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Adversarial attacks are a potential threat to machine learning models by causing incorrect predictions through imperceptible perturbations to the input data. While these attacks have been extensively studied in unstructured data like images, applying them to structured data, such as tabular data, presents new challenges. These challenges arise from the inherent heterogeneity and complex feature interdependencies in tabular data, which differ from the characteristics of image data. To account for this distinction, it is necessary to establish tailored imperceptibility criteria specific to tabular data. However, there is currently a lack of standardised metrics for assessing the imperceptibility of adversarial attacks on tabular data.To address this gap, we propose a set of key properties and corresponding metrics designed to comprehensively characterise imperceptible adversarial attacks on tabular data. These are: proximity to the original input, sparsity of altered features, deviation from the original data distribution, sensitivity in perturbing features with narrow distribution, immutability of certain features that should remain unchanged, feasibility of specific feature values that should not go beyond valid practical ranges, and feature interdependencies capturing complex relationships between data attributes.We evaluate the imperceptibility of five adversarial attacks, including both bounded attacks and unbounded attacks, on tabular data using the proposed imperceptibility metrics. The results reveal a trade-off between the imperceptibility and effectiveness of these attacks. The study also identifies limitations in current attack algorithms, offering insights that can guide future research in the area. The findings gained from this empirical analysis provide valuable direction for enhancing the design of adversarial attack algorithms, thereby advancing adversarial machine learning on tabular data.

Health information technology is one of today’s fastest-growing and most powerful technologies. This technology is used predominantly for predicting illness and obtaining medications quickly because visiting a doctor and performing pathological tests can be time-consuming and expensive. This has prompted many researchers to contribute by developing new disease prediction systems or improving existing ones. This paper presents a smartwatch-based prediction system named ‘MedAi’ for multiple diseases such as ischemic heart disease, hypertension, respiratory disease, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, stroke, myocardial infarction, kidney failure, gallstones, diabetes, dyslipidemia using machine learning algorithms. It comprises three core modules: a prototype smartwatch ‘Sense O’Clock’ equipped with eleven sensors to collect bodily statistics, a machine learning model to analyze the data and make a prediction, and a mobile application to display the prediction result. A dataset consisting of patient bodily statistics was obtained from a local hospital according to ethical guidelines, such as obtaining the prior consent of both patients and doctors. We employ several machine learning algorithms, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Support Vector Regression (SVR), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Random Forest (RF) to investigate the best performing algorithm. Experimentation using our dataset shows that the RF algorithm outperforms other machine learning algorithms such as SVM, KNN, XGBoost, etc., in predicting aforementioned diseases with an accuracy of 99.4%. The system provides full-time assistance to the user by reporting his or her body condition and suggesting requisite remedies. It is a notable addition to early disease prediction systems and can predict multiple disease vulnerabilities before they reach an irrecoverable stage. Finally, we compare our method with the related existing methods.

The imaging devices sense light reflected from objects and reconstruct images using the 2D-sensor matrix. It is a 2D Cartesian coordinate system where the depth dimension is absent. The absence of a depth axis on 2D images imposes challenges in locating and tracking objects in a 3D environment. Real-time object tracking faces another challenge imposed by network latency. This paper presents the development and analysis of a real-time, real-world object tracker called Trackez, which is capable of tracking within the top hemisphere. It uses Machine Vision at the IoT Edge (Mez) technology to mitigate latency sensitivity. A novel algorithm, Follow-Satisfy-Loop (FSL), has been developed and implemented in this paper that optimally tracks the target. It does not require the depth-axis. The simple and innovative design and incorporation of Mez technology have made the proposed object tracker a latency-insensitive, Z-axis-independent, and effective system. The Trackez reduces the average latency by 85.08% and improves the average accuracy by 81.71%. The object tracker accurately tracks objects moving in regular and irregular patterns at up to $5.4ft/s$ speed. This accurate, latency tolerant, and Z-axis independent tracking system contributes to developing a better robotics system that requires object tracking.

