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Numerous consensus mechanisms have been suggested to cater to the specific characteristics of fog computing. To comprehensively understand their unique features, performance, and applications in fog computing, it is crucial to conduct a systematic analysis of these mechanisms. For this study, 79 relevant articles were carefully selected based on predefined criteria. Among these articles, 35 employed work-proof-based consensus mechanisms, 24 utilized voting-based mechanisms, and 22 adopted capability-based mechanisms. Among the 26 identified consensus mechanisms, proof of work remains the most prevalent one. It is important to note that the scope of this paper is limited to the research available in the predominant databases at the time of writing. Future research may expand to include additional databases and more recent literature in this domain.

Software architecture forms the cornerstone for achieving and ensuring various software quality attributes. It encompasses the collected requirements of the product, serving as a blueprint that delineates quality features for all project stakeholders, along with methods for measurement and control. Despite the significant increase in IoT-based agricultural systems, there is a dearth of studies on the quality elements of their software architecture. To address this need, this study offers an overview of components and services tailored to address specific quality attributes pertinent to agriculture systems. It identifies, investigates, and presents quality attributes influencing the design of software architecture for IoT-based agriculture systems. This paper identified and discussed several quality attributes, including performance, scalability, flexibility, interoperability, productivity, extensibility, and security, and mapped them to corresponding components of the IoT-based agriculture software architecture. Also, several issues were identified and discussed for the software architecture quality of IoT-based agriculture systems, such as real-time processing and interoperability due to the various devices and protocols utilized in these systems. The findings of this study offer valuable insights for developing, executing, and refining IoT-based agricultural systems to fulfill the changing requirements of the agriculture industry.

(1) Background: Code smell is the most popular and reliable method for detecting potential errors in code. In real-world circumstances, a single source code may have multiple code smells. Multi-label code smell detection is a popular research study. However, limited studies are available on it, and there is a need for a standardized classifier for reliably identifying various multi-label code smells that belong to the method-level code smell category. The primary goal of this study is to develop a rule-based method for detecting multi-label code smells. (2) Methods: Binary Relevance, Label Powerset, and Classifier Chain methods are utilized with tree based single-label algorithms, including some ensemble algorithms in this research paper. The chi-square feature selection technique is applied to select relevant features. The proposed model is trained using 10-fold cross-validation, Random Search cross-validation parameter tuning, and different performance measures are used to evaluate the model. (3) Results: The proposed model achieves 99.54% of the best jaccard accuracy for detecting method-level code smells using the Classifier Chain method with the Decision Tree. The Decision Tree model incorporating a multi-label classifier outperforms alternative approaches to multi-label classification. Single-label classifiers produced better results after considering the correlation factor. (4) Conclusion: This study will facilitate scientists and programmers by providing a systematic method for detecting various code smells in software projects and saving time and effort during code reviews by detecting multiple problems simultaneously. After detecting multi-label code smell, programmers can create more organized, easier-to-understand, and trustworthy programs.

Abstract Background Prostate cancer remains the most prevalent malignancy and the second-leading cause of cancer-related death in men in the USA. Radiation therapy, typically with androgen suppression, remains a mainstay in the treatment of intermediate- and high-risk, potentially lethal prostate cancers. However, local recurrence and treatment failure remain common. Basic and translational research has determined the potential for using androgen receptor (AR) ligands (e.g., dihydrotestosterone and flutamide) in the context of androgen-deprived prostate cancer to induce AR- and TOP2B-mediated DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and thereby synergistically enhance the effect of radiation therapy (RT). The primary aim of this study is to carry out pharmacodynamic translation of these findings to humans. Methods Patients with newly diagnosed, biopsy-confirmed localized prostatic adenocarcinoma will be recruited. Flutamide, an oral non-steroidal androgen receptor ligand, will be administered orally 6–12 h prior to prostate biopsy (performed under anesthesia prior to brachytherapy seed implantation). Key study parameters will include the assessment of DNA double-strand breaks by γH2A.x foci and AR localization to the nucleus. The initial 6 patients will be treated in a single-arm run-in phase to assess futility by establishing whether at least 2 subjects from this group develop γH2A.x foci in prostate cancer cells. If this criterion is met, the study will advance to a two-arm, randomized controlled phase in which 24 participants will be randomized 2:1 to either flutamide intervention or placebo standard-of-care (with all patients receiving definitive brachytherapy). The key pharmacodynamic endpoint will be to assess whether the extent of γH2A.x foci (proportion of cancer cells positive and number of foci per cancer cell) is greater in patients receiving flutamide versus placebo. Secondary outcomes of this study include an optional, exploratory analysis that will (a) describe cancer-specific methylation patterns of cell-free DNA in plasma and urine and (b) assess the utility of serum and urine samples as a DNA-based biomarker for tracking therapeutic response. Discussion This study will confirm in humans the pharmacodynamic effect of AR ligands to induce transient double-strand breaks when administered in the context of androgen deprivation as a novel therapy for prostate cancer. The findings of this study will permit the development of a larger trial evaluating flutamide pulsed-dose sequencing in association with fractionated external beam RT (+/− brachytherapy). The study is ongoing, and preliminary data collection and recruitment are underway; analysis has yet to be performed. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03507608. Prospectively registered on 25 April 2018.

