processed and stored in cloud servers, which increases the system response time. Sending the videos to a cloud data center through the infrastructure network may also cause performance issues such as delay, jitter, and packet loss. Usually, edge computing is a viable solution to overcome these problems. This paper proposes a deep learning-based network traffic management policy for IoT-enabled surveillance systems in which the user's quality of experience (QoE) is a performance metric. For this purpose, first, a host in the edge data center preprocesses the video to reduce the video file size. Next, we designed a QoE-aware routing algorithm that uses a minimum delay-maximum mean opinion score heuristic algorithm to create a dataset that contains optimal routes with high QoE values. Then, it trains a sequential deep recurrent neural network (deep-RNN) on this dataset, and the trained model predicts the optimal routes between a source edge data center and a destination cloud center. Because software-defined networks (SDN) facilitate the execution of intelligent algorithms in networks, we implemented the proposed policy in the SDN controller of the infrastructure network. The simulation results showed that the proposed method could reduce the end-to-end packet loss ratio and increase the QoE values in IoT-enabled surveillance systems. Furthermore, converting the video codec on the edge layer reduces the video size, reducing the network latency by 50%. The experimental results also showed 94% accuracy using the proposed sequential deep RNN model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain technology has gained significant attention in the most recent years due to its potential to address related issues to privacy, transparency, and security. In the healthcare industry, it is considered a promising solution to challenges related to data management, medical data privacy, and security. This paper proposes a novel framework for managing electronic medical healthcare records that uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a secure and cost-effective solution. The proposed solution uses a serverless approach to reduce costs and only pay for the compute resources when needed. The framework focuses on improving the security of access to the blockchain network by implementing a multi-level security approach, starting from protecting the Hyperledger and implementing role-based access for end-users who require access to the stored data. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated by creating a role-based access matrix for three different user types and performing multiple experiments to validate access for each user type.Article highlights: Secured Hyperledger blockchain network using Amazon Web Services. Serverless solution for the API layer using Amazon Lambda function and API gateway and secured using Amazon Cognito. Three members in the network to support separation of concerns between medical facility, patient and enforcement authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of Cloud Computing into a service utility, along with the pervasive adoption of the IoT paradigm, has promoted a significant growth in the need of computational and storage services. The traditional use of cloud services, focused on the consumption of one provider, is not valid anymore due to different shortcomings being the risk of vendor lock-in a critical. We are assisting to a change of paradigm, from the usage of a single cloud provider to the combination of multiple cloud service types, affecting the way in which applications are designed, developed, deployed and operated over such heterogeneous ecosystems. The result is an effective heterogeneity of architectures, methods, tools, and frameworks, copying with the multi-cloud application concept. The goal of this study is manifold. Firstly, it aims to characterize the multi-cloud concept from the application development perspective by reviewing existing definitions of multi-cloud native applications in the literature. Secondly, we set up the basis for the architectural characterization of these kind of applications. Finally, we highlight several open research issues drawn up from the analysis carried out. To achieve that, we have conducted a systematic literature review (SLR), where, a large set of primary studies published between 2011 and 2021 have been studied and classified. The in-depth analysis has revealed five main research trends for the improvement of the development and operation DevOps lifecycle of "multi-cloud native applications". The paper finishes with directions for future work and research challenges to be addressed by the software community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing is seen as a more promising technology than any other traditional information technology computing paradigm in today's world. It essentially functions as an on-demand resource provisioning platform that requires no active user participation. The resource provisioning strategies necessitate proper load distribution management across the cloud network, without which the cloud would experience biased workload performance. Today virtualization is the cornerstone of cloud computing, allowing data dissemination and administration via deploying virtual machines. Modern applications contain data that need to be stored into a scheme called polyglot persistence (combining SQL and NoSQL data-stores). However, these services are tailored to specific storage requirements, necessitating aggregating them from several heterogeneous clouds or migrating data from one cloud to another. Data migration can be done offline where the database is independent of the application, or otherwise, the application has to be down for the migration period. This paper developed a middleware in.NET Core facilitating the live migration of persistent polyglot data in heterogeneous clouds. This paper presents the proof of concept for live migration of the database layer of an application hosted on any supported clouds to any implemented cloud's data-store. Our suggested technique performs better in migration time, energy usage, and throughput aspects as compared with the offline migration scenario. In our experimentation, we found that while migrating data in offline mode from SQL to mongo and vice versa there is a marginal increase of 29% and 11%, respectively, in latency time. This increase is acceptable and tolerable while considering the live data migration scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing technology offers flexible and