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The agriculture sector holds paramount importance in Pakistan due to the intrinsic agrarian nature of the economy. Pakistan has its GDP based on agriculture, however it relies on manual monitoring of crops, which is a labour intensive and ineffective method. In contrast to this, several cutting edge technology-based solutions are being employed in the developed countries to enhance the crop yield with the optimal use of resources. To this end, we have proposed an integrated approach for monitoring crop health using IoT, machine learning and drone technology. The integration of these sensing modalities generate heterogeneous data which not only varies in nature (i.e. observed parameter) but also has different temporal fidelity. The spatial resolution of these methods is also different, hence, the optimal integration of these sensing modalities and their implementation in practice are addressed in the proposed system. In our proposed solution, the IoT sensors provide the real-time status of environmental parameters impacting the crop, and the drone platform provide the multispectral data used for generating Vegetation Indices (VIs) such as Normalized Difference vegetation Index (NDVI) for analyzing the crop health. The NDVI provides information about the crop based on the chlorophyll content, which offers limited information regarding the crop health. In order to obtain a rich and detailed knowledge about crop health, the variable length time series data of IoT sensors and multispectral images were converted to a fixed-sized representation to generate crop health maps. A number of machine and deep learning algorithms were applied on the collected data wherein deep neural network with two hidden layers was found to be the most optimal model among all the selected models, providing an accuracy of (98.4%). Further, the health maps were validated through ground surveys and by agriculture experts due to the absence of reference data. The proposed research is basically an indigenous, technology based agriculture solution capable of providing important insights into the crop health by extracting complementary features from multi-modal data set, and minimizing the crop ground survey effort, particularly useful when the agriculture land is large in size.

Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the most significant resource and its scheduling is one of the main functions of an operating system. In timeshared systems, Round Robin (RR) is most widely used scheduling algorithm. The efficiency of RR algorithm is influenced by the quantum time, if quantum is small, there will be overheads of more context switches and if quantum time is large, then given algorithm will perform as First Come First Served (FCFS) in which there is more risk of starvation. In this paper, a new CPU scheduling algorithm is proposed named as Amended Dynamic Round Robin (ADRR) based on CPU burst time. The primary goal of ADRR is to improve the conventional RR scheduling algorithm using the active quantum time notion. Quantum time is cyclically adjusted based on CPU burst time. We evaluate and compare the performance of our proposed ADRR algorithm based on certain parameters such as, waiting time, turnaround time etc. and compare the performance of our proposed algorithm. Our numerical analysis and simulation results in MATLAB reveals that ADRR outperforms other well-known algorithms such as conventional Round Robin, Improved Round Robin (IRR), Optimum Multilevel Dynamic Round Robin (OMDRR) and Priority Based Round Robin (PRR)

Indoor air quality typically encompasses the ambient conditions inside buildings and public facilities that may affect both the mental and respiratory health of an individual. Until the COVID-19 outbreak, indoor air quality monitoring was not a focus area for public facilities such as shopping complexes, hospitals, banks, restaurants, educational institutes, and so forth. However, the rapid spread of this virus and its consequent detrimental impacts have brought indoor air quality into the spotlight. In contrast to outdoor air, indoor air is recycled constantly causing it to trap and build up pollutants, which may facilitate the transmission of virus. There are several monitoring solutions which are available commercially, a typical system monitors the air quality using gas and particle sensors. These sensor readings are compared against well known thresholds, subsequently generating alarms when thresholds are violated. However, these systems do not predict the quality of air for future instances, which holds paramount importance for taking timely preemptive actions, especially for COVID-19 actual and potential patients as well as people suffering from acute pulmonary disorders and other health problems. In this regard, we have proposed an indoor air quality monitoring and prediction solution based on the latest Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and machine learning capabilities, providing a platform to measure numerous indoor contaminants. For this purpose, an IoT node consisting of several sensors for 8 pollutants including NH3, CO, NO2, CH4, CO2, PM 2.5 along with the ambient temperature &amp, air humidity is developed. For proof of concept and research purposes, the IoT node is deployed inside a research lab to acquire indoor air data. The proposed system has the capability of reporting the air conditions in real-time to a web portal and mobile app through GSM/WiFi technology and generates alerts after detecting anomalies in the air quality. In order to classify the indoor air quality, several machine learning algorithms have been applied to the recorded data, where the Neural Network (NN) model outperformed all others with an accuracy of 99.1%. For predicting the concentration of each air pollutant and thereafter predicting the overall quality of an indoor environment, Long and Short Term Memory (LSTM) model is applied. This model has shown promising results for predicting the air pollutants&rsquo, concentration as well as the overall air quality with an accuracy of 99.37%, precision of 99%, recall of 98%, and F1-score of 99%. The proposed solution offers several advantages including remote monitoring, ease of scalability, real-time status of ambient conditions, and portable hardware, and so forth.

Agriculture holds paramount significance in Pakistan due to its high impact on gross domestic product (GDP). However, there is huge gap between actual production and estimated production in agriculture due to manual farming system, which is time-consuming, inefficient, and labor-intensive. As of today, ultra-modern technology such as Internet of Things (IoT) can assist in acquiring timely and accurate crop information essential for the success of precision agriculture technology. Towards such ends, the authors propose an IoT-based crop health monitoring system comprised of different sensors used in agricultural fields. Additionally, low altitude remote sensing platforms, such as drones, are used to capture the spectral imagery of the entire crop field of the study region. The development of such a system can be instrumental for crop status monitoring and localizing the areas under stress to maximize the agricultural output by leveraging the IoT technology.

