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The complexity of urban road scenes at night and the inadequacy of visible light imaging in such conditions pose significant challenges. To address the issues of insufficient color information, texture detail, and low spatial resolution in infrared imagery, we propose an enhanced infrared detection model called LFIR-YOLO, which is built upon the YOLOv8 architecture. The primary goal is to improve the accuracy of infrared target detection in nighttime traffic scenarios while meeting practical deployment requirements. First, to address challenges such as limited contrast and occlusion noise in infrared images, the C2f module in the high-level backbone network is augmented with a Dilation-wise Residual (DWR) module, incorporating multi-scale infrared contextual information to enhance feature extraction capabilities. Secondly, at the neck of the network, a Content-guided Attention (CGA) mechanism is applied to fuse features and re-modulate both initial and advanced features, catering to the low signal-to-noise ratio and sparse detail features characteristic of infrared images. Third, a shared convolution strategy is employed in the detection head, replacing the decoupled head strategy and utilizing shared Detail Enhancement Convolution (DEConv) and Group Norm (GN) operations to achieve lightweight yet precise improvements. Finally, loss functions, PIoU v2 and Adaptive Threshold Focal Loss (ATFL), are integrated into the model to better decouple infrared targets from the background and to enhance convergence speed. The experimental results on the FLIR and multispectral datasets show that the proposed LFIR-YOLO model achieves an improvement in detection accuracy of 4.3% and 2.6%, respectively, compared to the YOLOv8 model. Furthermore, the model demonstrates a reduction in parameters and computational complexity by 15.5% and 34%, respectively, enhancing its suitability for real-time deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microcephaly, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and potential sexual transmission stand as prominent complications associated with Zika virus (ZIKV) infection. The absence of FDA-approved drugs or vaccines presents a substantial obstacle in combatting the virus. Furthermore, the inclusion of pregnancy in the pharmacological screening process complicates and extends the endeavor to ensure molecular safety and minimal toxicity. Given its pivotal role in viral assembly and maturation, the NS2B-NS3 viral protease emerges as a promising therapeutic target against ZIKV. In this context, a dipeptide inhibitor was specifically chosen as a control against 200 compounds for docking analysis. Subsequent molecular dynamics simulations extending over 200 ns were conducted to ascertain the stability of the docked complex and confirm the binding of the inhibitor at the protein's active site. The simulation outcomes exhibited conformity to acceptable thresholds, encompassing parameters such as root mean square deviation (RMSD), root mean square fluctuation (RMSF), ligand-protein interaction analysis, ligand characterization, and surface area analysis. Notably, analysis of ligand angles bolstered the identification of prospective ligands capable of inhibiting viral protein activity and impeding virus dissemination. In this study, the integration of molecular docking and dynamics simulations has pinpointed the dipeptide inhibitor as a potential candidate ligand against ZIKV protease, thereby offering promise for therapeutic intervention against the virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the distributed computing era, cloud computing has completely changed organizational operations by facilitating simple access to resources. However, the rapid development of the IoT has led to collaborative computing, which raises scalability and security challenges. To fully realize the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart home technologies, there is still a need for strong data security solutions, which are essential in dynamic offloading in conjunction with edge, fog, and cloud computing. This research on smart home challenges covers in-depth examinations of data security, privacy, processing speed, storage capacity restrictions, and analytics inside networked IoT devices. We introduce the Trusted IoT Big Data Analytics (TIBDA) framework as a comprehensive solution to reshape smart living. Our primary focus is mitigating pervasive data security and privacy issues. TIBDA incorporates robust trust mechanisms, prioritizing data privacy and reliability for secure processing and user information confidentiality within the smart home environment. We achieve this by employing a hybrid cryptosystem that combines Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC), and Blockchain technology (BCT) to protect user privacy and confidentiality. Additionally, we comprehensively compared four prominent Artificial Intelligence anomaly detection algorithms (Isolation Forest, Local Outlier Factor, One-Class SVM, and Elliptic Envelope). We utilized machine learning classification algorithms (random forest, k-nearest neighbors, support vector machines, linear discriminant analysis, and quadratic discriminant analysis) for detecting malicious and non-malicious activities in smart home systems. Furthermore, the main part of the research is with the help of an artificial neural network (ANN) dynamic algorithm; the TIBDA framework designs a hybrid computing system that integrates edge, fog, and cloud architecture and efficiently supports numerous users while processing data from IoT devices in real-time. The analysis shows that TIBDA outperforms these systems significantly across various metrics. In terms of response time, TIBDA demonstrated a reduction of 10–20% compared to the other systems under varying user loads, device counts, and transaction volumes. Regarding security, TIBDA's AUC values were consistently higher by 5–15%, indicating superior protection against threats. Additionally, TIBDA exhibited the highest trustworthiness with an uptime percentage 10–12% greater than its competitors. TIBDA's Isolation Forest algorithm achieved an accuracy of 99.30%, and the random forest algorithm achieved an accuracy of 94.70%, outperforming other methods by 8–11%. Furthermore, our ANN-based offloading decision-making model achieved a validation accuracy of 99% and