expedient services that carry a variety of profits for both societies as well as individuals. De-duplication techniques were developed to minimize redundant data in the cloud storage. But, one of the main challenges of cloud storage is data deduplication with secure data storage.To overcome the issue, we propose Boneh Goh Nissim Bilinear Attribute-based Optimal Cache Oblivious (BGNBA-OCO) access control and secure de-duplication for data storage in cloud computing in this paper. The proposed method achieves fne-grained access control with low computation consumption. We design Boneh Goh Nissim Privacy Preserving Revocable Attribute-based Encryption that reinforces attribute revocation and averts the discharge of sensitive information. Furthermore, we utilize Optimal Cache Oblivious algorithm to prevent disclosure of access patterns to hide the access patterns in cloud storage via rand pattern matching. We support updating both encrypted data and access control policies to minimize communication and computation overhead of data duplication and encryption processes concurrently. We perform secure data sharing to achieve higher data confidentiality and integrity. Finally, we conducted the extensive experiments in cloud and the results illustrated that our proposed BGNBA-OCO method is more efficient than related works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of cloud computing technology, cloud storage services are becoming more and more mature. However, the storage of sensitive data on remote servers poses privacy risks and is presently a source of concern. Searchable Encryption (SE) is an effective method for protecting sensitive data while preserving server-side searchability. Hierarchical Public key Encryption with Keyword Search (HPEKS), a new variant of SE, allows users with higher access permission to search over encrypted data sent to lower-level users. To the best of our knowledge, there exist only four HPEKS schemes in the literature. Two of them are in traditional public-key setting, and the remaining ones are identity-based public key cryptosystems. Unfortunately, all of the four existing HPEKS schemes are vulnerable against inside Keyword Guessing Attacks (KGAs). Moreover, all of the existing HPEKS schemes are based on the computationally expensive bilinear pairing operation which dramatically increases the computational costs. To overcome these issues, in this paper, we introduce the notion of Hierarchical Identity-Based Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (HIBAEKS). We formulate a security model for HIBAEKS and propose an efficient pairing-free HIBAEKS scheme. We then prove that the proposed HIBAEKS scheme is secure under the defined security model and is resistant against KGAs. Finally, we compare our proposed scheme with related constructions regarding security requirements, computational and communication costs to indicate the overall superiority of our proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on resource management focuses on optimizing system performance and energy efficiency by distributing shared resources like processor cores, caches, and main memory among competing applications. This research spans a wide range of applications, including those from high-performance computing, machine learning, and mobile computing. Existing research frameworks often simplify research by concentrating on specific characteristics, such as the architecture of the computing nodes, resource monitoring, and representative workloads. For instance, this is typically the case with cloud systems, which introduce additional complexity regarding hardware and software requirements. To avoid this complexity during research, experimental frameworks are being developed. Nevertheless, proposed frameworks often fail regarding the types of nodes included, virtualization support, and management of critical shared resources. This paper presents Stratus, an experimental framework that overcomes these limitations. Stratus includes different types of nodes, a comprehensive virtualization stack, and the ability to partition the major shared resources of the system. Even though Stratus was originally conceived to perform cloud research, its modular design allows Stratus to be extended, broadening its research use on different computing domains and platforms, matching the complexity of modern cloud environments, as shown in the case studies presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to growing network data dissemination in cloud, the elasticity, pay as you go options, globally accessible facilities, and security of networks have become increasingly important in today's world. Cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and others, facilitate worldwide expansion within minutes by offering decentralized communication network functions, hence providing security to cloud is still remains a challenging task. This paper aims to introduce and evaluate the Biz-SCOP model, a novel intrusion detection system developed for cloud security. The research addresses the pressing need for effective intrusion detection in cloud environments by combining hybrid optimization techniques and advanced deep learning methodologies. The study employs prominent intrusion datasets, including CSE-CIC-IDS 2018, CIC-IDS 2017, and a cloud intrusion dataset, to assess the proposed model's performance. The study's design involves implementing the Biz-SCOP model using Matlab 2019 software on a Windows 10 OS platform, utilizing 8 GB RAM and an Intel core i3 processor. The hybrid optimization approach, termed HyPSM, is employed for feature selection, enhancing the model's efficiency. Additionally, an intelligent deep learning model, C2AE, is introduced to discern friendly and hostile communication, contributing to accurate intrusion detection. Key findings indicate that the Biz-SCOP model outperforms existing intrusion detection systems, achieving notable accuracy (99.8%), precision (99.7%), F1-score (99.8%), and GEO (99.9%). The model excels in identifying various attack types, as demonstrated by robust ROC analysis. Interpretations and conclusions emphasize the significance of hybrid optimization and advanced deep learning techniques in enhancing intrusion detection system performance. The proposed model exhibits lower computational load, reduced false positives, ease of implementation, and improved accuracy, positioning it as a promising solution for cloud security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud applications are built from a set of components