Abstract Detecting code smells may be highly helpful for reducing maintenance costs and raising source code quality. Code smells facilitate developers or researchers to understand several types of design flaws. Code smells with high severity can cause significant problems for the software and may cause challenges for the system's maintainability. It is quite essential to assess the severity of the code smells detected in software, as it prioritizes refactoring efforts. The class imbalance problem also further enhances the difficulties in code smell severity detection. In this study, four code smell severity datasets (Data class, God class, Feature envy, and Long method) are selected to detect code smell severity. In this work, an effort is made to address the issue of class imbalance, for which, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) class balancing technique is applied. Each dataset's relevant features are chosen using a feature selection technique based on principal component analysis. The severity of code smells is determined using five machine learning techniques: K-nearest neighbor, Random forest, Decision tree, Multi-layer Perceptron, and Logistic Regression. This study obtained the 0.99 severity accuracy score with the Random forest and Decision tree approach with the Long method code smell. The model's performance is compared based on its accuracy and three other performance measurements (Precision, Recall, and F-measure) to estimate severity classification models. The impact of performance is also compared and presented with and without applying SMOTE. The results obtained in the study are promising and can be beneficial for paving the way for further studies in this area.

Code smells are early warning signs of potential issues in software quality. Various techniques are used in code smell detection, including the Bayesian approach, rule-based automatic antipattern detection, antipattern identification utilizing B-splines, Support Vector Machine direct, SMURF (Support Vector Machines for design smell detection using relevant feedback), and immune-based detection strategy. Machine learning (ML) has taken a great stride in this area. This study includes relevant studies applying ML algorithms from 2005 to 2024 in a comprehensive manner for the survey to provide insight regarding code smell, ML algorithms frequently applied, and software metrics. Forty-two pertinent studies allow us to assess the efficacy of ML algorithms on selected datasets. After evaluating various studies based on open-source and project datasets, this study evaluated additional threats and obstacles to code smell detection, such as the lack of standardized code smell definitions, the difficulty of feature selection, and the challenges of handling large-scale datasets. The current studies only considered a few factors in identifying code smells, while in this study, several potential contributing factors to code smells are included. Several ML algorithms are examined, and various approaches, datasets, dataset languages, and software metrics are presented. This study provides the potential of ML algorithms to produce better results and fills a gap in the body of knowledge by providing class-wise distributions of the ML algorithms. Support Vector Machine, J48, Naive Bayes, and Random Forest models are the most common for detecting code smells. Researchers can find this study helpful in better anticipating and taking care of software development design and implementation issues. The findings from this study, which highlight the practical implications of ML algorithms in software quality improvement, will help software engineers fix problems during software design and development to ensure software quality.

Medicine is one of the fields where the advancement of computer science is making significant progress. Some diseases require an immediate diagnosis in order to improve patient outcomes. The usage of computers in medicine improves precision and accelerates data processing and diagnosis. In order to categorize biological images, hybrid machine learning, a combination of various deep learning approaches, was utilized, and a meta-heuristic algorithm was provided in this research. In addition, two different medical datasets were introduced, one covering the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain tumors and the other dealing with chest X-rays (CXRs) of COVID-19. These datasets were introduced to the combination network that contained deep learning techniques, which were based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) or autoencoder, to extract features and combine them with the next step of the meta-heuristic algorithm in order to select optimal features using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. This combination sought to reduce the dimensionality of the datasets while maintaining the original performance of the data. This is considered an innovative method and ensures highly accurate classification results across various medical datasets. Several classifiers were employed to predict the diseases. The COVID-19 dataset found that the highest accuracy was 99.76% using the combination of CNN-PSO-SVM. In comparison, the brain tumor dataset obtained 99.51% accuracy, the highest accuracy derived using the combination method of autoencoder-PSO-KNN.

