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Handling and quantifying two types of uncertainties, spatial and inherent, in land-cover segmentation using multiple satellite images constitutes a primary concern within the domain of segmenting multiple remote sensing images. Despite the comprehensive examination of the spatial uncertainty, the lack of a mathematical model addressing the inherent uncertainty in satellite images is notable. This article endeavors to address this gap by considering and focuses on the latter. Leveraging multiple high-resolution panchromatic remote sensing images as input data, the study aims to model all procedures in the image formation and preprocessing stages (applied to each input image before segmentation) as the producing factors of inherent uncertainty in the segmentation process. The input images, conceptualized as events in random processes, undergo fusion using the mean estimator, referred to as the proposed “ultrafusion” method in this article. The study demonstrates that the results of ultrafusion can be effectively modeled by normal-type fuzzy numbers. The parameters of these fuzzy numbers are estimated using the maximum likelihood method. Subsequently, fuzzy C-means, as the most renowned clustering method, is employed for segmentation. Analytical comparisons reveal the notable performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of accurate segmentation and computational efficiency. Affirming the efficacy of the proposed approach, simulation results validate the advantages by improving the overall accuracy, Kappa, and F1-score indices by about 0.86%, 0.52%, and 1.03%, respectively, in comparison with the most recent and similar method.

In recent years, the use of Software Defined Networking (SDN) has increased due to various network management requirements. Using SDN in computer network applications has brought several benefits to users, including lower operational costs, better hardware management, flexibility, and centralized network deployment. On the other hand, the Internet of Things (IoT) is another rapidly growing technology. Distributed and dynamic infrastructures are two critical characteristics of IoT. These characteristics lead to some challenges while using SDN in IoT in terms of security and privacy. In this paper, we address security and privacy issues and solutions for SDN-based IoT systems. We analyze the techniques used for defense in previous works to achieve an acceptable level of security and privacy protection in SDN-based IoT systems. In the data plane, SDN-based IoT papers have considered hashing and encryption techniques, in the control plane, certificate authority and access control have been analyzed, and in the application plane, attack detection, and authentication have been discussed. We also provide a statistical analysis of the existing work. This analysis shows that researchers have focused on certain areas more than others in recent years. The final analysis also highlights issues that previous researchers have ignored.

Myocarditis is the form of an inflammation of the middle layer of the heart wall which is caused by a viral infection and can affect the heart muscle and its electrical system. It has remained one of the most challenging diagnoses in cardiology. Myocardial is the prime cause of unexpected death in approximately 20% of adults less than 40 years of age. Cardiac MRI (CMR) has been considered a noninvasive and golden standard diagnostic tool for suspected myocarditis and plays an indispensable role in diagnosing various cardiac diseases. However, the performance of CMR depends heavily on the clinical presentation and features such as chest pain, arrhythmia, and heart failure. Besides, other imaging factors like artifacts, technical errors, pulse sequence, acquisition parameters, contrast agent dose, and more importantly qualitatively visual interpretation can affect the result of the diagnosis. This paper introduces a new deep learning-based model called Convolutional Neural Network-Clustering (CNN-KCL) to diagnose Myocarditis. In this study, we used 47 subjects with a total number of 98,898 images to diagnose myocarditis disease. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 97.41% based on 10 fold-cross validation technique with 4 clusters for diagnosis of Myocarditis. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first to use deep learning algorithms for the diagnosis of myocarditis.

The manuscript represents a comeprehensive and systematic literature review on the machine learning methods in the emerging applications of the smart cities. Application domains include the essential aspects of the smart cities including the energy, healthcare, transportation, security, and pollution. The research methodology presents a state-of-the-art taxonomy, evaluation and model performance where the ML algorithms are classified into one of the following four categories: decision trees, support vector machines, artificial neural networks, and advanced machine learning methods, i.e., hybrid methods, ensembles, and Deep Learning. The study found that the hybrid models and ensembles have better performance since they exhibit both a high accuracy and low overall cost. On the other hand, the deep learning (DL) techniques had a higher accuracy than the hybrid models and ensembles, but they demanded relatively higher computation power. Moreover, all these advanced ML methods had a slower processing speed than the single methods. Likewise, the support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT) generally outperformed the artificial neural network (ANN) for accuracy and other metrics. However, since the difference was negligible, it can be concluded that using either of them is appropriate.

