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Object Storage Systems (OSS) inside a cloud promise scalability, durability, availability, and concurrency. However, open-source OSS does not have a specific approach to letting users and administrators search based on the data, which is contained inside the object storage, without involving the entire cloud infrastructure. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Sherlock, a novel Content-Based Searching (CoBS) architecture to extract additional information from images and documents. Here, we store the additional information in an Elasticsearch-enabled database, which helps us to search for our desired data based on its contents. This approach works in two sequential stages. First, the data will be uploaded to a classifier that will determine the data type and send it to the specific model for the data. Here, the images that are being uploaded are sent to our trained model for object detection, and the documents are sent for keyword extraction. Next, the extracted information is sent to Elasticsearch, which enables searching based on the contents. Because the precision of the models is so fundamental to the search's correctness, we train our models with comprehensive datasets (Microsoft COCO Dataset for multimedia data and SemEval2017 Dataset for document data). Furthermore, we put our designed architecture to the test with a real-world implementation of an open-source OSS called OpenStack Swift. We upload images into the dataset of our implementation in various segments to find out the efficacy of our proposed model in real-life Swift object storage., Comment: 13 Pages, 9 Figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems for possible publication. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1306.3075 by other authors; substantial text overlap with arXiv:1910.05786 by other authors without attribution

The prevalence and mobility of smartphones make these a widely used tool for environmental health research. However, their potential for determining aggregated air quality index (AQI) based on PM2.5 concentration in specific locations remains largely unexplored in the existing literature. In this paper, we thoroughly examine the challenges associated with predicting location-specific PM2.5 concentration using images taken with smartphone cameras. The focus of our study is on Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, due to its significant air pollution levels and the large population exposed to it. Our research involves the development of a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN), which we train using over a thousand outdoor images taken and annotated. These photos are captured at various locations in Dhaka, and their labels are based on PM2.5 concentration data obtained from the local US consulate, calculated using the NowCast algorithm. Through supervised learning, our model establishes a correlation index during training, enhancing its ability to function as a Picture-based Predictor of PM2.5 Concentration (PPPC). This enables the algorithm to calculate an equivalent daily averaged AQI index from a smartphone image. Unlike, popular overly parameterized models, our model shows resource efficiency since it uses fewer parameters. Furthermore, test results indicate that our model outperforms popular models like ViT and INN, as well as popular CNN-based models such as VGG19, ResNet50, and MobileNetV2, in predicting location-specific PM2.5 concentration. Our dataset is the first publicly available collection that includes atmospheric images and corresponding PM2.5 measurements from Dhaka. Our codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/lepotatoguy/aqi., Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, published to Nature Scientific Reports

Bangladesh, a developing country with a large and dense population, has recently seen significant economic as well as technological developments. The growth of technology has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of smartphone users in Bangladesh, and as such, mobile apps have become an increasingly important part of peoples' life, even encompassing healthcare services. However, the apps used in healthcare (telemedicine to be specific) in Bangladesh are yet to be studied from the perspective of their features as per the voices of the users as well as service providers. Therefore, in this study, we focus on the features of the telemedicine apps used in Bangladesh. First, we evaluated the present status of existing telemedicine apps in Bangladesh, as well as their benefits and drawbacks in the context of HCI. We analyzed publicly accessible reviews of several Bangladeshi telemedicine apps (N = 14) to evaluate the user impressions. Additionally, to ascertain the public opinion of these apps, we performed a survey in which the patients (N = 87) participated willingly. Our analysis of the collected opinions reveals what users experience, what they appreciate, and what they are concerned about when they use telemedicine apps. Additionally, our study demonstrates what users expect from telemedicine apps, independent of their past experience. Finally, we explore how to address the issues we discovered and how telemedicine may be used to effectively offer healthcare services throughout the country. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to analyze the perception of the people of Bangladesh towards telemedicine apps from the perspective of features of the apps., Comment: 12 pages

Pilgrimage is one of the largest mass gatherings, where millions of Muslims gather annually from all over the world to perform Hajj. The stoning ritual during Hajj has been historically vulnerable to serious disasters that often cause severe impacts ranging from injuries to death tolls. In efforts to minimize the number and extent of the disasters, the stoning area has been expanded recently. However, no research has been carried out to study the evacuation effectiveness of the current exit placements in the area, which lies at the heart of effective minimization of the number and extent of the disasters. Therefore, this paper presents an in-depth study on emergency evacuation planning for the extended stoning area. It presents a simulation model of the expanded stoning area with the current exit placement. In addition, we suggested and examined four different exit placements considering evacuation scenarios in case of no hazard as well as two realistic hazard scenarios covering fire and bomb hazards. The simulation studied three stoning phases, beginning of stoning, during the peak hour of stoning, and ending of stoning at three scales of population sizes. The performance was measured in the light of evacuation time, percentage of evacuees, and percentage of crowd at each exit. The experimental results revealed that the current exits are not optimally positioned, and evacuation can be significantly improved through introducing a few more exits, or even through changing positions of the current ones.