Cancer is a major global health challenge, emphasizing the critical need for early detection to enhance patient outcomes. This study thoroughly investigates the applications of advanced machine learning methods for cancer detection and prevention, aiming to develop robust algorithms that can accurately identify cancerous cells and assess cancer severity based on key parameters. The authors synthesize insights from previous cancer detection and prevention research through an in-depth literature review. The study sets specific objectives, including creating and evaluating innovative algorithms for classifying cancer cells.The authors employed machine learning techniques to analyze parameters, such as cell size, shape, nucleus characteristics, and additional factors like cell texture, mitosis count, tumour progression, metastasis, gene expression patterns, and biological markers. This methodology is distinguished by its effective use of diverse data types and automated feature extraction to improve cancer detection and prediction accuracy. Advanced machine learning methods enhance the precision and reliability of current cancer cell classification algorithms. The research underscores the importance of timely and accurate cancer detection, which enables early intervention and significantly improves patient survival rates. The results and discussion section meticulously analyzes the findings, demonstrating the approach's effectiveness in accurately identifying cancerous cells and assessing cancer severity. This study is a valuable resource for medical professionals, supporting early-stage cancer detection and classification of cancer cells at different stages. The proposed algorithms show promising results in improving the accuracy and efficiency of cancer detection systems, paving the way for future advancements in cancer research and offering essential insights for healthcare practitioners and researchers.

Abstract 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.

Agile methods have gained wide popularity recently due to their characteristics in software development. Despite the success of agile methods in the software maintenance process, several challenges have been reported. In this study, we investigate the challenges that measure the impact of agile methods in software maintenance in terms of quality factors. A survey was conducted to collect data from agile practitioners to establish their opinions about existing challenges. As a result of the statistical analysis of the data from the survey, it has been observed that there are moderately effective challenges in manageability, scalability, communication, collaboration, and transparency. Further research is required to validate software maintenance challenges in agile methods.

In the current competitive world, producing quality products has become a prominent factor to succeed in business. In this respect, defining and following the software product quality metrics (SPQM) to detect the current quality situation and continuous improvement of systems have gained tremendous importance. Therefore, it is necessary to review the present studies in this area to allow for the analysis of the situation at hand, as well as to enable us to make predictions regarding the future research areas. The present research aims to analyze the active research areas and trends on this topic appearing in the literature during the last decade. A Systematic Mapping (SM) study was carried out on 70 articles and conference papers published between 2009 and 2019 on SPQM as indicated in their titles and abstract. The result is presented through graphics, explanations, and the mind mapping method. The outputs include the trend map between the years 2009 and 2019, knowledge about this area and measurement tools, issues determined to be open to development in this area, and conformity between conference papers, articles and internationally valid quality models. This study may serve as a foundation for future studies that aim to contribute to the development in this crucial field. Future SM studies might focus on this subject for measuring the quality of network performance and new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT), Cloud of Things (CoT), Machine Learning, and Robotics.

Code smells detection helps in improving understandability and maintainability of software while reducing the chances of system failure. In this study, six machine learning algorithms have been applied to predict code smells. For this purpose, four code smell datasets (God-class, Data-class, Feature-envy, and Long-method) are considered which are generated from 74 open-source systems. To evaluate the performance of machine learning algorithms on these code smell datasets, 10-fold cross validation technique is applied that predicts the model by partitioning the original dataset into a training set to train the model and test set to evaluate it. Two feature selection techniques are applied to enhance our prediction accuracy. The Chi-squared and Wrapper-based feature selection techniques are used to improve the accuracy of total six machine learning methods by choosing the top metrics in each dataset. Results obtained by applying these two feature selection techniques are compared. To improve the accuracy of these algorithms, grid search-based parameter optimization technique is applied. In this study, 100% accuracy was obtained for the Long-method dataset by using the Logistic Regression algorithm with all features while the worst performance 95.20% was obtained by Naive Bayes algorithm for the Long-method dataset using the chi-square feature selection technique.