Recent technology has modeled VANET (vehicular adhoc network) communication well in terms of privileges to derive vehicular communication technologically to save time, energy, and money. Due to the increase in powerful technology in modern times, VANETs play a vital role in uplifting daily concerns across vehicles and vehicular identities. Hence, to tune VANETs to become compatible with traditional technologies and increase demand, VANETs require upgrading. The severity and frequency of unwanted occurrences have become a considerable concern for our day-to-day lives relating to vehicular position. Thus, verily updated methodologies or working procedures are needed for the future VANET interplay to eradicate such problems occurring through vehicular identities. This article outlines in technology related to VANETS, future developments, and coping issues by deriving comprehensive frameworks, workflow patterns, upgrading procedures including big data, fog computing, SDN (software defined networking), and SIoT (social Internet of Things). This article provides a high-level overview of a complete VANET upgrade solution to address future problem management issues under a range of acceptable scientific themes, indicators, and combinations.

This paper investigates the applications of explainable AI (XAI) in healthcare, which aims to provide transparency, fairness, accuracy, generality, and comprehensibility to the results obtained from AI and ML algorithms in decision-making systems. The black box nature of AI and ML systems has remained a challenge in healthcare, and interpretable AI and ML techniques can potentially address this issue. Here we critically review previous studies related to the interpretability of ML and AI methods in medical systems. Descriptions of various types of XAI methods such as layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP), Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME), SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), ANCHOR, contextual importance and utility (CIU), Training calibration-based explainers (TraCE), Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), NeuroXAI, Explainable Cumulative Fuzzy Class Membership Criterion (X-CFCMC) along with the diseases which can be explained through these methods are provided throughout the paper. The paper also discusses how AI and ML technologies can transform healthcare services. The usability and reliability of the presented methods are summarized, including studies on the usability and reliability of XGBoost for mediastinal cysts and tumors, a 3D brain tumor segmentation network, and the TraCE method for medical image analysis. Overall, this paper aims to contribute to the growing field of XAI in healthcare and provide insights for researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers in the healthcare industry. Finally, we discuss the performance of XAI methods applied in medical health care systems. It is also needed to mention that a brief implemented method is provided in the methodology section.

The ever-evolving and contagious nature of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) has immobilized the world around us. As the daily number of infected cases increases, the containment of the spread of this virus is proving to be an overwhelming task. Healthcare facilities around the world are overburdened with an ominous responsibility to combat an ever-worsening scenario. To aid the healthcare system, Internet of Things (IoT) technology provides a better solution—tracing, testing of COVID patients efficiently is gaining rapid pace. This study discusses the role of IoT technology in healthcare during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemics. The study overviews different research, platforms, services, products where IoT is used to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we intelligently integrate IoT and healthcare for COVID-19 related applications. Again, we focus on a wide range of IoT applications in regards to SARS-CoV-2 tracing, testing, and treatment. Finally, we effectively consider further challenges, issues, and some direction regarding IoT in order to uplift the healthcare system during COVID-19 and future pandemics.

With the rapid development of ICT, the present world is experiencing rapid changes in the field of education. Implementation of e-learning and ICT in the education system could allow teachers to upgrade and improve their lectures. However, from the perspective of value co-creation behavior in learning communities, conventional learning and e-learning classrooms may encounter different opportunities and challenges. Thus, a more in-depth investigation would be needed. Based on the S-O-R framework, this study identifies self-directed learning as a stimulus, perceived benefits as the organism, and value co-creation behavior as the response. By applying the multi-criteria decision-making techniques of DEMATEL, ANP, and VIKOR, this study explores the causal effects, influential weights, and performance ranking of the primary constructs in the framework as criteria. This study's theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and ways of improving learning performance are suggested.

