Multi-Head Spatiotemporal Attention Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Prediction.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have become an indispensable component of modern global technological development, as they play a massive role in the accurate statistical estimation of vehicles or individuals commuting to a particular transportation facility at a given time. This provides the perfect backdrop for designing and engineering an adequate infrastructural capacity for transportation analyses. However, traffic prediction remains a daunting task due to the non-Euclidean and complex distribution of road networks and the topological constraints of urbanized road networks. To solve this challenge, this paper presents a traffic forecasting model which combines a graph convolutional network, a gated recurrent unit, and a multi-head attention mechanism to simultaneously capture and incorporate the spatio-temporal dependence and dynamic variation in the topological sequence of traffic data effectively. By achieving 91.8% accuracy on the Los Angeles highway traffic (Los-loop) test data for 15-min traffic prediction and an R2 score of 85% on the Shenzhen City (SZ-taxi) test dataset for 15- and 30-min predictions, the proposed model demonstrated that it can learn the global spatial variation and the dynamic temporal sequence of traffic data over time. This has resulted in state-of-the-art traffic forecasting for the SZ-taxi and Los-loop datasets.

Automatic Hybrid Access Control in SCADA-Enabled IIoT Networks Using Machine Learning.

The recent advancements in the Internet of Things have made it converge towards critical infrastructure automation, opening a new paradigm referred to as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In the IIoT, different connected devices can send huge amounts of data to other devices back and forth for a better decision-making process. In such use cases, the role of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) has been studied by many researchers in recent years for robust supervisory control management. Nevertheless, for better sustainability of these applications, reliable data exchange is crucial in this domain. To ensure the privacy and integrity of the data shared between the connected devices, access control can be used as the front-line security mechanism for these systems. However, the role engineering and assignment propagation in access control is still a tedious process as its manually performed by network administrators. In this study, we explored the potential of supervised machine learning to automate role engineering for fine-grained access control in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) settings. We propose a mapping framework to employ a fine-tuned multilayer feedforward artificial neural network (ANN) and extreme learning machine (ELM) for role engineering in the SCADA-enabled IIoT environment to ensure privacy and user access rights to resources. For the application of machine learning, a thorough comparison between these two algorithms is also presented in terms of their effectiveness and performance. Extensive experiments demonstrated the significant performance of the proposed scheme, which is promising for future research to automate the role assignment in the IIoT domain.

WebGIS-Based Real-Time Surveillance and Response System for Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases.

The diseases transmitted through vectors such as mosquitoes are named vector-borne diseases (VBDs), such as malaria, dengue, and leishmaniasis. Malaria spreads by a vector named Anopheles mosquitos. Dengue is transmitted through the bite of the female vector Aedes aegypti or Aedes albopictus mosquito. The female Phlebotomine sandfly is the vector that transmits leishmaniasis. The best way to control VBDs is to identify breeding sites for their vectors. This can be efficiently accomplished by the Geographical Information System (GIS). The objective was to find the relation between climatic factors (temperature, humidity, and precipitation) to identify breeding sites for these vectors. Our data contained imbalance classes, so data oversampling of different sizes was created. The machine learning models used were Light Gradient Boosting Machine, Random Forest, Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, and Multi-Layer Perceptron for model training. Their results were compared and analyzed to select the best model for disease prediction in Punjab, Pakistan. Random Forest was the selected model with 93.97% accuracy. Accuracy was measured using an F score, precision, or recall. Temperature, precipitation, and specific humidity significantly affect the spread of dengue, malaria, and leishmaniasis. A user-friendly web-based GIS platform was also developed for concerned citizens and policymakers.

Small-Scale and Occluded Pedestrian Detection Using Multi Mapping Feature Extraction Function and Modified Soft-NMS.

In autonomous driving and Intelligent transportation systems, pedestrian detection is vital in reducing traffic accidents. However, detecting small-scale and occluded pedestrians is challenging due to the ineffective utilization of the low-feature content of small-scale objects. The main reasons behind this are the stochastic nature of weight initialization and the greedy nature of nonmaximum suppression. To overcome the aforesaid issues, this work proposes a multifocus feature extractor module by fusing feature maps extracted from the Gaussian and Xavier mapping function to enhance the effective receptive field. We also employ a focused attention feature selection on a higher layer feature map of the single shot detector (SSD) region proposal module to blend with its low-layer feature to tackle the vanishing of the feature detail due to convolution and pooling operation. In addition, this work proposes a decaying nonmaximum suppression function considering score and Intersection Over Union (IOU) parameters to tackle high miss rates caused by greedy nonmaximum suppression used by SSD. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the Caltech pedestrian dataset with the original annotations and the improved annotations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, particularly for small and occluded pedestrians.

Combining Latent Factor Model for Dynamic Recommendations in Community Question Answering Forums.