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has proved to be an effective and accurate method for diagnostic prediction over the years. This article focuses on the development of an automated CAD system with the intent to perform diagnosis as accurately as possible. Deep learning methods have been able to produce impressive results on medical image datasets. This study employs deep learning methods in conjunction with meta-heuristic algorithms and supervised machine-learning algorithms to perform an accurate diagnosis. Pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or auto-encoder are used for feature extraction, whereas feature selection is performed using an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Ant colony optimization helps to search for the best optimal features while reducing the amount of data. Lastly, diagnosis prediction (classification) is achieved using learnable classifiers. The novel framework for the extraction and selection of features is based on deep learning, auto-encoder, and ACO. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using two medical image datasets: chest X-ray (CXR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the prediction of the existence of COVID-19 and brain tumors. Accuracy is used as the main measure to compare the performance of the proposed approach with existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed system achieves an average accuracy of 99.61% and 99.18%, outperforming all other methods in diagnosing the presence of COVID-19 and brain tumors, respectively. Based on the achieved results, it can be claimed that physicians or radiologists can confidently utilize the proposed approach for diagnosing COVID-19 patients and patients with specific brain tumors.

Code smells are the result of not following software engineering principles during software development, especially in the design and coding phase. It leads to low maintainability. To evaluate the quality of software and its maintainability, code smell detection can be helpful. Many machine learning algorithms are being used to detect code smells. In this study, we applied five ensemble machine learning and two deep learning algorithms to detect code smells. Four code smell datasets were analyzed: the Data class, the God class, the Feature-envy, and the Long-method datasets. In previous works, machine learning and stacking ensemble learning algorithms were applied to this dataset and the results found were acceptable, but there is scope of improvement. A class balancing technique (SMOTE) was applied to handle the class imbalance problem in the datasets. The Chi-square feature extraction technique was applied to select the more relevant features in each dataset. All five algorithms obtained the highest accuracy—100% for the Long-method dataset with the different selected sets of metrics, and the poorest accuracy, 91.45%, was achieved by the Max voting method for the Feature-envy dataset for the selected twelve sets of metrics.

Smartphone adaptation in society has been progressing at a very high speed. Having the ability to run on a vast variety of devices, much of the user base possesses an Android phone. Its popularity and flexibility have played a major role in making it a target of different attacks via malware, causing loss to users, both financially and from a privacy perspective. Different malware and their variants are emerging every day, making it a huge challenge to come up with detection and preventive methodologies and tools. Research has spawned in various directions to yield effective malware detection mechanisms. Since malware can adopt different ways to attack and hide, accurate analysis is the key to detecting them. Like any usual mobile app, malware requires permission to take action and use device resources. There are 235 total permissions that the Android app can request on a device. Malware takes advantage of this to request unnecessary permissions, which would enable those to take malicious actions. Since permissions are critical, it is important and challenging to identify if an app is exploiting permissions and causing damage. The focus of this article is to analyze the identified studies that have been conducted with a focus on permission analysis for malware detection. With this perspective, a systematic literature review (SLR) has been produced. Several papers have been retrieved and selected for detailed analysis. Current challenges and different analyses were presented using the identified articles.

In recent years, different types of monitoring systems have been designed for various applications, in order to turn the urban environments into smart cities. Most of these systems consist of wireless sensor networks (WSN)s, and the designing of these systems has faced many problems. The first and most important problem is sensor node deployment. The main function of WSNs is to gather the required information, process it, and send it to remote places. A large number of sensor nodes were deployed in the monitored area, so finding the best deployment algorithm that achieves maximum coverage and connectivity with the minimum number of sensor nodes is the significant point of the research. This paper provides a systematic mapping study that includes the latest recent studies, which are focused on solving the deployment problem using optimization algorithms, especially heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms in the period (2015–2022). It was found that 35% of these studies updated the swarm optimization algorithms to solve the deployment problem. This paper will be helpful for the practitioners and researchers, in order to work out new algorithms and seek objectives for the sensor deployment. A comparison table is provided, and the basic concepts of a smart city and WSNs are presented. Finally, an overview of the challenges and open issues are illustrated.

