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Abstract Recurrent incidents of economically motivated adulteration have long-lasting and devastating effects on public health, economy, and society. With the current food authentication methods being target-oriented, the lack of an effective methodology to detect unencountered adulterants can lead to the next melamine-like outbreak. In this study, an ensemble machine-learning model that can help detect unprecedented adulteration without looking for specific substances, that is, in a non-targeted approach, is proposed. Using raw milk as an example, the proposed model achieved an accuracy and F1 score of 0.9924 and 0. 0.9913, respectively, when the same type of adulterants was presented in the training data. Cross-validation with spiked contaminants not routinely tested in the food industry and blinded from the training data provided an F1 score of 0.8657. This is the first study that demonstrates the feasibility of non-targeted detection with no a priori knowledge of the presence of certain adulterants using data from standard industrial testing as input. By uncovering discriminative profiling patterns, the ensemble machine-learning model can monitor and flag suspicious samples; this technique can potentially be extended to other food commodities and thus become an important contributor to public food safety.

Abstract  Routing is a fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks. Most previous routing protocols are challenged when used in large dynamic networks as they suffer from either poor scalability or the void problem. In this paper, we propose a new geographic routing protocol, SBFR (Scoped Bellman-Ford Routing), for large dynamic wireless sensor networks. The basic idea is that each node keeps a view scope of the network by computing distance vectors using the distributed Bellman-Ford method, and maintains a cost for routing to the sink. When forwarding a packet, a node picks the node with minimum cost in its routing table as a temporary landmark. While achieving good scalability, it also solves the void problem in an efficient manner through the combination of Bellman-Ford routing and cost-based geographic routing. Analytical and simulation results show that SBFR outperforms other routing protocols not only because of its robustness and scalability but also its practicality and simplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have found more and more applications in a variety of pervasive computing environments. However, how to support the development, maintenance, deployment and execution of applications over WSNs remains to be a nontrivial and challenging task, mainly because of the gap between the high level requirements from pervasive computing applications and the underlying operation of WSNs. Middleware for WSN can help bridge the gap and remove impediments. In recent years, research has been carried out on WSN middleware from different aspects and for different purposes. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing work on WSN middleware, seeking for a better understanding of the current issues and future directions in this field. We propose a reference framework to analyze the functionalities of WSN middleware in terms of the system abstractions and the services provided. We review the approaches and techniques for implementing the services. On the basis of the analysis and by using a feature tree, we provide taxonomy of the features of WSN middleware and their relationships, and use the taxonomy to classify and evaluate existing work. We also discuss open problems in this important area of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  To minimize the execution time of a sensing task over a multi-hop hierarchical sensor network, we present a coordinated scheduling method following the divisible load scheduling paradigm. The proposed scheduling strategy builds on eliminating transmission collisions and idle gaps between two successive data transmissions. We consider a sensor network consisting of several clusters. In a cluster, after related raw data measured by source nodes are collected at the fusion node, in-network data aggregation is further considered. The scheduling strategies consist of two phases: intra-cluster scheduling and inter-cluster scheduling. Intra-cluster scheduling deals with assigning different fractions of a sensing workload among source nodes in each cluster; inter-cluster scheduling involves the distribution of fused data among all fusion nodes. Closed-form solutions to the problem of task scheduling are derived. Finally, numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the impacts of different system parameters such as the number of sensor nodes, measurement, ommunication, and processing speed, on the finish time and energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]