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Influenza poses a significant risk to public health, as evidenced by the 2009 H1N1 pandemic which caused up to 203 000 deaths worldwide. Predicting the spatiotemporal information of disease in the incubation period is crucial because the prime aim of it is to provide guidance on preparing a response and avoid presumably adverse impact caused by a pandemic. This article designs and analyzes a prediction system about influenza-like illness (ILI) from the latent temporal and spatial information. In this system 1) Gaussian function model and multivariate polynomial regression are employed to investigate the temporal and spatial distribution of ILI data; 2) the phase space reconstructed by delay-coordinate embedding is used to explore the dynamical evolution behavior of the 1-D ILI series; and 3) a dynamical radial basis function neural network (DRBFNN) method which is the kernel of the system, is proposed to predict the ILI values based on the correlations between the observations space and reconstructed phase space. The performance analysis of our system shows that the regression equations coupling with spatial distribution information can be used to supplement the missing data, and the proposed DRBFNN method can predict the trends of ILI for the following one year. Furthermore, the prediction system in this article applies a model-free control schemes, i.e., there are no restriction equations between the multivariable inputs and outputs. This prediction system is expected to be used in predicting the output signals, even the chaotic output signals, in meteorology, industry, medicine, economy, and other fields. An example of predicting the Standard & Poors 500 index is given to introduce the application of our proposed system. The trend of open prices of the following eight trading days is well predicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of impulse noise detection and reduction is a critical problem for image processing application systems. In order to detect impulse noises in corrupted images, a statistic named local consensus index (LCI) is proposed for quantitatively evaluating how noise free a pixel is, and then an impulse noise detection scheme based on LCI is introduced. First, the similarity between arbitrary two pixels in an image is quantified based on both their geometric distance and intensity difference, and the LCI of arbitrary pixel is calculated by summing all the similarity values of pixels in its neighborhood. As a new statistic, the value of LCI indicates the local consensus of the concerned pixel regarding its neighbors and could also tell whether a pixel is noise free or impulsive. Therefore, LCI can be directly used as an efficient indicator of impulse noise. Furthermore, to improve the performance of impulse noise detection, different strategies are applied to the pixels at flat regions and the ones with complex textures, since distributions of LCI value within those regions are totally different. As for impulse noise filtering, a hybrid graph Laplacian regularization (HGLR) method is introduced to restore the intensities of those pixels degraded by impulse noise. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our impulsive noise detection and reduction method, and the results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in terms of impulse detection and noise removal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pervasive sensing devices make an unprecedented increase in data sensing, collection, and processing in edge network and they form the edge content server system. The edge content server system combines the content-centric network (CCN) to form a huge content propagation system which makes it challenging to achieve efficient content propagation. Different from IP-based, host-oriented Internet architecture, the CCN systems focus on the information that is contained in network and directly accessible, providing more secure and flexible Internet services. This emerging network architecture supports a number of novel applications, such as common interests sharing, mobile data offloading, and information dissemination without Internet access. In this paper, an analytical framework is proposed to address the problem of content propagation among users with the same interests in leveraging location-based social networks, where the check-in patterns of users are recorded. Particularly, we propose a content propagation effectiveness quantitative model that considers the distance between users, users’ interests, and contact rates to formulate the propagation effect and latency. We also apply our framework to two real-world datasets for the evaluation of its effectiveness. Compared with previous studies, our simulated annealing-based algorithm can greatly improve the effects by as much as 25.4%–65.6%, and the contents can be disseminated faster by about 24.6%–57.8%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of dedicated sensors are deployed in smart cities to enhance quality of urban living. Communication technologies are critical for connecting these sensors and transmitting events to sink. In control systems of mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs), mobile nodes are constantly moving to detect events, while static nodes constitute the communication infrastructure for information transmission. Therefore, how to communicate with sink quickly and effectively is an important research issue for control systems of MWSNs. In this paper, a communication scheme named first relay node selection based on fast response and multihop relay transmission with variable duty cycle (FRAVD) is proposed. The scheme can effectively reduce the network delay by combining first relay node selection with node duty cycles setting. In FRAVD