reduced loss to 0.11, demonstrating significant improvements in resource utilization and system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) applications and resources are highly vulnerable to flood attacks, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks overwhelm the targeted device with numerous network packets, making its resources inaccessible to authorized users. Such attacks may comprise attack references, attack types, sub-categories, host information, malicious scripts, etc. These details assist security professionals in identifying weaknesses, tailoring defense measures, and responding rapidly to possible threats, thereby improving the overall security posture of IoT devices. Developing an intelligent Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is highly complex due to its numerous network features. This study presents an improved IDS for IoT security that employs multimodal big data representation and transfer learning. First, the Packet Capture (PCAP) files are crawled to retrieve the necessary attacks and bytes. Second, Spark-based big data optimization algorithms handle huge volumes of data. Second, a transfer learning approach such as word2vec retrieves semantically-based observed features. Third, an algorithm is developed to convert network bytes into images, and texture features are extracted by configuring an attention-based Residual Network (ResNet). Finally, the trained text and texture features are combined and used as multimodal features to classify various attacks. The proposed method is thoroughly evaluated on three widely used IoT-based datasets: CIC-IoT 2022, CIC-IoT 2023, and Edge-IIoT. The proposed method achieves excellent classification performance, with an accuracy of 98.2%. In addition, we present a game theory-based process to validate the proposed approach formally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate wind power forecasting is critical for system integration and stability as renewable energy reliance grows. Traditional approaches frequently struggle with complex data and non-linear connections. This article presents a novel approach for hybrid ensemble learning that is based on rigorous requirements engineering concepts. The approach finds significant parameters influencing forecasting accuracy by evaluating real-time Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA2) data from several European Wind farms using in-depth stakeholder research and requirements elicitation. Ensemble learning is used to develop a robust model, while a temporal convolutional network handles time-series complexities and data gaps. The ensemble-temporal neural network is enhanced by providing different input parameters including training layers, hidden and dropout layers along with activation and loss functions. The proposed framework is further analyzed by comparing stateof- the-art forecasting models in terms of Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE), respectively. The energy efficiency performance indicators showed that the proposed model demonstrates error reduction percentages of approximately 16.67%, 28.57%, and 81.92% for MAE, and 38.46%, 17.65%, and 90.78% for RMSE for MERRAWind farms 1, 2, and 3, respectively, compared to other existingmethods. These quantitative results show the effectiveness of our proposed model with MAE values ranging from 0.0010 to 0.0156 and RMSE values ranging from 0.0014 to 0.0174. This work highlights the effectiveness of requirements engineering in wind power forecasting, leading to enhanced forecast accuracy and grid stability, ultimately paving the way for more sustainable energy solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, a huge amount of data is generated, which is costly to transfer to the cloud data centers in terms of security, bandwidth, and latency. Fog computing is an efficient paradigm for locally processing and manipulating IoT-generated data. It is difficult to configure the fog nodes to provide all of the services required by the end devices because of the static configuration, poor processing, and storage capacities. To enhance fog nodes' capabilities, it is essential to reconfigure them to accommodate a broader range and variety of hosted services. In this study, we focus on the placement of fog services and their dynamic reconfiguration in response to the end-device requests. Due to its growing successes and popularity in the IoT era, the Decision Tree (DT) machine learning model is implemented to predict the occurrence of requests and events in advance. The DT model enables the fog nodes to predict requests for a specific service in advance and reconfigure the fog node accordingly. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated in terms of high throughput, minimized energy consumption, and dynamic fog node smart switching. The simulation results demonstrate a notable increase in the fog node hit ratios, scaling up to 99% for the majority of services concurrently with a substantial reduction in miss ratios. Furthermore, the energy consumption is greatly reduced by over 50% as compared to a static node. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effective handling of waste is one of the paramount global environmental challenges. Various industries generate diverse wastewater pollutants, often presenting complex and expensive treatment challenges. The attributes of wastewater and concentrations of contaminants vary significantly from one industry to another. Recently, there has been a growing interest in utilizing industrial waste as a soil amendment. The distillery spent wash (DSW) released through the sugarcane processing, is abundant in organic materials and a variety of essential nutrients, including Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, Calcium, and Sulphur. Different concentrations of spent wash were applied to sugarcane crops to explore their effects on the development, production, and yield at the Sugar Crops Research Institute (SCRI) Mardan. Four different concentrations of distillery spent wash were applied (i.e. 30%-DSW, 40%-DSW, 50%-DSW, and 60%-DSW) to a sugarcane variety "Israr Shaheed SC (CP 80-1827)". Our results showed that the application of a 50%-DSW increased plant height, cane diameter, leaf count per plant, and tillers per plant, while 60%-DSW had a diminishing trend compared to the other concentrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]