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Worm-like ransomware strains spread quickly to critical systems such as IoMT without human interaction. Therefore, detecting different worm-like ransomware attacks during their spread is vital. Nevertheless, the low detection rate due to the imbalanced ransomware data and the detection systems’ disability for multiclass simultaneous detection are two apparent problems. In this work, we proposed a new approach for multi-classifying ransomware using preprocessing, resampling, and different classifiers. The proposed system uses network traffic NetFlow data, which is privacy-friendly and not heavy. In the first phase, preprocessing techniques were used on the collected and aggregated ransomware traffic, and then an optimized Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) was used for resampling the low-class samples. After that, four classifiers were applied, namely, Bayes Net, Hoeffding Tree, K-Nearest Neighbor, and a lightweight Multi-Layered Perceptron (MLP). The experimental results showed that the efficient preprocessing ensured accurate and simultaneous ransomware detection while the resampling technique improved the detection rate, F1, and PRC curve.

There exist numerous solutions to detect malicious URLs based on Natural Language Processing and machine learning technologies. However, there is a lack of comparative analysis among approaches using distributed representation and deep learning. To solve this problem, this paper performs a comparative study on phishing URL detection based on text embedding and deep learning algorithms. Specifically, character-level and word-level embedding were combined to learn the feature representations from the webpage URLs. In addition, three deep learning models, including Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU), and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), were constructed for effective classification of phishing websites. Several experiments were conducted and various evaluation metrics were used to assess the performance of these deep learning models. The findings obtained from the experiments indicated that the combination of the character-level and word-level embedding approach produced better results than the individual text representation methods. Also, the CNN-based model outperformed the other two deep learning algorithms in terms of both detection accuracy and execution time.

One of the challenging issues in detecting the malware is that modern stealthy malware prefers to stay hidden during their attacks on our devices and be obfuscated. They can evade antivirus scanners or other malware analysis tools and might attempt to thwart modern detection, including altering the file attributes or performing the action under the pretense of authorized services. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand and analyze how malware implements obfuscation techniques to curb these concerns. This paper is dedicated to presenting an analysis of anti-obfuscation techniques for malware detection. Furthermore, an empirical analysis of the performance evaluation of malware detection using machine learning algorithms and the obfuscation techniques was conducted to address the associated issues that might help researchers plan and generate an efficient algorithm for malware detection.

BACKGROND: One of the important areas of heart research is to analyze heart rate variability during (HRV) walking. OBJECTIVE: In this research, we investigated the correction between heart activation and the variations of walking paths. METHOD: We employed Shannon entropy to analyze how the information content of walking paths affects the information content of HRV. Eight healthy students walked on three designed walking paths with different information contents while we recorded their ECG signals. We computed and analyzed the Shannon entropy of the R-R interval time series (as an indicator of HRV) versus the Shannon entropy of different walking paths and accordingly evaluated their relation. RESULTS: According to the obtained results, walking on the path that contains more information leads to less information in the R-R time series. CONCLUSION: The analysis method employed in this research can be extended to analyze the relation between other physiological signals (such as brain or muscle reactions) and the walking path.

Porcelain insulators are mostly created from the combination of the particles of Clay, Silica, Kaolin, and Feldspar. This implies that different particle sizes contribute to the insulating properties of the materials. In this paper, we attempt to create a set of model porcelain materials by critically analysing the particle sizes that are most likely to yield the best insulator results. Materials sourced from Edo State, Nigeria were processed to produce Porcelain insulator samples. For each of the component minerals, a 65g mass was compacted and pressed at 500 Psi (3.4 KN) into a steel cylindrical mould via hydraulic press, this was closely followed by firing at 1200°C. Porosity, bulk density, insulation volume resistivity, as well as dielectric strength, and their relationship with particle sizes were evaluated. Results obtained showed that porosity of the Porcelain materials shared a direct relation with particle sizes, while the bulk density showed an inverse relationship. It was also observed that the 150 µm particles yielded the most effective insulators, given higher insulation volume resistivity and dielectric strength. Altering particle size from 150 µm tends to lower the insulation volume resistivity and dielectric strength.

Our skin reacts to various stimuli that we receive. Since all parts of the human body are controlled by the brain, a relationship should exist among brain and skin activities. This study evaluates ...