In many industries inclusive of automotive vehicle industry, predictive maintenance has become more important. It is hard to diagnose failure in advance in the vehicle industry because of the limited availability of sensors and some of the designing exertions. However with the great development in automotive industry, it looks feasible today to analyze sensor’s data along with machine learning techniques for failure prediction. In this article, an approach is presented for fault prediction of four main subsystems of vehicle, fuel system, ignition system, exhaust system, and cooling system. Sensor is collected when vehicle is on the move, both in faulty condition (when any failure in specific system has occurred) and in normal condition. The data is transmitted to the server which analyzes the data. Interesting patterns are learned using four classifiers, Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, K Nearest Neighbor, and Random Forest. These patterns are later used to detect future failures in other vehicles which show the similar behavior. The approach is produced with the end goal of expanding vehicle up-time and was demonstrated on 70 vehicles of Toyota Corolla type. Accuracy comparison of all classifiers is performed on the basis of Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curves.

Wheat yellow rust is a common agricultural disease that affects the crop every year across the world. The disease not only negatively impacts the quality of the yield but the quantity as well, which results in adverse impact on economy and food supply. It is highly desired to develop methods for fast and accurate detection of yellow rust in wheat crop; however, high-resolution images are not always available which hinders the ability of trained models in detection tasks. The approach presented in this study harnesses the power of super-resolution generative adversarial networks (SRGAN) for upsampling the images before using them to train deep learning models for the detection of wheat yellow rust. After preprocessing the data for noise removal, SRGANs are used for upsampling the images to increase their resolution which helps convolutional neural network (CNN) in learning high-quality features during training. This study empirically shows that SRGANs can be used effectively to improve the quality of images and produce significantly better results when compared with models trained using low-resolution images. This is evident from the results obtained on upsampled images, i.e., 83% of overall test accuracy, which are substantially better than the overall test accuracy achieved for low-resolution images, i.e., 75%. The proposed approach can be used in other real-world scenarios where images are of low resolution due to the unavailability of high-resolution camera in edge devices.

Internet of Things (IoT)-based automation of agricultural events can change the agriculture sector from being static and manual to dynamic and smart, leading to enhanced production with reduced human efforts. Precision Agriculture (PA) along withWireless Sensor Network (WSN) are the main drivers of automation in the agriculture domain. PA uses specific sensors and software to ensure that the crops receive exactly what they need to optimize productivity and sustainability. PA includes retrieving real data about the conditions of soil, crops and weather from the sensors deployed in the fields. High-resolution images of crops are obtained from satellite or air-borne platforms (manned or unmanned), which are further processed to extract information used to provide future decisions. In this paper, a review of near and remote sensor networks in the agriculture domain is presented along with several considerations and challenges. This survey includes wireless communication technologies, sensors, and wireless nodes used to assess the environmental behaviour, the platforms used to obtain spectral images of crops, the common vegetation indices used to analyse spectral images and applications of WSN in agriculture. As a proof of concept, we present a case study showing how WSN-based PA system can be implemented. We propose an IoT-based smart solution for crop health monitoring, which is comprised of two modules. The first module is a wireless sensor network-based system to monitor real-time crop health status. The second module uses a low altitude remote sensing platform to obtain multi-spectral imagery, which is further processed to classify healthy and unhealthy crops. We also highlight the results obtained using a case study and list the challenges and future directions based on our work.

Water is one of the primary requisites and crucial for sustaining the quality of life. In Pakistan its significance is more than ordinary due to the agrarian nature of the economy. Owing to increasing trend in urbanization and industrialization, the quality of water is continuously declining. For this purpose, we propose an Internet of Things (IoT) based water quality system capable of measuring the quality of water in near real time. The proposed solution is based on World Health Organization (WHO) defined water quality metrics. For this purpose, a real time embedded prototype has been developed to record the water quality parameters from the water samples collected from various sources across the study area. The hardware solution sends data to cloud for real time storage and processing. The processed data can be remotely monitored and water flow can be controlled using our developed software solution comprising of mobile app and a dashboard. In addition to water quality monitoring and control system, the predictive analysis of the collected data has been performed. For training purposes a dataset has been obtained from Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR). Machine learning algorithms have been applied for classification of water quality and the experimental results indicate that deep neural network outperforms all other algorithms with an accuracy of 93%. The preliminary results have shown a high potential of scaling up this concept to an advanced level.

The ubiquitous use of IEEE 802.11 has aggravated the need to make efficient use of available bandwidth. Currently handoff decision in IEEE 802.11 is made based on the received signal strength but these results in poor connectivity specifically when an access point is overloaded. Overlapping regions where users can be connected to multiple access points, switching to less loaded access point can improve overall network capacity. In this article, we propose a decentralized approach for best access point selection which also prevents an access point to get overloaded. We propose an algorithm for handover strategy to improve network capacity via load balancing and it also minimizes switching overhead. We perform detail analysis on publically available dataset which consists of millions of Wi-Fi sessions with multiple access points.

A smartphone has more advanced computing ability and connectivity than basic featured phones. Presently, we are moving from the Internet society to a mobile society where more and more access to the information is required. This has resulted in a mobile security which is no longer immanent, but imperative. Smartphone authentication has received substantial attention of the research community for the past several years because there have been modern developments beyond the classical PINs and passwords making user authentication more challenging. In this paper, we critically analyze the attacks and the vulnerabilities in smartphones’ authentication mechanisms. A comparative analysis of different authentication techniques along with the usage of the different authentication methods is discussed which lead the end-user towards choosing the most suitable and customizable authentication technique.