Community Question Answering (CQA) web service provides a platform for people to share knowledge. Quora, Stack Overflow, and Yahoo! Answers are few sites where questioners post their queries and answerers respond to their respective queries. Due to the ease of use and quick responsiveness of the CQA platform, these sites are being widely adopted by the community. For better usability, there is a dire need to route the question toward the relevant answerers. To fulfil this gap, recommender systems play an important role in identifying the relevant answerers. To map the user interests more effectively, this research work proposed a dynamic feature representation of the latent user attributes for user profiling. The latent features are mapped by leveraging the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modelling of user data. The proposed recommendation model segments the user profile based on these latent user profiles incorporating the incremental learning of the users' interests to produce the relevant recommendations in near real time. The experimental setup generated recommendation lists of variable sizes and evaluated using multiple evaluation metrics, such as mean average precision, recall, throughput, and different quality metrics, such as discounted cumulative gain and mean reciprocal rank. The results showed that the proposed model provided a better quality of recommendations in CQA forums, which is promising for future research in this domain.

The Rise of Cloud Computing: Data Protection, Privacy, and Open Research Challenges-A Systematic Literature Review (SLR).

Cloud computing is a long-standing dream of computing as a utility, where users can store their data remotely in the cloud to enjoy on-demand services and high-quality applications from a shared pool of configurable computing resources. Thus, the privacy and security of data are of utmost importance to all of its users regardless of the nature of the data being stored. In cloud computing environments, it is especially critical because data is stored in various locations, even around the world, and users do not have any physical access to their sensitive data. Therefore, we need certain data protection techniques to protect the sensitive data that is outsourced over the cloud. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to illustrate all the data protection techniques that protect sensitive data outsourced over cloud storage. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to synthesize, classify, and identify important studies in the field of study. Accordingly, an evidence-based approach is used in this study. Preliminary results are based on answers to four research questions. Out of 493 research articles, 52 studies were selected. 52 papers use different data protection techniques, which can be divided into two main categories, namely noncryptographic techniques and cryptographic techniques. Noncryptographic techniques consist of data splitting, data anonymization, and steganographic techniques, whereas cryptographic techniques consist of encryption, searchable encryption, homomorphic encryption, and signcryption. In this work, we compare all of these techniques in terms of data protection accuracy, overhead, and operations on masked data. Finally, we discuss the future research challenges facing the implementation of these techniques.

Metaheuristic Algorithms Based on Compromise Programming for the Multi-Objective Urban Shipment Problem.

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and its variants are found in many fields, especially logistics. In this study, we introduced an adaptive method to a complex VRP. It combines multi-objective optimization and several forms of VRPs with practical requirements for an urban shipment system. The optimizer needs to consider terrain and traffic conditions. The proposed model also considers customers' expectations and shipper considerations as goals, and a common goal such as transportation cost. We offered compromise programming to approach the multi-objective problem by decomposing the original multi-objective problem into a minimized distance-based problem. We designed a hybrid version of the genetic algorithm with the local search algorithm to solve the proposed problem. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with the Tabu Search algorithm and the original genetic algorithm on the tested dataset. The results show that our method is an effective decision-making tool for the multi-objective VRP and an effective solver for the new variation of VRP.

Secure and dynamic access control for the Internet of Things (IoT) based traffic system.

Today, the trend of the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing through the use of smart devices, vehicular networks, and household devices with internet-based networks. Specifically, the IoT smart devices and gadgets used in government and military are crucial to operational success. Communication and data sharing between these devices have increased in several ways. Similarly, the threats of information breaches between communication channels have also surged significantly, making data security a challenging task. In this context, access control is an approach that can secure data by restricting unauthorized users. Various access control models exist that can effectively implement access control yet, and there is no single state-of-the-art model that can provide dynamicity, security, ease of administration, and rapid execution all at once. In combating this loophole, we propose a novel secure and dynamic access control (SDAC) model for the IoT networks (smart traffic control and roadside parking management). Our proposed model allows IoT devices to communicate and share information through a secure means by using wired and wireless networks (Cellular Networks or Wi-Fi). The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model are demonstrated using mathematical models and discussed with many example implementations.

Attention Autoencoder for Generative Latent Representational Learning in Anomaly Detection.

Today, accurate and automated abnormality diagnosis and identification have become of paramount importance as they are involved in many critical and life-saving scenarios. To accomplish such frontiers, we propose three artificial intelligence models through the application of deep learning algorithms to analyze and detect anomalies in human heartbeat signals. The three proposed models include an attention autoencoder that maps input data to a lower-dimensional latent representation with maximum feature retention, and a reconstruction decoder with minimum remodeling loss. The autoencoder has an embedded attention module at the bottleneck to learn the salient activations of the encoded distribution. Additionally, a variational autoencoder (VAE) and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network is designed to learn the Gaussian distribution of the generative reconstruction and time-series sequential data analysis. The three proposed models displayed outstanding ability to detect anomalies on the evaluated five thousand electrocardiogram (ECG5000) signals with 99% accuracy and 99.3% precision score in detecting healthy heartbeats from patients with severe congestive heart failure.