Due to the complex underwater environment, conventional measurement and sensing methods used for land are difficult to apply directly in the underwater environment. Especially for seabed topography, it is impossible to perform long-distance and accurate detection by electromagnetic waves. Therefore, various types of acoustic and even optical sensing devices for underwater applications have been used. Equipped with submersibles, these underwater sensors can detect a wide underwater range accurately. In addition, the development of sensor technology will be modified and optimized according to the needs of ocean exploitation. In this paper, we propose a multiagent approach for optimizing the quality of monitoring (QoM) in underwater sensor networks. Our framework aspires to optimize the QoM by resorting to the machine learning concept of diversity. We devise a multiagent optimization procedure which is able to both reduce the redundancy among the sensor readings and maximize the diversity in a distributed and adaptive manner. The mobile sensor positions are adjusted iteratively using a gradient type of updates. The overall framework is tested through simulations based on realistic environment conditions. The proposed approach is compared to other placement approaches and is found to achieve a higher QoM with a smaller number of sensors.

Automatic facial expression recognition (FER) is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision. FER admits a wide range of applications in human–computer interaction, behavioral psychology, and human expression synthesis. Extensive works have been reported in this field, mainly, based on handcrafted features. However, it is a challenging task to accurately extract all the correlated handcrafted features due to the effect of variations caused by emotional state. Therefore, there is a quest for further research on accurately extracting relevant features that can capture changes in facial expressions (FEs) with high fidelity. In this study, we propose FER-net: a convolution neural network to distinguish FEs efficiently with the help of the softmax classifier. We implement our method FER-net along with twenty-one state-of-the-art methods and test them on five benchmarking datasets, namely FER2013, Japanese Female Facial Expressions, Extended CohnKanade, Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces, and Real-world Affective Faces. Seven FEs, namely neutral, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, are considered in this work. The average accuracies on these datasets are 78.9%, 96.7%, 97.8%, 82.5% and 81.68%, respectively. The obtained results demonstrate that FER-net is preeminent in comparison with twenty-one state-of-the-art methods.

In 2019, citizens of Indonesia participated in the democratic process of electing a new president, vice president, and various legislative candidates for the country. The 2019 Indonesian presidential election was very tense in terms of the candidates' campaigns in cyberspace, especially on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc. The Indonesian people used social media platforms to express their positive, neutral, and also negative opinions on the respective presidential candidates. The campaigning of respective social media users on their choice of candidates for regents, governors, and legislative positions up to presidential candidates was conducted via the Internet and online media. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to conduct sentiment analysis on the candidates in the 2019 Indonesia presidential election based on Twitter datasets. The study used datasets on the opinions expressed by the Indonesian people available on Twitter with the hashtags (#) containing "Jokowi and Prabowo." We conducted data pre-processing using a selection of comments, data cleansing, text parsing, sentence normalization and tokenization based on the given text in the Indonesian language, determination of class attributes, and, finally, we classified the Twitter posts with the hashtags (#) using Naïve Bayes Classifier (NBC) and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to achieve an optimal and maximum optimization accuracy. The study provides benefits in terms of helping the community to research opinions on Twitter that contain positive, neutral, or negative sentiments. Sentiment Analysis on the candidates in the 2019 Indonesian presidential election on Twitter using non-conventional processes resulted in cost, time, and effort savings. This research proved that the combination of the SVM machine learning algorithm and alphabetic tokenization produced the highest accuracy value of 79.02%. While the lowest accuracy value in this study was obtained with a combination of the NBC machine learning algorithm and N-gram tokenization with an accuracy value of 44.94%. ABSTRAK: Pada tahun 2019 rakyat Indonesia telah terlibat dalam proses demokrasi memilih presiden baru, wakil presiden, dan berbagai calon legislatif negara. Pemilihan presiden Indonesia 2019 sangat tegang dalam kempen calon di ruang siber, terutama di laman media sosial seperti Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, LinkedIn, dll. Rakyat Indonesia menggunakan platfom media sosial bagi menyatakan pendapat positif, berkecuali, dan juga negatif terhadap calon presiden masing-masing. Kampen pencalonan menteri, gabenor, dan perundangan hingga pencalonan presiden dilakukan melalui media internet dan atas talian. Oleh itu, kajian ini dilakukan bagi menilai sentimen terhadap calon pemilihan presiden Indonesia 2019 berdasarkan kumpulan data Twitter. Kajian ini menggunakan kumpulan data yang diungkapkan oleh rakyat Indonesia yang terdapat di Twitter dengan hashtag (#) yang mengandungi "Jokowi dan Prabowo." Proses data dibuat menggunakan pilihan komentar, pembersihan data, penguraian teks, normalisasi kalimat, dan tokenisasi teks dalam bahasa Indonesia, penentuan atribut kelas, dan akhirnya, pengklasifikasian catatan Twitter dengan hashtag (#) menggunakan Klasifikasi Naïve Bayes (NBC) dan Mesin Vektor Sokongan (SVM) bagi mencapai ketepatan optimum dan maksimum. Kajian ini memberikan faedah dari segi membantu masyarakat meneliti pendapat di Twitter yang mengandungi sentimen positif, neutral, atau negatif. Analisis Sentimen terhadap calon dalam pemilihan presiden Indonesia 2019 di Twitter menggunakan proses bukan konvensional menghasilkan penjimatan kos, waktu, dan usaha. Penyelidikan ini membuktikan bahawa gabungan algoritma pembelajaran mesin SVM dan tokenisasi abjad menghasilkan nilai ketepatan tertinggi iaitu 79.02%. Manakala nilai ketepatan terendah dalam kajian ini diperoleh dengan kombinasi algoritma pembelajaran mesin NBC dan tokenisasi N-gram dengan nilai ketepatan 44.94%.

