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The digital economy's rise has fueled the growth of digital banking, but concerns linger about customer protection. While offering advantages like financial inclusion, this shift disrupts traditional banking experiences and introduces potential risks. Customer safety in this new landscape is paramount, as dissatisfied users may switch providers and institutions risk reputational damage. To remain competitive, financial institutions must prioritize a secure experience that aligns with customer expectations. This study investigates five key factors influencing customer protection in Pakistan's digital financial services. Analysis reveals all factors positively impact customer protection, with information security holding the most weight. These findings highlight the need for robust information security measures as a critical driver for the Pakistani digital banking industry's success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of signal outages in sub-THz frequency communication for future 6G networks is addressed by this research. A machine learning method is proposed, employing Random Forest and K-Means algorithms to predict the optimal frequency band and outage probabilities for UAV relays. Both space and frequency diversity are explored to enhance signal strength, and metasurfacecarrying UAVs are introduced with a 16 × 16 mm² design. This design significantly reduces the predicted outage probability from 0.1% to 0.0178%. Finally, triangular and hexagonal UAV swarm formations with metasurfaces are investigated, demonstrating improved performance through heatmap results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective requirement collection and prioritization are paramount within the inherently distributed nature of the Internet of Things (IoT) application. Current methods typically categorize IoT application requirements subjectively into inessential, desirable, and mandatory groups. This often leads to prioritization challenges, especially when dealing with requirements of equal importance and when the number of requirements grows. This increases the complexity of the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) to O(n2) dimensions. This research introduces a novel framework that integrates an enhanced AHP with an advanced grouping model to address these issues. This integrated approach mitigates the subjectivity found in traditional grouping methods and efficiently manages larger sets of requirements. The framework consists of two main modules: the Pre-processing Module and the Prioritization Module. The latter includes three units: the Grouping Processing Unit (GPU) for initial classification using a new grouping approach, the Review Processing Unit (RPU) for post-grouping assessment, and the AHP Processing Unit (APU) for final prioritization. This framework is evaluated through a detailed case study, demonstrating its ability to effectively streamline requirement prioritization in IoT applications, thereby enhancing design quality and operational efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Computational intelligence (CI) based prediction models increase the efficient and effective utilization of resources for wind prediction. However, the traditional recurrent neural networks (RNN) are difficult to train on data having long- term temporal dependencies, thus susceptible to an inherent problem of vanishing gradient. This work proposed a method based on an advanced version of RNN known as long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture, which updates recurrent weights to overcome the vanishing gradient problem. This, in turn, improves training performance. Methods. The RNN model is developed based on stack LSTM and bidirectional LSTM. The parameters like mean absolute error (MAE), standard deviation error (SDE), and root mean squared error (RMSE) are utilized as performance measures for comparison with recent state-of-the-art techniques. Results. Results showed that the proposed technique outperformed the existing techniques in terms of RMSE and MAE against all the used wind farm datasets. Whereas, a reduction in SDE is observed for larger wind farm datasets. The proposed RNN approach performed better than the existing models despite fewer parameters. In addition, the approach requires minimum processing power to achieve compatible results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cybersecurity threats are increasing rapidly as hackers use advanced techniques. As a result, cybersecurity has now a significant factor in protecting organizational limits. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are used in networks to flag serious issues during network management, including identifying malicious traffic, which is a challenge. It remains an open contest over how to learn features in IDS since current approaches use deep learning methods. Hybrid learning, which combines swarm intelligence and evolution, is gaining attention for further improvement against cyber threats. In this study, we employed a PSO-GA (fusion of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA)) for feature selection on the CICIDS-2017 dataset. To achieve better accuracy, we proposed a hybrid model called LSTM-GRU of deep learning that fused the GRU (gated recurrent unit) and LSTM (long short-term memory). The results show considerable improvement, detecting several network attackswith 98.86% accuracy. A comparative study with other current methods confirms the efficacy of our proposed IDS scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, there has been a noticeable increase in the application of human biometrics for user authentication in various domains, such as online banking. However, the use of biometric systems poses security risks and the potential for misuse, primarily due to the storage of original templates in databases. To tackle this issue, the concept of cancelable biometrics has emerged as a reliable method utilizing one-way encryption. Several algorithms have been developed to implement cancelable biometrics, incorporating visual representations of single or multiple biometrics. This research proposes a cancelable biometric system that utilizes deep learning techniques to generate two encrypted modalities, namely text and image, using facial and fingerprint biometrics acquired from a smartphone. The system consists of two main stages: a visual encoder and a text encoder. The visual encoder converts the fingerprint style into a facial representation, creating a cancelable template to ensure the potential for cancelation. The resulting visual template is then processed by the text encoder, which employs hashing techniques to generate a corresponding text template. User authentication is automatically verified by utilizing the generated templates through Siamese networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]