As a global community, the Internet is comprised of thousands of administrative entities that operate and interact with each other. Transferring data among these entities is possible due to the process of routing, which is challenging due to the lack of centrality. Consequently, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) can play a vital role in the routing process as a central hub for disseminating routing information to the various autonomous systems. Yet, the BGP poses security vulnerability due to the difficulty of validation and authentication. Recent studies argue that it would be beneficial to apply the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) approach to address some of the BGP problems. The SDN can help handle BGP-based networks at a low cost and with minimal complexity. However, there are still many scientific and operational problems in this field of study. The main objective of this paper is to identify the challenges that the BGP facing with respect to the adoption of the SDN. The findings revealed that most researchers focused on improving convergence time, while other essential features such as scalability and privacy were overlooked.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Blockchain are leading technologies used worldwide to establish safe network communication as well as build secure network infrastructures. They provide a robust and reliable platform to address threats and face challenges such as security, privacy, flexibility, scalability, and confidentiality. Driven by these assumptions, this paper presents an optimized energy-efficient and secure Blockchain-based software-defined IoT framework for smart networks. Indeed, SDN and Blockchain technologies have proven to be able to suitably manage resource utilization and to develop secure network communication across the IoT ecosystem. However, there is a lack of research works that present a comprehensive definition of such a framework that can meet the requirements of the IoT ecosystem (i.e. efficient energy utilization and reduced end-to-end delay). Therefore, in this research, we present a layered hierarchical architecture for the deployment of a distributed yet efficient Blockchain-enabled SDN-IoT framework that ensures efficient cluster-head selection and secure network communication via the identification and isolation of rouge switches. Besides, the Blockchain-enabled flow-rules record keeps track of the rules enforced in the switches and maintains the consistency within the controller cluster. Finally, we assess the performance of the proposed framework in a simulation environment and show that it can achieve optimized energy-utilization, end-to-end delay, and throughput compared to considered baselines, thus being able to achieve efficiency and security in the smart network.

The world is witnessing the daily emergence of a vast variety of online social networks and community detection problem is a major research area in online social network studies. The existing community detection algorithms are mostly edge-based and are evaluated using the modularity metric benchmarks. However, these algorithms have two inherent limitations. Firstly, they are based on a pure mathematical object which considers the number of connections in each community as the main measures. Consequently, a resolution limit and low accuracy in finding community members in often observed. Whereas, online social networks are dynamic networks and the key players are humans whose main attributes such as lifespan, geo-location, the density of interactions, and user weight, change over time. These attributes tend to influence the formation of user communities in any category of online social network. Secondly, the output structure of existing community detection algorithms is usually provided as a graph and dendrogram. A graph structure, is, however, characterized by a high memory complexity, and subsequently exponential search time complexity. Implementing dendrogram such a complex structure is complicated. To address memory complexity and the accuracy rate of the community detection issues, this paper proposes a new temporal user attribute-based algorithm, namely the recently largest interaction based on the attributes of a typical online social network user. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms eight well-known algorithms in this domain.