The integration of heterogeneous communication services and devices has led to paradigm shift towards unified communications, which promise to improve productivity and lifestyle by creating the digitally connected life and work environment. The increasing use of various devices for accessing web-based rather than native unified communication is expected to initiate the rise of interest among various parties included in the service delivery chain in comprehension of the influence of different perceptual dimensions on user’s quality of experience. This paper presents a multidimensional analysis of quality of experience for web-based unified communication. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, the multidimensional model, which quantifies the mutual relations between quality of experience and numerous perceivable dimensions of the experience that determine its quality is proposed. Second, the importance of distinct dimensions in terms of overall user perceived quality of experience for web-based unified communication is identified.

Depression is a common reason for an increase in suicide cases worldwide. Thus, to mitigate the effects of depression, accurate diagnosis and treatment are needed. An electroencephalogram (EEG) is an instrument used to measure and record the brain’s electrical activities. It can be utilized to produce the exact report on the level of depression. Previous studies proved the feasibility of the usage of EEG data and deep learning (DL) models for diagnosing mental illness. Therefore, this study proposes a DL-based convolutional neural network (CNN) called DeprNet for classifying the EEG data of depressed and normal subjects. Here, the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 score is used for quantifying the level of depression. The performance of DeprNet in two experiments, namely, the recordwise split and the subjectwise split, is presented in this study. The results attained by DeprNet have an accuracy of 0.9937, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.999 is achieved when recordwise split data are considered. On the other hand, an accuracy of 0.914 and the AUC of 0.956 are obtained, while subjectwise split data are employed. These results suggest that CNN trained on recordwise split data gets overtrained on EEG data with a small number of subjects. The performance of DeprNet is remarkable compared with the other eight baseline models. Furthermore, on visualizing the last CNN layer, it is found that the values of right electrodes are prominent for depressed subjects, whereas, for normal subjects, the values of left electrodes are prominent.

Nowadays, the usage of deep learning-based approaches for salient object detection (SOD) is increasing exponentially to detect and localize visually distinct regions in static images. However, the variability in scales of salient objects requires further attention given the abstract nature of the multilayer feature hierarchy of convolution neural networks (CNNs). First, feature maps of different layers in CNNs embed abstract information about objects that changes with the object’s scale. Second, the progressive feature fusion in models, such as the feature pyramid network, loses its effectiveness in detecting sharp boundaries due to the late fusion of detailed features. This work proposes two modules namely, adjacent layer attention block and partial encoder–decoder (PED) block to handle the aforementioned issues. The proposed adjacent layer attention block facilitates communication among the layers of closest abstraction to mine abundant scale features at the current resolution. The resultant integrated feature at a resolution contains detailed and semantic information from interaction among the adjacent layers useful to extract scale information of complex objects. A PED module utilizes the resolution-specific integrated features from the adjacent layer attention block of its corresponding encoder to generate multiscale features, and fuse them in a top-down manner. This level-specific distribution of aggregated features within a PED helps coarser layers of the network to acquire boundary information. Experimental results on five broadly used SOD datasets are compared with recent 20 state-of-the-art SOD models. The proposed method performs favorably against its competitors without any preprocessing or postprocessing.