Epidemics and pandemics have ravaged human life since time. To combat these, novel ideas have always been created and deployed by humanity, with varying degrees of success. At this very moment, the COVID-19 pandemic is the singular global health crisis. Now, perhaps for the first time in human history, almost the whole of humanity is experiencing some form of hardship as a result of one invisible pathogen. This once again entails novel ideas for quick eradication, healing and recovery, whether it is healthcare, banking, travel, education or any other. For efficient policy-making, clear trends of past, present and future are vital for policy-makers. With the global impacts of COVID-19 so severe, equally important is the analysis of correlations between disease spread and various socio-economic and environmental factors. Furthermore, all of these need to be presented in an integrated manner in real-time to facilitate efficient policy making. To address these issues, in this study, we report results on our development and deployment of a web-based integrated real-time operational dashboard as an important decision support system for COVID-19. In our study, we conducted data-driven analysis based on available data from diverse authenticated sources to predict upcoming consequences of the pandemic through rigorous modeling and statistical analyses. We also explored correlations between pandemic spread and important socio-economic and environmental factors. Furthermore, we also present how outcomes of our work can facilitate efficient policy making in this critical hour., Comment: 36 pages, 19 figures, CSCW 2021/UbiComp 2021

Using low-cost piezoelectric sensors to sense structural vibration exhibits great potential in augmenting structural engineering, which is yet to be explored in the literature to the best of our knowledge. Examples of such unexplored augmentation include classifying diverse structures (such as building, flyover, foot over-bridge, etc.), and relating the extent of vibration generated at different height of a structure and the associated height. Accordingly, to explore these cases, we develop a low-cost piezoelectric sensor-based vibration sensing system aiming to remotely collect real vibration data from diversified civil structures. We dig into our collected sensed data to classify five different types of structures through rigorous statistical and machine-learning-based analyses. Our analyses achieve a classification accuracy of up to 97% with an F1 score of 0.97. Nonetheless, in the rarely explored time domain, our analyses reveal a novel modality of relation between vibration generated at different heights of a structure and the associated height, which was explored in the frequency domain earlier in the literature with expensive sensors.

Even though the traffic systems in developed countries have been analyzed with rigor and operated efficiently, the same does not generally hold for developing countries due to inadequate planning, design, and operations of their transportation systems. Because of inherent differences between internal infrastructures, the systems deployed in developed countries may not be amenable to developing ones. Besides, the traffic systems of developing countries are not well-studied in the literature to the best of our knowledge. For example, it is yet to explore how a developed country's lane-based traffic flow would perform in the context of a developing country, which generally experiences non-lane-based traffic. As such, by using our newly developed traffic simulator 'RoadBird', we investigate outcomes of both lane-based and non-lane-based traffic from the contexts of both developing and developed countries. To do so, we run simulations over real road topologies (extracted from the GIS maps of major cities such as Dhaka, Miami, and Riyadh) considering different scenarios such as lane-based or non-lane-based flows, homogeneous or heterogeneous traffic, with or without pedestrians, etc. We also incorporate different car-following and lane-changing models to mimic traffic behaviors and investigate their performances. While the lane changing dilemma remains an open research question, our experimental evidences indicate: (i) lane-based approaches will not necessarily perform better in the case of currently-adopted non-lane-based scenarios; and (ii) non-lane-based strategies may benefit system performance in lane-based scenarios while having heavy mixed traffic. Nonetheless, we reveal several new insights for on-road experiences both in developing and developed countries.

Securing information transmission is critical today. However, with rapidly developing powerful quantum technologies, conventional cryptography techniques are becoming more prone to attacks each day. New techniques in the realm of quantum cryptography to preserve security against powerful attacks are slowly emerging. What is important though now is the fidelity of the cryptography, because security with massive processing power is not worth much if it is not correct. Focusing on this issue, we propose a method to enhance the fidelity of quantum cryptography using maximally entangled qubit pairs. For doing so, we created a graph state along a path consisting of all the qubits of ibmqx4 and ibmq_16_melbourne respectively and we measure the strength of the entanglement using negativity measurement of the qubit pairs. Then, using the qubits with maximal entanglement, we send the modified encryption key to the receiver. The key is modified by permutation and superdense coding before transmission. The receiver reverts the process and gets the actual key. We carried out the complete experiment in the IBM Quantum Experience project. Our result shows a 15% to 20% higher fidelity of encryption and decryption than a random selection of qubits.

Identifying physical traits and emotions based on system-sensed physical activities is a challenging problem in the realm of human-computer interaction. Our work contributes in this context by investigating an underlying connection between head movements and corresponding traits and emotions. To do so, we utilize a head movement measuring device called eSense, which gives acceleration and rotation of a head. Here, first, we conduct a thorough study over head movement data collected from 46 persons using eSense while inducing five different emotional states over them in isolation. Our analysis reveals several new head movement based findings, which in turn, leads us to a novel unified solution for identifying different human traits and emotions through exploiting machine learning techniques over head movement data. Our analysis confirms that the proposed solution can result in high accuracy over the collected data. Accordingly, we develop an integrated unified solution for real-time emotion and trait identification using head movement data leveraging outcomes of our analysis., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, NSysS 2019

The recent emergence of new vulnerabilities is an epoch-making problem in the complex world of website security. Most of the websites are failing to keep updating to tackle their websites from these new vulnerabilities leaving without realizing the weakness of the websites. As a result, when cyber-criminals scour such vulnerable old version websites, the scanner will represent a set of vulnerabilities. Once found, these vulnerabilities are then exploited to steal data, distribute malicious content, or inject defacement and spam content into the vulnerable websites. Furthermore, a combination of different vulnerabilities is able to cause more damages than anticipation. Therefore, in this paper, we endeavor to find connections among various vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting, local file inclusion, remote file inclusion, buffer overflow CSRF, etc. To do so, we develop a Finite State Machine (FSM) attacking model, which analyzes a set of vulnerabilities towards the road to finding connections. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model by applying it to the set of vulnerabilities found on two live websites., Comment: Accepted at 5th International Conference on Networking, Systems and Security (5th NSysS 2018)