often deployed as containers, which can be deployed individually on separate Virtual Machines (VMs) or grouped on a smaller set of VMs. Additionally, the application owner may have inhibition constraints regarding the co-location of components. Finding the best way to deploy an application means finding the best groups of components and the best VMs, and it is not trivial because of the complexity coming from the number of possible options. The problem can be mapped onto may known combinatorial problems as binpacking and knapsack formulations. However, these approaches often assume homogeneus resources and fail to incorporate the inhibition constraints. The main contribution of this paper are firstly a novel formulation of the grouping problem as constrained Coalition Structure Generation (CSG) problem, including the specification of the value function which fulfills the criteria of a Characteristic Function Game (CFG). The CSG problem aims to determine stable and disjoint groups of players collaborating to optimize the joint outcome of the game, and a CFG is a common representation of a CSG, where each group is assigned a value and where the value of the game is the sum of the groups' contributions. Secondly, the Integer-Partition (IP) CSG algorithm has been modified and extended to handle constraints. The proposed approach is evaluated with the extended IP algorithm, and a novel exhaustive search algorithm establishing the optimum grouping for comparison. The evaluation shows that our approach with the modified algorithm evaluates on average significantly less combinations than the CSG state-of-the-art algorithm. The proposed approach is promising for optimized constrained Cloud application management as the modified IP algorithm can optimally solve constrained grouping problems of attainable sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate how the petroleum industry evaluates and selects powerful cloud service providers, first, an evaluation index system including 25 indices such as scalability and private data protection is built. This index system can systematically examine the comprehensive strengths of cloud service providers. Aiming to solve the problems that the traditional expert evaluation method has high requirements on expert experience and is easily affected by subjective factors, a novel artificial intelligence evaluation model named TentISSA-BPNN is proposed. The objective evaluation ability of this model can be effectively used in evaluation research on cloud service providers for petroleum enterprises. In this model, the SSA algorithm is optimized by Tent chaotic mapping and adaptive inertia weight; an algorithm, TentISSA, that has good stability and fast convergence speed is designed and proposed; and the BPNN is improved with TentISSA to obtain more accurate evaluation results. To evaluate the performance of the TentISSA algorithm, nine unimodal and multimodal functions are selected in this paper to test the convergence accuracy. Then, seven models are selected as the control groups to validate the effectiveness and performance of the TentISSA-BPNN evaluation model proposed in this paper. Finally, the preprocessed data of the candidate cloud service providers are input into the trained neural network model proposed in this paper for evaluation. Based on the ranking of the evaluation scores, the comprehensive strengths of the cloud service providers are obtained to provide a decision-making reference for managers of petroleum enterprises in the process of choosing cloud service providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of cloud computing, users are more inclined to outsource complex computing tasks to cloud servers with strong computing capacity, and the cloud returns the final calculation results. However, the cloud is not completely trustworthy, which may leak the data of user and even return incorrect calculations on purpose. Therefore, it is important to verify the results of computing tasks without revealing the privacy of the users. Among all the computing tasks, the polynomial calculation is widely used in information security, linear algebra, signal processing and other fields. Most existing polynomial-based verifiable computation schemes require that the input of the polynomial function must come from a single data source, which means that the data must be signed by a single user. However, the input of the polynomial may come from multiple users in the practical application. In order to solve this problem, the researchers have proposed some schemes for multi-source outsourced data, but these schemes have the common problem of low efficiency. To improve the efficiency, this paper proposes an efficient polynomial-based verifiable computation scheme on multi-source outsourced data. We optimize the polynomials using Horner's method to increase the speed of verification, in which the addition gate and the multiplication gate can be interleaved to represent the polynomial function. In order to adapt to this structure, we design the corresponding homomorphic verification tag, so that the input of the polynomial can come from multiple data sources. We prove the correctness and rationality of the scheme, and carry out numerical analysis and evaluation research to verify the efficiency of the scheme. The experimental indicate that data contributors can sign 1000 new data in merely 2 s, while the verification of a delegated polynomial function with a power of 100 requires only 18 ms. These results confirm that the proposed scheme is better than the existing scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous development and combined application of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, some new methods have emerged to reduce task execution time for training neural network models in a cloud-edge collaborative environment. The most attractive method is neural network model segmentation. However, many factors affect the segmentation point, such as resource allocation, system energy consumption, load balancing, and network Bandwidth allocation. Some segmentation methods consider the shortest task execution time, which ignores the utilization of resources at the edge and can result in resource waste. Additionally, these factors are difficult to measure, which presents a challenge in calculating the best segmentation point to achieve the goal of maximum resource utilization and minimum task execution time. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a cloud-edge collaborative task scheduling method based on model segmentation (CECMS). This method first analyzes the factors affecting the segmentation point of the model and then obtains accurate factors that affect the segmentation point calculation through the pre-execution method. Furthermore, a multi-objective solution algorithm is improved to calculate the optimal model segmentation point. And tasks are separately offloaded to the edge and cloud based on the optimal model segmentation point. Finally, the experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of this method. Finally, the effectiveness of the CECMS method was verified through simulation experiments. Compared with the Dynamic Adaptive DNN Surgery (DADS) method and an adaptive DNN inference acceleration framework algorithm with end–edge–cloud collaborative computing algorithm (ADC), CECMS achieves the same effectiveness as DADS and ADC in optimizing task execution time by comprehensively considering the utilization of edge resources and minimizing task execution time, while also effectively ensuring resource utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting a virtual machine (VM) is a common operation in cloud computing platforms. In order to achieve better management of resource provisioning, a cloud platform needs to accurately estimate the VM boot time. In this paper, we have conducted several experiments to analyze the factors that could affect VM boot time in a computer cluster with shared storage. We also implemented four models for VM boot time prediction and evaluated the performance of the four models based on the datasets of four hosts and seven hosts in our environment, where the four models are the rule-based model, the regression tree model, the random forest regression model, and the linear regression model. According to our analysis, we found that host capability and maximal network bandwidth are two main factors that can influence VM boot time. We also found that VM boot time becomes harder to predict when booting VMs at different hosts concurrently due to competition between hosts to obtain resources. According to the experimental results, the proposed random forest regression is the best model for VM boot time prediction with an average accuracy of 94.76 % and 96.59 % in predicting VM boot time in two clusters with four and seven compute hosts, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of cloud computing, mobile devices and mobile applications, mobile social cloud has gradually become a very potential technology. Mobile social cloud is a mobile application platform with collaboration as the core and resource sharing as the main purpose to carry out social interaction, so there are complex social relationships among cloud members. This paper analyzes the design characteristics of intelligent hardware products from the perspective of interaction mode, and studies the innovative design method of entity interaction. This paper summarizes the research results of interaction design of intelligent hardware products, and the research status of entity interaction and its design methods. Based on the research results of intelligent hardware product design and entity interaction theory, this paper proposes an intelligent hardware product design method based on entity interaction with "library" as the core. Voice is the most commonly used way to transmit and exchange information. With the development of science and technology, more and more products add voice function, using text processing technology, so that the machine, APP, web page can understand the user's intention, and complete the human–computer interaction between products and users. In the cloud social voice environment, this paper studies the data analysis framework of visual interactive product design. The complex information environment is constructed for the further study. The experiment analysis is provided for the testing of robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fog computing concept was proposed to help cloud computing for the data processing of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, fog computing faces several challenges such as security, privacy, and storage. One way to address these challenges is to integrate blockchain with fog computing. There are several applications of blockchain-fog computing integration that have been proposed, recently, due to their lucrative benefits such as enhancing security and privacy. There is a need to systematically review and synthesize the literature on this topic of blockchain-fog computing integration. The purposes of integrating blockchain and fog computing were determined using a systematic literature review approach and tailored search criteria established from the research questions. In this research, 181 relevant papers were found and reviewed. The results showed that the authors proposed the combination of blockchain and fog computing for several purposes such as security, privacy, access control, and trust management. A lack of standards and laws may make it difficult for blockchain and fog computing to be integrated in the future, particularly in light of newly developed technologies like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. The findings of this paper serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners of blockchain-fog computing integration for future research and designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cloud of things (CloudIoT) represents a general system of supporting infrastructure for storing and processing information gathered from smart objects and their communications.There are many resources used to respond to requests in the CloudIoT environment. Therefore, a primary challenge in these systems is resource discovery based on the requests. Discovering and accessing resources, overcoming user constraints, and focusing on dynamic requirements, such as failure nodes, are the most critical issues to be addressed. This paper focuses on several resource discovery mechanisms using the systematic literature review method in the CloudIoT environment. The research aims at analyzing and reviewing studies published from 2016 to 2021 (June) on resource discovery in CloudIoT. The technical classification of resource discovery is based on selected studies by considering architecture, algorithm, middleware, and protocol approaches. These studies are discussed in terms of their main ideas, advantages, and weaknesses. Finally, future research opportunities related to resource discovery in the cloud of things are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]