The authors wish to thank Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) for its support under Research University Grant Vot- 20H04, Malaysia Research University Network (MRUN) Vot 4L876. The authors would like to acknowledge that this work was supported/funded by the Ministry of Higher Education under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1). The work was also partially supported by the Specific Research project (SPEV) at the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic, under Grant 2102-2021. The authors are grateful for the support of student Sebastien Mambou in consultations regarding application aspects. The authors also wish to thank the Ministry of Education Malaysia for the Hadiah Latihan Persekutuan (HLP) scholarship to complete the research., A botnet is a malware program that a hacker remotely controls called a botmaster. Botnet can perform massive cyber-attacks such as DDOS, SPAM, click-fraud, information, and identity stealing. The botnet also can avoid being detected by a security system. The traditional method of detecting botnets commonly used signature-based analysis unable to detect unseen botnets. The behavior-based analysis seems like a promising solution to the current trends of botnets that keep evolving. This paper proposes a multilayer framework for botnet detection using machine learning algorithms that consist of a ltering module and classi cation module to detect the botnet's command and control server. We highlighted several criteria for our framework, such as it must be structure-independent, protocol-independent, and able to detect botnet in encapsulated technique. We used behavior-based analysis through ow-based features that analyzed the packet header by aggregating it to a 1-s time. This type of analysis enables detection if the packet is encapsulated, such as using a VPN tunnel. We also extend the experiment using different time intervals, but a 1-s time interval shows the most impressive results. The result shows that our botnet detection method can detect up to 92% of the f-score, and the lowest false-negative rate was 1.5%., Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) through the Research University Vot-20H04, Malaysia Research University Network (MRUN) Vot4L876, Ministry of Higher Education through the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1, Hadiah Latihan Persekutuan (HLP) Scholarship through the Ministry of Education Malaysia, Specific Research Project (SPEV) by the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic

Computer-aided diagnosis of disease primarily depends on proper vision-based measurement (VBM). The traditional approach followed for diagnosis of colorectal cancer includes a manual screening of colorectum via a colonoscope and resection of polyps for histopathological analysis to decide the grade of malignancy. This procedure is time-consuming and expensive, and removal of benign polyp for analysis signifies the inefficiency of the diagnosis system. These drawbacks inspired us to develop an automatic vision-based analysis method for preliminary in vivo malignancy analysis of the polyp region. In this work, we have proposed a fusion-based polyp segmentation network, namely, Polyp-Net. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown immense success in the domain of medical image analysis as it can exploit in-depth significant features with high discrimination capabilities. Therefore, motivated by these insights, we have proposed an enriched version of CNN with a nascent pooling mechanism, namely dual-tree wavelet pooled CNN (DT-WpCNN). The resultant segmented mask contains some surplus high-intensity regions apart from the polyp region. These shortcomings are avoided using a new variation of the region-based level-set method, namely, the local gradient weighting-embedded level-set method (LGWe-LSM), which shows a significant reduction of false-positive rate. The pixel-level fusion of the two enhanced methods shows more potentiality in the segmentation of the polyp regions. Our proposed network is trained on CVC-colon DB and tested on CVC-clinic DB. It achieves a dice score of 0.839, volume-similarity of 0.863, precision of 0.836, recall of 0.811, F1-score of 0.823, F2-score of 0.815, and Hausdorff distance of 21.796 which outperforms the existing baseline CNN’s and recent state-of-the-art methods.

The effective extraction of local and contextual visual cues carrying information of different scales is crucial for accurate detection of the salient object(s) with varying shape, size, and location. The atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and its dense versions are widely used for extracting contextual features for dense prediction tasks. The skip connections in densely or moderately connected ASPP directly propagate the context information from a parallel dilated convolution to the next higher rate dilated convolution to combat the “gridding issue” in atrous convolutions. The aggregated context from several scales may dilute features belonging to small objects or confuse between the salient object and the background. To emphasize invariance features for different scale visual patterns in an image, a gate-based context extraction module is proposed in this work. Gate functions are embedded in the interbranch short connection of the proposed module. The learnable gates are deployed to decide on the relevance of the contextual information extracted at a lower scale for the next higher scale. Experimental results on salient object detection tasks demonstrate that gates are helpful to retain relevant contextual information across multiple-scales of the context-extraction module. The performance of the proposed gated contextual feature-based salient object detector is evaluated on five broadly used saliency detection benchmarks by comparing it with the other 13 state-of-the-art approaches. Experimental outcomes show that the proposed method achieves a favorable performance for various compared evaluation measures.

The fitness-dependent optimizer (FDO), a newly proposed swarm intelligent algorithm, is focused on the reproductive mechanism of bee swarming and collective decision-making. To optimize the performance, FDO calculates velocity (pace) differently. FDO calculates weight using the fitness function values to update the search agent position during the exploration and exploitation phases. However, the FDO encounters slow convergence and unbalanced exploitation and exploration. Hence, this study proposes a novel hybrid of the sine cosine algorithm and fitness-dependent optimizer (SC-FDO) for updating the velocity (pace) using the sine cosine scheme. This proposed algorithm, SC-FDO, has been tested over 19 classical and 10 IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation (CEC-C06 2019) benchmark test functions. The findings revealed that SC-FDO achieved better performances in most cases than the original FDO and well-known optimization algorithms. The proposed SC-FDO improved the original FDO by achieving a better exploit-explore tradeoff with a faster convergence speed. The SC-FDO was applied to the missing data estimation cases and refined the missingness as optimization problems. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that nature-inspired algorithms have been considered for handling time series datasets with low and high missingness problems (10%-90%). The impacts of missing data on the predictive ability of the proposed SC-FDO were evaluated using a large weather dataset from 1985 until 2020. The results revealed that the imputation sensitivity depends on the percentages of missingness and the imputation models. The findings demonstrated that the SC-FDO based multilayer perceptron (MLP) trainer outperformed the other three optimizer trainers with the highest average accuracy of 90% when treating the high-low missingness in the dataset.