Smartphones have enabled the widespread use of mobile applications. However, there are unrecognized defects of mobile applications that can affect businesses due to a negative user experience. To avoid this, the defects of applications should be detected and removed before release. This study aims to develop a defect prediction model for mobile applications. We performed cross-project and within-project experiments and also used deep learning algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short term memory (LSTM) to develop a defect prediction model for Android-based applications. Based on our within-project experimental results, the CNN-based model provides the best performance for mobile application defect prediction with a 0.933 average area under ROC curve (AUC) value. For cross-project mobile application defect prediction, there is still room for improvement when deep learning algorithms are preferred.

Many real-world optimization problems usually require a large number of conflicting objectives to be optimized simultaneously to obtain solution. It has been observed that these kinds of many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs) often pose several performance challenges to the traditional multi-objective optimization algorithms. To address the performance issue caused by the different types of MaOPs, recently, a variety of many-objective particle swarm optimization (MaOPSO) has been proposed. However, external archive maintenance and selection of leaders for designing the MaOPSO to real-world MaOPs are still challenging issues. This work presents a MaOPSO based on entropy-driven global best selection strategy (called EMPSO) to solve the many-objective software package restructuring (MaOSPR) problem. EMPSO makes use of the entropy and quality indicator for the selection of global best particle. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we applied it over the five MaOSPR problems. We compared it with eight variants of MaOPSO, which are based on eight different global best selection strategies. The results indicate that the proposed EMPSO is competitive with respect to the existing global best selection strategies based on variants of MaOPSO approaches.

The Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates in building cyber-physical systems, which are significant for Industry 4.0. Agent-based computing represents effective modeling, programming, and simulation paradigm to develop IoT systems. Agent concepts, techniques, methods, and tools are being used in evolving IoT systems. Over the last years, in particular, there has been an increasing number of agent approaches proposed along with an ever-growing interest in their various implementations. Yet a comprehensive and full-fledged agent approach for developing related projects is still lacking despite the presence of agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies. One of the moves towards compensating for this issue is to compile various available methodologies, ones that are comparable to the evolution of the unified modeling language (UML) in the domain of object-oriented analysis and design. These have become de facto standards in software development. In line with this objective, the present research attempts to comprehend the relationship among seven main AOSE methodologies. More specifically, we intend to assess and compare these seven approaches by conducting a feature analysis through examining the advantages and limitations of each competing process, structural analysis, and a case study evaluation method. This effort is made to address the significant characteristics of AOSE approaches. The main objective of this study is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of selected AOSE methodologies and provide a proposal of a draft unified approach that drives strengths (best) of these methodologies towards advancement in this area.

It is necessary to know the manufacturer and model of a previously implanted shoulder prosthesis before performing Total Shoulder Arthroplasty operations, which may need to be performed repeatedly in accordance with the need for repair or replacement. In cases where the patient’s previous records cannot be found, where the records are not clear, or the surgery was conducted abroad, the specialist should identify the implant manufacturer and model during preoperative X-ray controls. In this study, an auxiliary expert system is proposed for classifying manufacturers of shoulder implants on the basis of X-ray images that is automated, objective, and based on hybrid machine learning models. In the proposed system, ten different hybrid models consisting of a combination of deep learning and machine learning algorithms were created and statistically tested. According to the experimental results, an accuracy of 95.07% was achieved using the DenseNet201 + Logistic Regression model, one of the proposed hybrid machine learning models (p < 0.05). The proposed hybrid machine learning algorithms achieve the goal of low cost and high performance compared to other studies in the literature. The results lead the authors to believe that the proposed system could be used in hospitals as an automatic and objective system for assisting orthopedists in the rapid and effective determination of shoulder implant types before performing revision surgery.

Software defect prediction studies aim to predict defect-prone components before the testing stage of the software development process. The main benefit of these prediction models is that more testing resources can be allocated to fault-prone modules effectively. While a few software defect prediction models have been developed for mobile applications, a systematic overview of these studies is still missing. Therefore, we carried out a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study to evaluate how machine learning has been applied to predict faults in mobile applications. This study defined nine research questions, and 47 relevant studies were selected from scientific databases to respond to these research questions. Results show that most studies focused on Android applications (i.e., 48%), supervised machine learning has been applied in most studies (i.e., 92%), and object-oriented metrics were mainly preferred. The top five most preferred machine learning algorithms are Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines, Logistic Regression, Artificial Neural Networks, and Decision Trees. Researchers mostly preferred Object-Oriented metrics. Only a few studies applied deep learning algorithms including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Deep Belief Networks (DBN), and Deep Neural Networks (DNN). This is the first study that systematically reviews software defect prediction research focused on mobile applications. It will pave the way for further research in mobile software fault prediction and help both researchers and practitioners in this field.