scheme, first, for the first relay node selection, we propose a strategy based on fast response, that is, select the first relay node from adjacent nodes in the communication range within the shortest response time, and guarantee that the remaining energy and the distance from sink of the node are better than the average. Then for multihop data transmission of static nodes, variable duty cycle is introduced novelty, which utilizes the residual energy to improve the duty cycle of nodes in far-sink area, because nodes adopt a sleep-wake asynchronous mode, increasing the duty cycle can significantly improve network performance in terms of delays and transmission reliability. Our comprehensive performance analysis has demonstrated that compared with the communication scheme with fixed duty cycle, the FRAVD scheme reduces the network delay by 24.17%, improves the probability of finding first relay node by 17.68%, while also ensuring the network lifetime is not less than the previous researches, and is a relatively efficient low-latency communication scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyber physical systems (CPS) is a tightly coupled integration and interaction between computational and physical components. In many cases, information collection in CPS is provided through a group of distributed sensors and all of them change continuously with time. Thus the sensor information is usually in the form of time series. One particularly interesting application in time series analysis is use of complex networks to represent and study behaviors of system. Complex networks has been playing an important role for analyzing complex systems as it helps understanding the topology structure of systems with different interacting units. In this paper, we proposed a reliable method for constructing complex networks from multivariate time series (MTSs) in the cases of single and multisensor based on information geometry theory, which allows the information in the time series to be extracted by analyzing the associated complex network. We first estimate covariance matrices and then a geodesic-based distance between the covariance matrices is introduced. Consequently, the network can be constructed on a Riemannian manifold where the nodes and edges correspond to the covariance matrix and the geodesic-based distance, respectively. The proposed method provides us with a nonlinear relationship and intrinsic geometry viewpoint to understand the MTSs and also an alternative approach to fuse, model, represent, and visualize the multisensor data in CPS. A number of experimental studies and numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the generality and the effectiveness of our approach with both synthetic and real datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT), the Federated Edge Learning (FEL), a promising computing framework is developing. However, there are still unsolved issues on communication efficiency and data security due to the huge models and unreliable transmission links. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel federated edge learning system, called LightFed, where the edge nodes upload only vital partial local models, and successfully achieve lightweight communication and model aggregation. First, a novel model aggregation method Model Splitting and Splicing (MSS) and a Selective Parameter Transmission (SPT) scheme are proposed. By detecting the updating gradients of local parameters and filtering significant parameters, selective rotated transmission and efficient aggregation of local models are achieved. Second, a Training Filling Model (TFM) is proposed to infer the total data distribution of edge nodes, and train a filling model to mitigate the unbalanced training data without violating the data privacy of individual users. Moreover, a blockchain-powered confusion transmission mechanism is proposed for defending the attacks from external adversaries and protecting the model information. Finally, extensive experimental results demonstrate that our LightFed significantly outperforms the existing FEL systems in terms of communication efficiency and privacy security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge graphs are large graph-structured knowledge bases with incomplete or partial information. Numerous studies have focused on knowledge graph embedding to identify the embedded representation of entities and relations, thereby predicting missing relations between entities. Previous embedding models primarily regard (subject entity, relation, and object entity) triplet as translational distance or semantic matching in vector space. However, these models only learn a few expressive features and hard to handle complex relations, i.e., 1-to-N, N-to-1, and N-to-N, in knowledge graphs. To overcome these issues, we introduce a multi-scale dynamic convolutional network (M-DCN) model for knowledge graph embedding. This model features topnotch performance and an ability to generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings than its counterparts. The subject entity and relation embeddings in M-DCN are composed in an alternating pattern in the input layer, which helps extract additional feature interactions and increase the expressiveness. Multi-scale filters are generated in the convolution layer to learn different characteristics among input embeddings. Specifically, the weights of these filters are dynamically related to each relation to model complex relations. The performance of M-DCN on the five benchmark datasets is tested via experiments. Results show that the model can effectively handle complex relations and achieve state-of-the-art link prediction results on most evaluation metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryptography chips are often used in some applications, such