Blockchain as emerging technology is revolutionizing several industries, and its abundant privileges have opened up a bunch of research directions in various industries; thereby, it has acquired many interests from the research community. The rapid evolution of blockchain research papers in recent years has resulted in a need to conduct research studies that investigate a detailed analysis of the current body of knowledge in this field. To address this need, a few review papers have been published to report the latest accomplishments and challenges of blockchain technology from different perspectives. Nonetheless, there has not been any bibliometric analysis of the state of the art in blockchain where Web of Science (WoS) has been taken into consideration as a literature database. Hence, a thorough analysis of the current body of knowledge in blockchain research through a bibliometric study would be needed. In this paper, we performed a bibliometric analysis of all Blockchain’s conference papers, articles, and review papers that have been indexed byWoS from 2013 to 2018. We have analyzed those collected papers against five research questions. The results revealed some valuable insights, including yearly publications and citations trends, hottest research areas, top-ten influential papers, favorite publication venues, and most supportive funding bodies. The findings of this paper offer several implications that can be used as a guideline by both fresh and experienced researchers to establish a baseline before initiating a blockchain research project in the future.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has had a tremendous impact on every field, and several definitions of its different types have been provided. In the literature, most articles focus on the extraordinary capabilities of artificial intelligence. Recently, some challenges such as security, safety, fairness, robustness, and energy consumption have been reported during the development of intelligent systems. As the usage of intelligent systems increases, the number of new challenges increases. Obviously, during the evolution of artificial narrow intelligence to artificial super intelligence, the viewpoint on the challenges such as security will be changed. In addition, the recent development of human-level intelligence cannot appropriately happen without considering whole challenges in designing intelligent systems. Considering the mentioned situation, no study in the literature summarizes the challenges in designing artificial intelligence. In this paper, a review of the challenges is presented. Then, some important research questions about the future dynamism of challenges and their relationships are answered.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has seen a surge in mobile devices with the market and technical expansion. IoT networks provide end-to-end connectivity while keeping minimal latency. To reduce delays, efficient data delivery schemes are required for dispersed fog-IoT network orchestrations. We use a Spark-based big data processing scheme (BDPS) to accelerate the distributed database (RDD) delay efficient technique in the fogs for a decentralized heterogeneous network architecture to reinforce suitable data allocations via IoTs. We propose BDPS based on Spark-RDD in fog-IoT overlay architecture to address the performance issues across the network orchestration. We evaluate data processing delays from fog-IoT integrated parts using a depth-first-search-based shortest path node finding configuration, which outperforms the existing shortest path algorithms in terms of algorithmic (i.e., depth-first search) efficiency, including the Bellman–Ford (BF) algorithm, Floyd–Warshall (FW) algorithm, Dijkstra algorithm (DA), and Apache Hadoop (AH) algorithm. The BDPS exhibits low latency in packet deliveries as well as low network overhead uplink activity through a map-reduced resilient data distribution mechanism, better than in BF, DA, FW, and AH. The overall BDPS scheme supports efficient data delivery across the fog-IoT orchestration, outperforming faster node execution while proving effective results, compared to DA, BF, FW and AH, respectively.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ubiquitous and pervasive, and therefore; highly susceptible to a number of security attacks. Denial of Service (DoS) attack is considered the most dominant and a major threat to WSNs. Moreover, the wormhole attack represents one of the potential forms of the Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Besides, crafting the wormhole attack is comparatively simple; though, its detection is nontrivial. On the contrary, the extant wormhole defense methods need both specialized hardware and strong assumptions to defend against static and dynamic wormhole attack. The ensuing paper introduces a novel scheme to detect wormhole attacks in a geographic routing protocol (DWGRP). The main contribution of this paper is to detect malicious nodes and select the best and the most reliable neighbors based on pairwise key pre-distribution technique and the beacon packet. Moreover, this novel technique is not subject to any specific assumption, requirement, or specialized hardware, such as a precise synchronized clock. The proposed detection method is validated by comparisons with several related techniques in the literature, such as Received Signal Strength (RSS), Authentication of Nodes Scheme (ANS), Wormhole Detection uses Hound Packet (WHOP), and Wormhole Detection with Neighborhood Information (WDI) using the NS-2 simulator. The analysis of the simulations shows promising results with low False Detection Rate (FDR) in the geographic routing protocols.

Cloud computing is a significant shift of computational paradigm where computing as a utility and storing data remotely have a great potential. Enterprise and businesses are now more interested in outsourcing their data to the cloud to lessen the burden of local data storage and maintenance. However, the outsourced data and the computation outcomes are not continuously trustworthy due to the lack of control and physical possession of the data owners. To better streamline this issue, researchers have now focused on designing remote data auditing (RDA) techniques. The majority of these techniques, however, are only applicable for static archive data and are not subject to audit the dynamically updated outsourced data. We propose an effectual RDA technique based on algebraic signature properties for cloud storage system and also present a new data structure capable of efficiently supporting dynamic data operations like append, insert, modify, and delete. Moreover, this data structure empowers our method to be applicable for large-scale data with minimum computation cost. The comparative analysis with the state-of-the-art RDA schemes shows that the proposed scheme is secure and highly efficient in terms of the computation and communication overhead on the auditor and server.