In recent years, research into blockchain technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown rapidly due to an increase in media coverage. Many different blockchain applications and platforms have been developed for different purposes, such as food safety monitoring, cryptocurrency exchange, and secure medical data sharing. However, blockchain platforms cannot store all the generated data. Therefore, they are supported with data warehouses, which in turn is called a hybrid blockchain platform. While several systems have been developed based on this idea, a current state-of-the-art systematic overview on the use of hybrid blockchain platforms is lacking. Therefore, a systematic literature review (SLR) study has been carried out by us to investigate the motivations for adopting them, the domains at which they were used, the adopted technologies that made this integration effective, and, finally, the challenges and possible solutions. This study shows that security, transparency, and efficiency are the top three motivations for adopting these platforms. The energy, agriculture, health, construction, manufacturing, and supply chain domains are the top domains. The most adopted technologies are cloud computing, fog computing, telecommunications, and edge computing. While there are several benefits of using hybrid blockchains, there are also several challenges reported in this study.

Cybersecurity is a critical issue that must be prioritized not just by enterprises of all kinds, but also by national security. To safeguard an organization’s cyberenvironments, information, and communication technologies, many enterprises are investing substantially in cybersecurity these days. One part of the cyberdefense mechanism is building an enterprises’ security policies library, for consistent implementation of security controls. Significant and common cybersecurity policies of various enterprises are compared and explored in this study to provide robust and comprehensive cybersecurity knowledge that can be used in various enterprises. Several significant common security policies were identified and discussed in this comprehensive study. This study identified 10 common cybersecurity policy aspects in five enterprises: healthcare, finance, education, aviation, and e-commerce. We aimed to build a strong infrastructure in each business, and investigate the security laws and policies that apply to all businesses in each sector. Furthermore, the findings of this study reveal that the importance of cybersecurity requirements differ across multiple organizations. The choice and applicability of cybersecurity policies are determined by the type of information under control and the security requirements of organizations in relation to these policies.

Several aspects of software product quality can be assessed and measured using product metrics. Without software metric threshold values, it is difficult to evaluate different aspects of quality. To this end, the interest in research studies that focus on identifying and deriving threshold values is growing, given the advantage of applying software metric threshold values to evaluate various software projects during their software development life cycle phases. The aim of this paper is to systematically investigate research on software metric threshold calculation techniques. In this study, electronic databases were systematically searched for relevant papers; 45 publications were selected based on inclusion/exclusion criteria, and research questions were answered. The results demonstrate the following important characteristics of studies: (a) both empirical and theoretical studies were conducted, a majority of which depends on empirical analysis; (b) the majority of papers apply statistical techniques to derive object-oriented metrics threshold values; (c) Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) metrics were studied in most of the papers, and are widely used to assess the quality of software systems; and (d) there is a considerable number of studies that have not validated metric threshold values in terms of quality attributes. From both the academic and practitioner points of view, the results of this review present a catalog and body of knowledge on metric threshold calculation techniques. The results set new research directions, such as conducting mixed studies on statistical and quality-related studies, studying an extensive number of metrics and studying interactions among metrics, studying more quality attributes, and considering multivariate threshold derivation.

The early and accurate prediction of defects helps in testing software and therefore leads to an overall higher-quality product. Due to drift in software defect data, prediction model performances may degrade over time. Very few earlier works have investigated the significance of concept drift (CD) in software-defect prediction (SDP). Their results have shown that CD is present in software defect data and tha it has a significant impact on the performance of defect prediction. Motivated from this observation, this paper presents a paired learner-based drift detection and adaptation approach in SDP that dynamically adapts the varying concepts by updating one of the learners in pair. For a given defect dataset, a subset of data modules is analyzed at a time by both learners based on their learning experience from the past. A difference in accuracies of the two is used to detect drift in the data. We perform an evaluation of the presented study using defect datasets collected from the SEACraft and PROMISE data repositories. The experimentation results show that the presented approach successfully detects the concept drift points and performs better compared to existing methods, as is evident from the comparative analysis performed using various performance parameters such as number of drift points, ROC-AUC score, accuracy, and statistical analysis using Wilcoxon signed rank test.

