Search

Thanks to rapid technological developments, new innovative solutions and practical applications of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are being created, upgrading the structures of many industrial enterprises. IIoT brings the physical and digital environment together with minimal human intervention and profoundly transforms the economy and modern business. Data flowing through IIoT feed artificial intelligence tools, which perform intelligent functions such as performance tuning of interconnected machines, error correction, and preventive maintenance. However, IIoT deployments are vulnerable to sophisticated security threats at various levels of the connectivity and communications infrastructure they incorporate. The complex and often heterogeneous nature of chaotic IIoT infrastructures means that availability, confidentiality and integrity are difficult to guarantee. This can lead to potential mistrust of network operations, concerns about privacy breaches or loss of vital personal data and sensitive information of network end-users. This paper examines the privacy requirements of an IIoT ecosystem in industry standards. Specifically, it describes the industry privacy dimensions of the protection of natural persons through the processing of personal data by competent authorities for the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties. In addition, it presents an overview of the state-of-the-art methodologies and solutions for industrial privacy threats. Finally, it analyses the privacy requirements and suggestions for an ideal secure and private IIoT environment.

Developing intelligent, interoperable Cyber Threat Information (CTI) sharing technologies can help build strong defences against modern cyber threats. CTIs allow the community to share information about cybercriminals' threats and vulnerabilities and countermeasures to defend themselves or detect malicious activity. A crucial need for success is that the data connected to cyber risks be understandable, organized, and of good quality. The receiving parties may grasp its content and utilize it effectively. This article describes an innovative cyber threat intelligence management platform (CTIMP) for industrial environments, one of the Cyber-pi project's significant elements. The suggested architecture, in particular, uses cyber knowledge from trusted public sources and integrates it with relevant information from the organization's supervised infrastructure in an entirely interoperable and intelligent way. When combined with an advanced visualization mechanism and user interface, the services mentioned above provide administrators with the situational awareness they require while also allowing for extended cooperation, intelligent selection of advanced coping strategies, and a set of automated self-healing rules for dealing with threats.

A smart city is a place where existing facilities and services are enhanced by digital technology to benefit people and companies. The most critical infrastructures in this city are interconnected. Increased data exchange across municipal domains aims to manage the essential assets, leading to more automation in city governance and optimization of the dynamic offered services. However, no clear guideline or standard exists for modeling these data flows. As a result, operators, municipalities, policymakers, manufac-turers, solution providers, and vendors are forced to accept systems with limited scalability and varying needs. Nonetheless, it is critical to raise awareness about smart city cybersecurity and implement suitable measures to safeguard citizens' privacy and security because the cyber threats seem to be well-organized, diverse, and sophisticated. This study aims to present an overview of cyber threats, attacks, and countermeasures on the primary domains of smart cities (smart government, smart mobility, smart environment, smart living, smart healthcare, smart economy, and smart people) to present information extracted from state-of-the-art to policymakers to perceive the critical situation and, at the same time, to be a valuable resource for the scientific community.

Developing a rapid, but also reliable and efficient, method for classifying the seismic damage potential of buildings constructed in countries with regions of high seismicity is always at the forefront of modern scientific research. Such a technique would be essential for estimating the pre-seismic vulnerability of the buildings, so that the authorities will be able to develop earthquake safety plans for seismic rehabilitation of the highly earthquake-susceptible structures. In the last decades, several researchers have proposed such procedures, some of which were adopted by seismic code guidelines. These procedures usually utilize methods based either on simple calculations or on the application of statistics theory. Recently, the increase of the computers' power has led to the development of modern statistical methods based on the adoption of Machine Learning algorithms. These methods have been shown to be useful for predicting seismic performance and classifying structural damage level by means of extracting patterns from data collected via various sources. A large training dataset is used for the implementation of the classification algorithms. To this end, 90 3D R/C buildings with three different masonry infills' distributions are analysed utilizing Nonlinear Time History Analysis method for 65 real seismic records. The level of the seismic damage is expressed in terms of the Maximum Interstory Drift Ratio. A large number of Machine Learning algorithms is utilized in order to estimate the buildings' damage response. The most significant conclusion which is extracted is that the Machine Learning methods that are mathematically well-established and their operations that are clearly interpretable step by step can be used to solve some of the most sophisticated real-world problems in consideration with high accuracy.

Seismic assessment of buildings and determination of their structural damage is at the forefront of modern scientific research. Since now, several researchers have proposed a number of procedures, in an attempt to estimate the damage response of the buildings subjected to strong ground motions, without conducting time-consuming analyses. These procedures, e.g. construction of fragility curves, usually utilize methods based on the application of statistical theory. In the last decades, the increase of the computers' power has led to the development of modern soft computing methods based on the adoption of Machine Learning algorithms. The present paper attempts an extensive comparative evaluation of the capability of various Machine Learning methods to adequately predict the seismic response of R/C buildings. The training dataset is created by means of Nonlinear Time History Analyses of 90 3D R/C buildings with three different masonry infills' distributions, which are subjected to 65 earthquakes. The seismic damage is expressed in terms of the Maximum Interstory Drift Ratio. A large-scale comparison study is utilized by the most efficient Machine Learning algorithms. The experimentation shows that the LightGBM approach produces training stability, high overall performance and a remarkable coefficient of determination to estimate the ability to predict the buildings' damage response. Due to the extremely urgent issue, civil protection mechanisms need to incorporate in their technological systems scientific methodologies and appropriate technical or modeling tools such as the proposed one, which can offer valuable assistance in making optimal decisions.