as smart grids and Internet of Things (IoT) to ensure their security. Cryptographic chips must be strictly tested to guarantee the correctness of the encryption and decryption. Scan-based design-for-testability (DFT) provides high test quality. However, it can also be misused to steal the cipher key of cryptographic chips by hackers. In this article, we present a new scan design methodology that can resist scan-based side-channel attacks by the dynamical obfuscation of scan input data and scan output data. The scan test is managed by a test password, which consists of load password and scan password. When the chip enters into the test mode, it is required to apply the test password via some external input ports. Once the correct load password is delivered, the scan password can be loaded into a special shift register. If the scan password is also correct, the chip testing can proceed normally. In case the load password or the scan password is wrong, the data in scan chains cannot be propagated correctly. Specifically, some elusory bits are sneaked into scan chains dynamically. The advantage of the proposed method is that it has no negative impact on design performance and test flow when powerfully protecting cryptographic chips. The area penalty is also acceptably low compared with other schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has gradually attracted the attention of the industry owing to its accurate time synchronization, communication accuracy, and high adaptability. As an important data structure, graphs are widely used in IIoT applications, where entities and their relationships can be expressed in the form of graphs. With the widespread adoption of IIoT and cloud computing, an increasing number of individuals or organizations are outsourcing their IIoT graph data to cloud servers to enjoy the unlimited storage space and fast computing service. To protect the privacy of graph data, graphs are usually encrypted before being outsourced. In this article, we propose a search pattern privacy system for approximate shortest distance query of encrypted graphs in IIoT. To realize search pattern privacy, we adopt two noncolluded cloud servers to accomplish different tasks. We leverage the first server to store the encrypted data and perform query operations, and use the second one to rerandomize the contents and shuffle the locations of the queried records. Before queries, we generate the trapdoors by using different random numbers. After queries, we ask the second server to rerandomize the contents of the records that the first server touched. In addition, we shuffle the physical locations of original records by inserting some fake records. In this way, all contents and physical locations of the touched records change, so that the first server cannot distinguish whether two queries are the same or not. To enhance the efficiency on the user side, we further improve this system by moving some heavy workloads from the user to the cloud. The security analysis and the performance evaluation show that our work is secure and efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) realizes the interconnection of heterogeneous devices by the technology of wireless and mobile communication. The data of target regions are collected by widely distributed sensing devices and transmitted to the processing center for aggregation and analysis as the basis of IoT. The quality of IoT services usually depends on the accuracy and integrity of data. However, due to the adverse environment or device defects, the collected data will be anomalous. Therefore, the effective method of anomaly detection is the crucial issue for guaranteeing service quality. Deep learning is one of the most concerned technology in recent years which realizes automatic feature extraction from raw data. In this article, the integrated model of the convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent autoencoder is proposed for anomaly detection. Simple combination of CNN and autoencoder cannot improve classification performance, especially, for time series. Therefore, we utilize the two-stage sliding window in data preprocessing to learn better representations. Based on the characteristics of the Yahoo Webscope S5 dataset, raw time series with anomalous points are extended to fixed-length sequences with normal or anomaly label via the first-stage sliding window. Then, each sequence is transformed into continuous time-dependent subsequences by another smaller sliding window. The preprocessing of the two-stage sliding window can be considered as low-level temporal feature extraction, and we empirically prove that the preprocessing of the two-stage sliding window will be useful for high-level feature extraction in the integrated model. After data preprocessing, spatial and temporal features are extracted in CNN and recurrent autoencoder for the classification in fully connected networks. Empiric results show that the proposed model has better performances on multiple classification metrics and achieves preferable effect on anomaly detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once defined, the access control policies and regulations would never be changed in a running and state transition process. However, it will give attackers the possibility of discovering vulnerabilities in the system, and the control systems lack the ability of dynamic perception of security state and risk, causing the systems to be exposed to risks. In this article, a dynamic Bell–LaPadula (BLP) model is proposed. The conditional random field (CRF) is introduced into the BLP model to optimize the rules. First, the model formalizes the security attributes, states of system, transition rules, and constraint models on the basis of the state transition of CRFs. After the historical