The study was conducted to study the effect of betaine supplementation on haematology, serum enzymes and hormones profile in gestating sows. For the study, artificially inseminated 18 crossbred (Landrace × Desi) sows were randomly distributed into 3 groups with 6 sows in each following a completely randomized design (CRD). Group T0 was fed with basal diet (control) and betaine was supplemented in group T1 and T2 @ 3 g/kg basal diet during late pregnancy (d 76 onwards till parturition) and throughout the length of gestation, respectively. The results revealed that betaine supplementation had no significant effect on the haemoglobin (Hb), packed cell volume (PCV), red blood cell (RBC) count, platelet count and white blood cells (WBC) count. Similarly, the serum enzymes such as aspartate amino transferase (AST), alanine amino transferase (ALT), alkaline phoshatase (ALP), lactate dehydogenase (LDH), and creatine kinase (CK) revealed no significant effect of betaine supplementation. The serum concentration of T3 and T4 hormone (ng/ml) of sows was significantly higher at the time of farrowing compared to the level at the time of insemination. The serum concentration of cortisol (ng/ml) of sows was significantly reduced in betaine supplemented groups compared to control. Thus, based on the results pertaining to cortisol levels in gestating, sows it can be concluded that betaine supplementation @ 3 g/kg diet, 76 day post insemination is beneficial to ameliorate the oxidative stress during pregnancy.

Present study was conducted to study the effect of betaine supplementation on production and reproductive performance, milk composition and serum antioxidant profile in gestating sows. For the study, 18 artificially inseminated crossbred (Landrace × Desi) sows were randomly distributed into three groups containing 6 sow each in completely randomized design (CRD). T0 (control) group was supplemented with basal diet, whereas, T1 and T2 groups were fed basal diet supplemented with betaine @ 3 g/kg DM during late gestation (-76 days to farrowing) and throughout the length of gestation, respectively. Litter size at weaning was significantly increased in T2 group as compared to control. Litter weight at weaning (kg) was significantly increased and weaning to estrus interval (days) was significantly decreased in T1 and T2 groups as compared to control. Serum superoxide dismutase level (ng/ml) was unaffected following betaine supplementation. Whereas, serum catalase level (ng/ml) and total antioxidant activity (Mmol/l) was significantly improved while malondialdehyde level (Mmol/l) was significantly reduced in betaine supplemented groups compared to control group. Thus, it can be concluded that, dietary betaine supplementation @ 3 g/kg throughout the length of gestation was helpful in improving reproduction performance, anti-oxidant defense as well as welfare of the pregnant sows.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) includes various types of diagrams that help to study, analyze, document, design, or develop any software efficiently. Therefore, UML diagrams are of great advantage for researchers, software developers, and academicians. Class diagrams are the most widely used UML diagrams for this purpose. Despite its recognition as a standard modeling language for Object-Oriented software, it is difficult to learn. Although there exist repositories that aids the users with the collection of UML diagrams, there is still much more to explore and develop in this domain. The objective of our research was to develop a tool that can automatically classify the images as UML class diagrams and non-UML class diagrams. Earlier research used Machine Learning techniques for classifying class diagrams. Thus, they are required to identify image features and investigate the impact of these features on the UML class diagrams classification problem. We developed a new approach for automatically classifying class diagrams using the approach of Convolutional Neural Network under the domain of Deep Learning. We have applied the code on Convolutional Neural Networks with and without the Regularization technique. Our tool receives JPEG/PNG/GIF/TIFF images as input and predicts whether it is a UML class diagram image or not. There is no need to tag images of class diagrams as UML class diagrams in our dataset.