Our facial muscles react due to exposure to various stimuli. For example, when we sniff an odor, our facial muscles react. Since the brain controls the activities of muscles, therefore, a coupling should exist between their activities. This paper studies the coupling between the activations of the brain and facial muscles in auditory stimulation by the complexity-based analysis of Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Electromyogram (EMG) signals. Three pieces of music were chosen according to the differences in their complexities. We calculated the fractal dimension and sample entropy of EEG and EMG signals for 13 subjects in rest and response to different music. The results showed strong couplings among the alterations of the complexities of these signals and music, which indicate the correlation between brain and facial muscle activities. This complexity-based analysis could be further extended to the case of other physiological signals to decode the correlation between the responses of different organs and the brain.

Clustering inspired superpixel algorithms perform a restricted partitioning of an image, where each visually coherent region containing perceptually similar pixels serves as a primitive in subsequent processing stages. Simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) has emerged as a standard superpixel generation tool due to its exceptional performance in terms of segmentation accuracy and speed. However, SLIC applies a manually adjusted distance measure for dis-similarity computation which directly affects the quality of superpixels. In this work, self-adjustable distance measures are adapted from the weighted k-means clustering (W-k-means) for generating superpixel segmentation. In the proposed distance measures, an adaptive weight associated with each variable reflects its relevance in the clustering process. Intuitively, the variable weights correspond to the normalization terms in SLIC that affect the trade-off between superpixels boundary adherence and compactness. Weights that influence consistency in superpixel generation are automatically updated. The variable weights update is accomplished during optimization with a closed-form solution based on the current image partition. The proposed adaptive, W-k-means-based superpixels (AWkS) experimented on three benchmarks under different distance measure outperform the conventional SLIC algorithm with respect to various boundary adherence metrics. Finally, the effectiveness of the AWkS over SLIC is demonstrated for saliency detection.

This paper proposes a mathematical model for decomposing a range face image into four basic components (named ‘complement components’) in conjunction with a simple approach for data-level fusion to generate thirty-six additional hybrid components. These forty component faces composing a new face image space called the ‘complement component face space.’ The main challenge of this work was to extract relevant features from the vast face space. Features are extracted from the four basic components and four selected hybrid components using singular value decomposition. To introduce diversity, the extracted feature vectors are fused by applying the crossover operation of the genetic algorithm using a Hamming distance-based fitness measure. Particle swarm optimization-based feature selection is employed on the fused features to discard redundant feature values and to maximize the face recognition performance. The recognition performances of the proposed feature set with a support vector machine-based classifier on three accessible and well-known 3D face databases, namely, Frav3D, Bosphorus, and Texas3D, show significant improvements over those achieved by state-of-the-art methods. This work also studies the feasibility of utilizing the component images in the complement component face space for data augmentation in convolutional neural network (CNN)-based frameworks.

Nowadays, the population is rapidly ageing because of increasing life expectancy and decreasing birth rates. Thus, the purpose of this systematic review is to prepare a comprehensive overview which identifies the activities of daily living (ADLs) that are gradually reduced among patients with dementia, as well as explore the therapies applied in relation to dementia and how they effectively improve the quality of life (QoL) of patients and caregivers. Furthermore, we aim to summarise the ADL activities influenced by therapies and examine the treatment costs and care for patients so that recommendations for research and development (R&D) can be made to improve both the QoL of people with dementia and cost-saving measures. The research focuses on four selected neurodegenerative diseases: Alzheimer, Parkinson, vascular dementia, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Therefore, the peer-reviewed English written articles from 2014 to 2019 were searched between September 1 and December 13, 2019. Twenty-seven papers were included in the analysis. The results show that essential assistance occurs in connection with activities: eating, drinking, dressing, bathing, personal hygiene, use of the toilet, and transport. By contrast, shopping or cleaning is not addressed as much. A lower ability to take care of oneself is connected with poor patient health and higher social care costs because the patient requires care from external sources, such as home aid or nurse visits. The challenge that remains is to shift new knowledge from scientific disciplines and connect it with the needs of patients to remove legitimate barriers and increase the acceptance of new solutions by popularisation. Additionally, regarding the burden on caregivers, it would be appropriate to promote this area of education and employment so that family members can use formal caregivers, ensuring them free time and much-needed rest.