Recognizing fraudulent activity in the banking system is essential due to the significant risks involved. When fraudulent transactions are vastly outnumbered by non-fraudulent ones, dealing with imbalanced datasets can be difficult. This study aims to determine the best model for detecting fraud by comparing four commonly used machine learning algorithms: Support Vector Machine (SVM), XGBoost, Decision Tree, and Logistic Regression. Additionally, we utilized the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to address the issue of class imbalance. The XGBoost Classifier proved to be the most successful model for fraud detection, with an accuracy of 99.88%. We utilized SHAP and LIME analyses to provide greater clarity into the decision-making process of the XGBoost model and improve overall comprehension. This research shows that the XGBoost Classifier is highly effective in detecting banking fraud on imbalanced datasets, with an impressive accuracy score. The interpretability of the XGBoost Classifier model was further enhanced by applying SHAP and LIME analysis, which shed light on the significant features that contribute to fraud detection. The insights and findings presented here are valuable contributions to the ongoing efforts aimed at developing effective fraud detection systems for the banking industry.

Digital multimedia elements such as text, image, audio, and video can be easily manipulated because of the rapid rise of multimedia technology, making data protection a prime concern. Hence, copyright protection, content authentication, and integrity verification are today’s new challenging issues. To address these issues, digital image watermarking techniques have been proposed by several researchers. Image watermarking can be conducted through several transformations, such as discrete wavelet transform (DWT), singular value decomposition (SVD), orthogonal matrix Q and upper triangular matrix R (QR) decomposition, and non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). However, a single transformation cannot simultaneously satisfy all the design requirements of image watermarking, which makes a platform to design a hybrid invisible image watermarking technique in this work. The proposed work combines four-level (4L) DWT and two-level (2L) SVD. The Arnold map initially encrypts the watermark image, and 2L SVD is applied to it to extract the s components of the watermark image. A 4L DWT is applied to the host image to extract the LL sub-band, and then 2L SVD is applied to extract s components that are embedded into the host image to generate the watermarked image. The dynamic-sized watermark maintains a balanced visual impact and non-blind watermarking preserves the quality and integrity of the host image. We have evaluated the performance after applying several intentional and unintentional attacks and found high imperceptibility and improved robustness with enhanced security to the system than existing state-of-the-art methods.

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 delves into the complex task of evaluating a website user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), a process complicated by gaps in research. To bridge this, we introduced an innovative human–computer interaction (HCI) framework that synergizes expert cognitive walkthroughs and user surveys for a comprehensive view. We transformed user responses into three key domains—control, engagement, and goal. Our work also generalized an extract of four context-level data metrics for a robust evaluation. The numerical evidence, such as a C1 score of 4.1, surpassing the expert usability benchmark, indicated our framework’s effectiveness. Our research not only addresses an essential gap by integrating assessments from both users and experts, but also offers actionable insights for UI/UX design. The findings extend beyond this specific context, providing a potent evaluation tool for website usability across various websites. Lastly, the research underscores the importance of prioritizing users’ needs and expert recommendations in design principles, significantly contributing to the broader domain of website usability and user experience.

SocialMedia Marketing (SMM) has become a mainstream promotional scheme. Almost every business promotes itself through social media, and an educational institution is no different. The users’ responses to social media posts are crucial to a successful promotional campaign. An adverse reaction leaves a long-term negative impact on the audience, and the conversion rate falls. This is why selecting the content to share on social media is one of the most effective decisions behind the success of a campaign. This paper proposes a Data-Driven Promotional Management System (DPMS) for universities to guide the selection of appropriate content to promote on social media, which is more likely to obtain positive user reactions. The main objective of DPMS is to make effective decisions for Social Media Marketing (SMM). The novel DPMS uses a well-engineered and optimized BiLSTM network, classifying users’ sentiments about different university divisions, with a stunning accuracy of 98.66%. The average precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score of the DPMS are 98.12%, 98.24%, 99.39%, and 98.18%, respectively. This innovative Promotional Management System (PMS) increases the positive impression by 68.75%, reduces the adverse reaction by 31.25%, and increases the conversion rate by 18%. In a nutshell, the proposed DPMS is the first promotional management system for universities. It demonstrates significant potential for improving the brand value of universities and for increasing the intake rate.