In the last years, materializations of neuromorphic circuits based on nanophotonic arrangements have been proposed, which contain complete optical circuits, laser, photodetectors, photonic crystals, optical fibers, flat waveguides, and other passive optical elements of nanostructured materials, which eliminate the time of simultaneous processing of big groups of data, taking advantage of the quantum perspective and thus highly increasing the potentials of contemporary intelligent computational systems. This article is an effort to record and study the research that has been conducted concerning the methods of development and materi-alization of neuromorphic circuits of Neural Networks of nanophotonic arrangements. In particular, an investigative study of the methods of developing nanophotonic neuromorphic processors, their originality in neuronic architectural structure, their training methods and their optimization has been realized along with the study of special issues such as optical activation functions and cost functions.

Given the increasing complexity of threats in smart cities, the changing environment, and the weakness of traditional security systems, which in most cases fail to detect serious threats such as zero-day attacks, the need for alternative more active and more effective security methods keeps increasing. Such approaches are the adoption of intelligent solutions to prevent, detect and deal with threats or anomalies under the conditions and the operating parameters of the infrastructure in question. This research paper introduces the development of an intelligent Threat Defense system, employing Blockchain Federated Learning, which seeks to fully upgrade the way passive intelligent systems operate, aiming at implementing an Advanced Adaptive Cooperative Learning (AACL) mechanism for smart cities networks. The AACL is based on the most advanced methods of computational intelligence while ensuring privacy and anonymity for participants and stakeholders. The proposed framework combines Federated Learning for the distributed and continuously validated learning of the tracing algorithms. Learning is achieved through encrypted smart contracts within the blockchain technology, for unambiguous validation and control of the process. The aim of the proposed Framework is to intelligently classify smart cities networks traffic derived from Industrial IoT (IIoT) by Deep Content Inspection (DCI) methods, in order to identify anomalies that are usually due to Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks.

Attackers are perpetually modifying their tactics to avoid detection and frequently leverage legitimate credentials with trusted tools already deployed in a network environment, making it difficult for organizations to proactively identify critical security risks. Network traffic analysis products have emerged in response to attackers relentless innovation, offering organizations a realistic path forward for combatting creative attackers. Additionally, thanks to the widespread adoption of cloud computing, Device Operators processes, and the Internet of Things, maintaining effective network visibility has become a highly complex and overwhelming process. What makes network traffic analysis technology particularly meaningful is its ability to combine its core capabilities to deliver malicious intent detection. In this paper, we propose a novel darknet traffic analysis and network management framework to real-time automating the malicious intent detection process, using a weight agnostic neural networks architecture. It is an effective and accurate computational intelligent forensics tool for network traffic analysis, the demystification of malware traffic, and encrypted traffic identification in real-time. Based on Weight Agnostic Neural Networks methodology, we propose an automated searching neural net architectures strategy that can perform various tasks such as identify zero-day attacks. By automating the malicious intent detection process from the darknet, the advanced proposed solution is reducing the skills and effort barrier that prevents many organizations from effectively protecting their most critical assets.

The global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, in conjunction with the economic consequences and the collapse of health systems, has raised serious concerns in Europe, which is the most affected continent by the pandemic since it recorded 2,388,694 cases and 190,091 deaths (39.6% of the worldwide total), of which 71.7% (136,238) are in the United Kingdom (43,414), Italy (34,708), France (29,778), and Spain (28,338). Unlike other countries, Greece, with about 310 confirmed cases and 18 deaths per million, is one bright exception in the study and analysis of this phenomenon. Focusing on the peculiarities of the disease spreading in Greece, both in epidemiological and in implementation terms, this paper applies an exploratory analysis of COVID-19 temporal spread in Greece and proposes a methodological approach for the modeling and prediction of the disease based on the Regression Splines algorithm and the change rate of the total infections. Also, it proposes a hybrid spline regression and complex network model of social distance measures evaluating and interpreting the spread of the disease. The overall approach contributes to decision making and support of the public health system and to the fight against the pandemic.

The implementation of teaching interventions in learning needs has received considerable attention, as the provision of the same educational conditions to all students, is pedagogically ineffective. In contrast, more effectively considered the pedagogical strategies that adapt to the real individual skills of the students. An important innovation in this direction is the Adaptive Educational Systems (AES) that support automatic modeling study and adjust the teaching content on educational needs and students' skills. Effective utilization of these educational approaches can be enhanced with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in order to the substantive content of the web acquires structure and the published information is perceived by the search engines. This study proposes a novel Adaptive Educational eLearning System (AEeLS) that has the capacity to gather and analyze data from learning repositories and to adapt these to the educational curriculum according to the student skills and experience. It is a novel hybrid machine learning system that combines a Semi-Supervised Classification method for ontology matching and a Recommendation Mechanism that uses a hybrid method from neighborhood-based collaborative and content-based filtering techniques, in order to provide a personalized educational environment for each student.

Within the complex framework of anti-COVID-19 health management, where the criteria of diagnostic testing, the availability of public-health resources and services, and the applied anti-COVID-19 policies vary between countries, the reliability and the accuracy in the modeling of temporal spread can be proven effective in the worldwide fight against the disease. This paper applies an exploratory time-series analysis to the evolution of the disease in Greece, which currently suggests a success story of COVID-19 management. The proposed method builds on a recent conceptualization of detecting connective communities in a time-series and develops a novel spline regression model where the knot vector is determined by the community detection in the complex network. Overall, the study contributes to the COVID-19 research by proposing a free of disconnected past-data and reliable framework of forecasting, which can facilitate decision-making and management of the available health resources.