The measurement of the surface quality and the profile preciseness is major issues in many industrial branches such that the surface quality of semi products directly affects the subsequent production steps. Although, there are many ways to obtain required data, the hardware necessary for the measurements such as 2D or 3D scanners, depending on the problem’s complexity, is too expensive. Therefore, in this paper, what we put forward as a novelty is an algorithm which is verified on the model of simple 3D scanner on the image processing basis with the resolution of 0.1 mm. There are many ways to scan surface profile; however, the image processing currently is the most trending topic in industry automation. Most importantly, in order to obtain surface images, standard high resolution reflex camera is used and thus the post processing could be realized with MatLab as the software environment. Therefore, this solution is an alternative to the expensive scanners, and single-purpose devices could be extended by many additional functions.

Intelligent systems are wanting for cities to cope with limited spaces and resources across the world. As a result, smart cities emerged mainly as a result of highly innovative ICT industries and markets, and additionally, they have started to use novel solutions taking advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and cloud computing technologies to establish a profound connection between each component and layer of a city. Several key technologies congregate to build a working smart city considering human requirements. Even though the smart city concept is an advanced solution for today’s cities, recently, more living spaces should be discovered, and the concept of a smart city could be moved to these alternative living spaces, namely floating cities. The concept of a floating city emerged as a novel solution due to rising sea levels and land scarcity in order to provide alternative living spaces for humanity. In this article, our main research question is to raise awareness on the current state of smart city concepts across the world by understanding the key future trends, including floating cities, by motivating researchers and scientists through new IoT technologies and applications. Therefore, we present a survey of smart city initiatives and analyze their key concepts and different data management techniques. We performed a detailed literature survey and review by applying a complex literature matrix including terms, like smart people, smart economy, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living. We also discuss multiple perspectives of smart floating cities in detail. With the proposed approach, recent advances and practical future opportunities for smart cities can be revealed.

By improving the quality of life and extending the length of life, Western society is becoming an increasingly ageing population with a higher proportion of seniors. From another point of view, there is a critical shortage of care staff, both in hospitals and for in-home care. Thanks to new technology trends such as Smart Homes and Smart Furniture, there is an opportunity for increased support for seniors by utilizing new technologies. This paper presents the current trends and possibilities in applying smart information and communications technology (ICT) solutions for in-home care concerning diseases in old age. The paper consists of a systematic review according to the PRISMA methodology of the available literature in Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Springer, and the Espacenet patent database. Publications report the usage of some types of artificial intelligence and their implementation and non-intrusive sensing technologies. The patents review identified solutions with a focus on monitoring the state of older adults and mobility improvement. Existing ICT smart solutions must address the following issues: (1) ease-of-use; (2) invisibility and disuse that isolate older adults; (3) privacy and security; (4) affordability of technology in terms of cost; and (5) supporting elderly individuals to stay in their homes or move in different environments independently. There is a significant gap between a large number of scientific publications and commercial solutions. The existing products reflect the specifics of the diseases in a rather wider context instead of the fulfilment of exact needs. It is often stated that such devices can be used across diseases, but the direct connection and benefits for the disease is still rather weak. The challenge remains to tap the existing potential of a large number of innovative ideas on the market and improve the quality of life.

In recent years, the number of image fusion schemes presented by the research community has increased significantly. Measuring the performance of these schemes is an important issue. In this work, we introduce three quantitative fusion metrics to assess the quality of an image fusion algorithm. The proposed metrics rely on edge information that is obtained using fractional order differentiation. Edge and orientation strengths are fed into three sigmoidal functions separately for estimating the values of three normalized weighted metrics for the fused image corresponding to source images. The experiments on the multi-focus, infrared-visible and medical image fusion pairs demonstrate that the proposed fusion metrics are perceptually meaningful and outperform some of the state-of-the-art metrics. This work was supported in part by the project (Prediction of diseases through computer assisted diagnosis system using images captured by minimally-invasive and non-invasive modalities), Computer Science and Engineering, PDPM Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Jabalpur, India, under Grant SPARC-MHRD-231, in part by the project of Grant Agency of Excellence, University of Hradec Kralove, Faculty of Informatics and Management, Czech Republic, under Grant UHK-FIMGE-2020, and in part by the IT4Neuro—project of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of Czech Republic under Project ERDF CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/18 _069/0010054.