Fog computing complements cloud computing by removing several limitations, such as delays and network bandwidth. It emerged to support Internet of Things (IoT) applications wherein its computations and tasks are carried out at the network’s edge. Heterogeneous IoT devices interact with different users throughout a network. However, data security is a crucial concern for IoT, fog and cloud network ecosystems. Since the number of anonymous users increases and new identity disclosures occur within the IoTs, it is becoming challenging to grow mesh networks to deliver end to end communications, as the extended IoT networks resemble a mesh architecture. To reinforce data security over IoTs, we deploy a microservice-based blockchain mechanism for fogs, which works as a decentralized client-server network medium (i.e., secured end device-based communication). We implement a blockchain equipped security scheme to be used with a fog-IoT hierarchical tree-based overlay mesh architecture to address and develop the network performance issues. In this study, we consider encryption and decryption delays from IoT and fog-integrated parts to monitor data records and compare them through the developed security scheme. The blocks of a blockchain offer the desired execution results mainly in terms of the algorithmic efficiency, which correlates with the existing algorithms, namely the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA), and the Data Encryption Standard (DES). Our ‘BFIM’ scheme has an enhanced task scheduling capacity and a more efficient throughput than the AES, DES, RSA resource deliverables (i.e., tasks). Our comprehensive performance evaluation implies that the Blockchain-based Fog IoT Microservice (i.e., BFIM) architecture provides a task delivery efficiency of 78.79% (i.e., task deliverable) and a service delivery efficiency of 83.24% (i.e., task scheduling). The ‘BFIM’ also has an overall process delivery efficiency of 75% (i.e., time delay, throughput) in the fog layer, rather than a central cloud layer running the AES, DES, and RSA algorithms.

Despite their rapid growth, the utilisation of application programming interfaces (APIs) poses challenges for companies under pressure to yield productive systems integration. APIs of larger systems tend to be large, complex and have reduced modularity and quality, which makes them cumbersome to comprehend and use. These challenges can be addressed by static API analysis that focuses on studying API code itself and deriving business entities and dependencies from operational signatures. However, existing techniques for static analysis of APIs face the challenges in deriving a sufficient coverage of business entity relationship types from implementation-oriented API operational signatures carrying limited semantic insights. The paper aims to address such problems by supporting static analysis techniques for APIs that improve their modularity. Our approach adopts an object-oriented paradigm where the concept of “object” is exemplified by the notion of business entity. It systematically applies interface analysis methods and techniques for eliciting knowledge of business entities and their attributes, for deriving the temporal order of calling operations across multiple business entities, and for learning and extracting various ways of invoking a service via APIs. The approach is implemented as an open-source tool and applied to a group of widely-deployed services in practice for validation. The research contributes to identifying key aspects of both the structure and behaviour of APIs, which will lead to building a simplified but comprehensive interface (presentation) layer to assist service users in understanding complex and overloaded interfaces as well as to facilitate efficient and effective service integration.

Smart cities can be complemented by fusing various components and incorporating recent emerging technologies. IoT communications are crucial to smart city operations, which are designed to support the concept of a “Smart City” by utilising the most cutting-edge communication technologies to enhance city administration and resident services. Smart cities have been outfitted with numerous IoT-based gadgets; the Internet of Things is a modular method to integrate various sensors with all ICT technologies. This paper provides an overview of smart cities’ concepts, characteristics, and applications. We thoroughly investigate smart city applications, challenges, and possibilities with solutions in recent technological trends and perspectives, such as machine learning and blockchain. We discuss cloud and fog IoT ecosystems in the in capacity of IoT devices, architectures, and machine learning approaches. In addition we integrate security and privacy aspects, including blockchain applications, towards more trustworthy and resilient smart cities. We also highlight the concepts, characteristics, and applications of smart cities and provide a conceptual model of the smart city mega-events framework. Finally, we outline the impact of recent emerging technologies’ implications on challenges, applications, and solutions for futuristic smart cities.

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.