system access logs are processed as the original dataset, a feature selection method is proposed to extract the requests and current states as feature vectors. Second, this article presents a rules training algorithm based on L-BFGS to implement the study and training of datasets, and then marks the logs in the test set through Viterbi algorithm automatically. On the base of these, a rule generation algorithm is proposed to dynamically adjust the access control rules based on the current security status and events of the system. Third, the security of CRFs-BLP is proved by theoretical analysis. Finally, the validity and accuracy of the model are verified by estimating the value of the precision, recall, and $F1$ -score. As the system threats are shown to be decreased obviously from these experiments, this dynamic model can decrease the vulnerabilities and risk effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-supervised clustering algorithms have several limitations: 1) the computation complexity of them is very high, because calculating the similarity distances of pairs of examples is time-consuming; 2) traditional semi-supervised clustering methods have not considered how to make full use of must-link and cannot-link constraints. In the clustering, the contribution of a few pairwise constraints to the clustering performance is very limited, and some may negatively affect the outcome; and 3) these methods are not effective to handle high dimensional data, especially for time series data. Up to now, few work touched semi-supervised clustering on time series data. To efficiently cluster large-scale time series data, we first tackle contract time series clustering to produce the most accurate clustering results under a contracted time. We propose a semi-supervised time series clustering framework (STSC), which integrates a fast similarity measure and a constraint propagation approach. Based on the proposed framework, two valid semi-supervised clustering algorithms including fssK-means and fssDBSCAN are designed. Experiments on 11 datasets show that our proposed method is efficient and effective for clustering large-scale time series data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, fingerprint authentication systems have been extensively deployed in various applications, including attendance systems, authentications on smartphones, mobile payment authorizations, as well as various safety certifications. However, similar to the other biometric identification technologies, fingerprint recognition is vulnerable to artificial replicas made from cheap materials, such as silicon, gelatin, etc. Thus, it is especially necessary to distinguish whether a given fingerprint is a live or a spoof one prior to such authentication. In order to solve the problems above, a novel local descriptor named Weber local binary descriptor for fingerprint liveness detection (FLD) has been proposed in this paper. The method consists of two components: the local binary differential excitation component that extracts intensity-variance features and the local binary gradient orientation component that extracts orientation features. The co-occurrence probability of the two components is calculated to construct a discriminative feature vector, which is fed into support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. The effectiveness of the proposed method is intuitively analyzed on the image samples and numerically demonstrated by Mahalanobis distance. Experiments are performed on two public databases from FLD competitions from 2011 and 2013. The results have proved that the proposed method obtains the best detection accuracy among the existing image local descriptors in FLD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With various emerging mobile devices, the visual content have be to resized into different sizes or aspect ratios for good viewing experiences. In this paper, we propose a new multioperator retargeting algorithm by using four retargeting operators of seam carving, cropping, warping, and scaling iteratively. To determine which retargeting operator should be used at each iteration, we adopt structural similarity (SSIM) to evaluate the similarity between the original and retargeted images. The retargeting operator sequence is constructed based on the four types of retargeting operators by an optimization process. Since the sizes of original and retargeted images are different, scale-invariant feature transform flow is used for dense correspondence between the original and retargeted images for similarity evaluation. Additionally, visual saliency is used to weight SSIM results based on the characteristics of the human visual system. Experimental results on a public image retargeting database have shown the promising performance of the proposed multioperator retargeting algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamical degradation of digital chaotic systems (DCSs) often has serious negative influences on some digital chaos-based systems and then becomes one of the bottleneck problems stopping chaos from some applications. In this paper, we first restrict the Devaney’s chaos definition to finite state sets to describe the chaotic motion of digital systems. Then, we propose a novel control method for DCSs based on the differential mean value theorem and state feedback technology. Simulation results show the effectiveness, robustness, and superiority of the proposed method. Finally, we construct a new pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) and evaluate its randomness via NIST SP800-22 and TestU01 test suites. Statistical test results show that the proposed PRNG has high reliability of randomness, thus it can be used for cryptography and other potential applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]