By improving the quality of life and extending the length of life, Western society is becoming an increasingly ageing population with a higher proportion of seniors. From another point of view, there is a critical shortage of care staff, both in hospitals and for in-home care. Thanks to new technology trends such as Smart Homes and Smart Furniture, there is an opportunity for increased support for seniors by utilizing new technologies. This paper presents the current trends and possibilities in applying smart information and communications technology (ICT) solutions for in-home care concerning diseases in old age. The paper consists of a systematic review according to the PRISMA methodology of the available literature in Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Springer, and the Espacenet patent database. Publications report the usage of some types of artificial intelligence and their implementation and non-intrusive sensing technologies. The patents review identified solutions with a focus on monitoring the state of older adults and mobility improvement. Existing ICT smart solutions must address the following issues: (1) ease-of-use; (2) invisibility and disuse that isolate older adults; (3) privacy and security; (4) affordability of technology in terms of cost; and (5) supporting elderly individuals to stay in their homes or move in different environments independently. There is a significant gap between a large number of scientific publications and commercial solutions. The existing products reflect the specifics of the diseases in a rather wider context instead of the fulfilment of exact needs. It is often stated that such devices can be used across diseases, but the direct connection and benefits for the disease is still rather weak. The challenge remains to tap the existing potential of a large number of innovative ideas on the market and improve the quality of life.

This work analyses the results of research regarding the predisposition of genetic hematological risks associated with secondary polyglobulia. The subjects of the study were selected based on shared laboratory markers and basic clinical symptoms. JAK2 (Janus Kinase 2) mutation negativity represented the common genetic marker of the subjects in the sample of interest. A negative JAK2 mutation hypothetically excluded the presence of an autonomous myeloproliferative disease at the time of detection. The parameters studied in this work focused mainly on thrombotic, immunological, metabolic, and cardiovascular risks. The final goal of the work was to discover the most significant key markers for the diagnosis of high-risk patients and to exclude the less important or only complementary markers, which often represent a superfluous economic burden for healthcare institutions. These research results are applicable as a clinical guideline for the effective diagnosis of selected parameters that demonstrated high sensitivity and specificity. According to the results obtained in the present research, groups with a high incidence of mutations were evaluated as being at higher risk for polycythemia vera disease. It was not possible to clearly determine which of the patients examined had a higher risk of developing the disease as different combinations of mutations could manifest different symptoms of the disease. In general, the entire study group was at risk for manifestations of polycythemia vera disease without a clear diagnosis. The group with less than 20% incidence appeared to be clinically insignificant for polycythemia vera testing and thus there is a potential for saving money in mutation testing. On the other hand, the JAK V617F (somatic mutation of JAK2) parameter from this group should be investigated as it is a clear exclusion or confirmation of polycythemia vera as the primary disease. Web of Science 10 4 art. no. 888

Smart telemetry medical devices do not have sufficient security measures, making them weak against different attacks. Machine learning (ML) has been broadly used for cyber-attack detection via on-gadgets and on-chip embedded models, which need to be held along with the medical devices, but with limited ability to perform heavy computations. The authors propose a real-time and lightweight fog computing-based threat detection using telemetry sensors data and their network traffic in NetFlow. The proposed method saves memory to a great extent as it does not require retraining. It is based on an incremental form of Hoeffding Tree Naïve Bayes Adaptive (HTNBA) and Incremental K-Nearest Neighbors (IKNN) algorithm. Furthermore, it matches the nature of sensor data which increases in seconds. Experimental results showed that the proposed model could detect different attacks against medical sensors with high accuracy (»100%), small memory usage (