Purpose: In this study, the required dose rates for optimal treatment of tumoral tissues when using proton therapy in the treatment of defective tumours seen in mandibles has been calculated. We aimed to protect the surrounding soft and hard tissues from unnecessary radiation as well as to prevent complications of radiation. Bragg curves of therapeutic energized protons for two different mandible (molar and premolar) plate phantoms were computed and compared with similar calculations in the literature. The results were found to be within acceptable deviation values. Methods: In this study, mandibular tooth plate phantoms were modelled for the molar and premolar areas and then a Monte Carlo simulation was used to calculate the Bragg curve, lateral straggle/range and recoil values of protons remaining in the therapeutic energy ranges. The mass and atomic densities of all the jawbone layers were selected and the effect of layer type and thickness on the Bragg curve, lateral straggle/range and the recoil were investigated. As protons move through different layers of density, lateral straggle and increases in the range were observed. A range of energies was used for the treatment of tumours at different depths in the mandible phantom. Results: Simulations revealed that as the cortical bone thickness increased, Bragg peak position decreased between 0.47–3.3%. An increase in the number of layers results in a decrease in the Bragg peak position. Finally, as the proton energy increased, the amplitude of the second peak and its effect on Bragg peak position decreased. Conclusion: These findings should guide the selection of appropriate energy levels in the treatment of tumour structures without damaging surrounding tissues.

This paper proposes a novel data classification framework, combining sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) and a post-processing system consisting of a linear system model relying on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. All the sensitive and high-level features are extracted by using the first auto-encoder which is wired to the second auto-encoder, followed by a Softmax function layer to classify the extracted features obtained from the second layer. The two auto-encoders and the Softmax classifier are stacked in order to be trained in a supervised approach using the well-known backpropagation algorithm to enhance the performance of the neural network. Afterwards, the linear model transforms the calculated output of the deep stacked sparse auto-encoder to a value close to the anticipated output. This simple transformation increases the overall data classification performance of the stacked sparse auto-encoder architecture. The PSO algorithm allows the estimation of the parameters of the linear model in a metaheuristic policy. The proposed framework is validated by using three public datasets, which present promising results when compared with the current literature. Furthermore, the framework can be applied to any data classification problem by considering minor updates such as altering some parameters including input features, hidden neurons and output classes.

There has been a strong growth in aquatic products supported by the global seafood industry. Consumers demand information transparency to support informed decisions and to verify nutrition, food safety, and sustainable operations. Supporting these needs rests on the existence of interoperable Internet of Things (IoT) platforms for traceability that goes beyond the minimum “one up, one down” scheme required by regulators. Seafood farmers, being the source of both food and food-information, are critical to achieving the needed transparency. Traditionally, seafood farmers carry the costs of providing information, while downstream actors reap the benefits, causing limited provision of information. Now, global standards for labelling, data from IoT devices, and the reciprocity of utility from collecting data while sharing them represent great potential for farmers to generate value from traceability systems. To enable this, farmers need an IoT platform integrated with other IoT platforms in the value network. This paper presents a case study of an enterprise-level IoT platform for seafood farmers that satisfies consumers’ end-to-end traceability needs while extracting data from requests for information from downstream actors.

With the growth of online information and sudden expansion in the number of electronic documents provided on websites and in electronic libraries, there is difficulty in categorizing text documents. Therefore, a rule-based approach is a solution to this problem; the purpose of this study is to classify documents by using a rule-based. This paper deals with the rule-based approach with the embedding technique for a document to vector (doc2vec) files. An experiment was performed on two data sets Reuters-21578 and the 20 Newsgroups to classify the top ten categories of these data sets by using a document to vector rule-based (D2vecRule). Finally, this method provided us a good classification result according to the F-measures and implementation time metrics. In conclusion, it was observed that our algorithm document to vector rule-based (D2vecRule) was good when compared with other algorithms such as JRip, One R, and ZeroR applied to the same Reuters-21578 dataset.

Recently, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has received considerable attention and is considered to be the next wave of information technology revolution. The number of RFID applications in different industries is increasing continuously. Cumulative sales of RFID tag is up in 2006 which shows RFID adoption trend in industries to improve their efficiency of operations and to gain a competitive advantage. In the aviation industry, major airports, airlines have been also planning the RFID adoption in baggage handling and customer services areas for a long time. Many pilot tests have been performed at various airports and RFID tags were found to be far more precise along with better performance than bar codes. This paper provides a review on RFID systems, associated technology, advantages, limitations and applications in various fields. Further, this paper reports the preliminary review of state of RFID adoption planning, architecture and implementation plan in a major airline, focusing on improved baggage handling, increased airport/airline security and customer services. KEYWORDS: aviation, airline, baggage handling, customer-service, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)