Botnet is a significant cyber threat that continues to evolve. Botmasters continue to improve the security framework strategy for botnets to go undetected. Newer botnet source code runs attack detection every second, and each attack demonstrates the difficulty and robustness of monitoring the botnet. In the conventional network botnet detection model that uses signature-analysis, the patterns of a botnet concealment strategy such as encryption & polymorphic and the shift in structure from centralized to decentralized peer-to-peer structure, generate challenges. Behavior analysis seems to be a promising approach for solving these problems because it does not rely on analyzing the network traffic payload. Other than that, to predict novel types of botnet, a detection model should be developed. This study focuses on using flow-based behavior analysis to detect novel botnets, necessary due to the difficulties of detecting existing patterns in a botnet that continues to modify the signature in concealment strategy. This study also recommends introducing Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and data pre-processing standardization to increase data quality before classification. With and without ICA implementation, we compared the percentage of significant features. Through the experiment, we found that the results produced from ICA show significant improvements. The highest F-score was 83% for Neris bot. The average F-score for a novel botnet sample was 74%. Through the feature importance test, the feature importance increased from 22% to 27%, and the training model false positive rate also decreased from 1.8% to 1.7%. ABSTRAK: Botnet merupakan ancaman siber yang sentiasa berevolusi. Pemilik bot sentiasa memperbaharui strategi keselamatan bagi botnet agar tidak dapat dikesan. Setiap saat, kod-kod sumber baru botnet telah dikesan dan setiap serangan dilihat menunjukkan tahap kesukaran dan ketahanan dalam mengesan bot. Model pengesanan rangkaian botnet konvensional telah menggunakan analisis berdasarkan tanda pengenalan bagi mengatasi halangan besar dalam mengesan corak botnet tersembunyi seperti teknik penyulitan dan teknik polimorfik. Masalah ini lebih bertumpu pada perubahan struktur berpusat kepada struktur bukan berpusat seperti rangkaian rakan ke rakan (P2P). Analisis tingkah laku ini seperti sesuai bagi menyelesaikan masalah-masalah tersebut kerana ianya tidak bergantung kepada analisis rangkaian beban muatan trafik. Selain itu, bagi menjangka botnet baru, model pengesanan harus dibangunkan. Kajian ini bertumpu kepada penggunaan analisa tingkah-laku berdasarkan aliran bagi mengesan botnet baru yang sukar dikesan pada corak pengenalan botnet sedia-ada yang sentiasa berubah dan menggunakan strategi tersembunyi. Kajian ini juga mencadangkan penggunakan Analisis Komponen Bebas (ICA) dan pra-pemprosesan data yang standard bagi meningkatkan kualiti data sebelum pengelasan. Peratusan ciri-ciri penting telah dibandingkan dengan dan tanpa menggunakan ICA. Dapatan kajian melalui eksperimen menunjukkan dengan penggunaan ICA, keputusan adalah jauh lebih baik. Skor F tertinggi ialah 83% bagi bot Neris. Purata skor F bagi sampel botnet baru adalah 74%. Melalui ujian kepentingan ciri, kepentingan ciri meningkat dari 22% kepada 27%, dan kadar positif model latihan palsu juga berkurangan dari 1.8% kepada 1.7%.

In higher education institutions (HEI), the ability to predict student grades as an early warning system is one of the important areas that gained attention to improve educational outcomes. Over the years, machine learning techniques have facilitated and successfully addressed student grade prediction for identifying the potentially weak students in a particular course. However, dealing with an imbalanced multiclass classification dataset is challenging due to biased results towards predicting the minority class. Therefore, this chapter proposes a method that can increase the classification performance by using a modified synthetic minority oversampling technique and feature selection (MSMOTE-FS). The experiments tested the proposed method's effectiveness by utilizing four oversampling techniques and six standard classification algorithms. This finding indicated that the proposed method gives promising results to improve the accuracy in multiclass classification of student grade prediction.

Missing values are highly undesirable in real-world datasets. The missing values should be estimated and treated during the preprocessing stage. With the expansion of nature-inspired metaheuristic techniques, interest in missing value imputation (MVI) has increased. The main goal of this literature is to identify and review the existing research on missing value imputation (MVI) in terms of nature-inspired metaheuristic approaches, dataset designs, missingness mechanisms, and missing rates, as well as the most used evaluation metrics between 2011 and 2021. This study ultimately gives insight into how the MVI plan can be incorporated into the experimental design. Using the systematic literature review (SLR) guidelines designed by Kitchenham, this study utilizes renowned scienti c databases to retrieve and analyze all relevant articles during the search process. A total of 48 related articles from 2011 to 2021 were selected to assess the review questions. This review indicated that the synthetic missing dataset is the most popular baseline test dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of the imputation strategy. The study revealed that missing at random (MAR) is the most common proposed missing mechanism in the datasets. This review also indicated that the hybridizations of metaheuristics with clustering or neural networks are popular among researchers. The superior performance of the hybrid approaches is signi cantly attributed to the power of optimized learning in MVI models. In addition, perspectives, challenges, and opportunities in MVI are also addressed in this literature. The outcome of this review serves as a toolkit for the researchers to develop effective MVI models., Ministry of Education, Malaysia FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1, Malaysia Research University Network (MRUN) 4L876, SPEV Project through the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic, "Smart Solutions in Ubiquitous Computing Environments'' 2102-2022

A social network is one of the efficient tools for information propagation. The content is the bridge between the product and its customers. Evaluating the user's content creation is a valuable feature to improve information spreading on the social network. This paper proposes a method for extracting brand value with influencers by combining the user's amplification and content creation in influencer marketing. The amplification factors are studied based on the propagation of the posts on the social network in a duration time. Those factors are more valuable than before when using influencer marketing at a determined time. Moreover, the content creation score is also studied to measure content creation based on the passion point with a brand and its quality. The amplification factors and content creation score are combined to analyze posts' interest in detecting the emerging influent users for a product in the influencer marketing campaign. Using the amplification factors, the passion points, and the content creation score, a system to manage the influencer marketing on Facebook has been constructed and tested in the real-world campaign. The experimental results show that the proposed method's influencers bring the conversion rate's efficiency and revenue in the influencer marketing campaign. Web of Science 17 10 art. no. e0274596