Digital agriculture, with the incorporation of Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based technologies, presents the ability to control a system at multiple levels (individual, local, regional, and global) and generates tools that allow for improved decision making and higher productivity. Recent advances in IoT hardware, e.g., networks of heterogeneous embedded devices, and software, e.g., lightweight computer

Human collaboration has a great impact on the performance of multi-person activities. The analysis of speaker information and speech timing can be used to extract human collaboration data in detail. Some studies have extracted human collaboration data by identifying a speaker with business-card-type sensors. However, it is difficult to realize speaker identification for business-card-type sensors at

Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is believed to play a significant role in our future society governed in a decentralized way. In this article, we first explain the definitions and preliminaries of DAO. Then, we conduct a literature review of the existing studies of DAO published in the recent few years. Through the literature review, we find out that a comprehensive survey towards the state-of-the-art

With the development of advanced information and communication technology, the traditional centralized service model alone no longer meets the increasing demand of data exchange in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). While Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology has been introduced to achieve more advanced ITS, there are still some unsettled issues such as flexibility and fault tolerance. The conventional

In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid roll-out of a vaccine and the implementation of a worldwide immunization campaign is critical, but its success will depend on the availability of an operational and transparent distribution chain that can be audited by all relevant stakeholders. In this paper, we discuss how blockchain technology can help in several aspects of COVID-19 vaccination scheme

The emerging field of privacy-preserving biometrics is attracting significant attention, as a paradigm that can address several of the key concerns in cryptographic authentication processes, whilst simultaneously addressing the issues of privacy. This paper contributes to the understanding of the field from following perspectives: (1) It proposes a novel and comprehensive taxonomy of privacy-preserving

With the advancements of Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization technologies, users can access the software-based service function chain (SFC), which is composed of multiple sequential virtual network function (VNF) nodes. Although SFC is more flexible and adaptive in terms of design and deployment, the security risks should not be underestimated. At present, there is a lack

The performance of one computer relative to another is traditionally characterized through benchmarking, a practice occasionally deficient in statistical rigor. The performance is often trivialized through simplified measures, such as the approach of central tendency, but doing so risks a loss of perspective of the variability and non-determinism of modern computer systems. Authentic performance evaluations

Currently, continuous monitoring on patients with the help of small devices (or sensors), is easy for doctors/nurses to check patients. Due to privacy issues, data collected from devices should be protected. Thus, a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is required among doctors/nurses, trusted servers, sensors and patients. In this paper, we provide a secure protocol which could

Computer and network security is an ever important field of study as information processed by these systems is of ever increasing value. The state of research on direct attacks, such as exploiting memory safety or shell input errors is well established and a rich set of testing tools are available for these types of attacks. Machine-learning based intrusion detection systems are also available and

Technological evolution has brought great changes to traditional industries. Nowadays farmers obtain great benefits such as intelligent production and convenient management from intelligent agriculture. Nevertheless, there still exists many flaws in current solutions. Deficiencies in energy management, data transmission and privacy preservation are supposed to be solved. In this paper, the privacy

Vehicular delay tolerant networks (VDTNs) enable information sharing among mobile nodes in scenarios where cellular base stations are unavailable and the connections between the mobile nodes are intermittent. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown to improve the performance of VDTNs, existing routing protocols, such as PRoPHET, consider the encounter probability between mobile nodes only

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Accurately predicting patient expenditure in healthcare is an important task with many applications such as provider profiling, accountable care management, and capitated medical payment adjustment. Existing approaches mainly rely on manually designed features and linear regression-based models, which require massive medical domain knowledge and show limited predictive performance. This paper proposes

Blockchain and smart contracts have seen significant application over the last decade, revolutionising many industries, including cryptocurrency, finance and banking, and supply chain management. In many cases, however, the transparency provided potentially comes at the cost of privacy. Blockchain does have potential uses to increase privacy-preservation. This paper outlines the current state of privacy

Mobile application integrated with cryptocurrency would be an innovative solution for making medicine purchase in the future. This research work fixates on the design and implementation of a crypto pharmacy - digital medicine utilizing hybrid blockchain technology. We present the concept of crypto medicine that eliminates third-party presence (buy/sell) in a medicine purchase. The proposed design integrates

It is indeed a great honor to be the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE OPEN JOURNAL OF THE COMPUTER SOCIETY (OJCS). OJCS is a rigorously peer-reviewed forum for rapid publication of open access (OA) articles describing high-impact results on the latest emerging topics and trends in all areas of interest to the IEEE Computer Society, encompassing theory, design, practice, and application relating

As one of the most promising energy-efficient emerging paradigms for designing digital systems, approximate computing has attracted a significant attention in recent years. Applications utilizing approximate computing (AxC) can tolerate some loss of quality in the computed results for attaining high performance. Approximate arithmetic circuits have been extensively studied; however, their application

The use of big data has led to many technologies that were previously thought to be impossible. We are now able to analyze the spread of a disaster automatically through the use of social networking analysis, which is effectively served by internet or cloud services. One problem with using such algorithms in these cases is that internet services and connections to the cloud can often be damaged. In

Packet loss recovery in wireless broadcast is challenging, particularly for real-time applications which have strict and short delivery deadline. To recover the maximum number of lost packets within a short time, existing packet recovery solutions often rely on instantly decodable network coding (IDNC). Some of these solutions can recover nearly the maximum number of lost packets possible at the cost

As a tremendous amount of service being streamed online to their users along with massive digital privacy information transmitted in recent years, the internet has become the backbone of most people's everyday workflow. The extending usage of the internet, however, also expands the attack surface for cyberattacks. If no effective protection mechanism is implemented, the internet will only be much vulnerable

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Smart contracts on Ethereum can be used to encode business logic and have been applied to many different areas, such as token exchanges and games. Unlike general programs, the computations of contracts on Ethereum are restricted by the gas limit. If a transaction runs out of the gas limit before an execution finishes, the Ethereum virtual machine throws an out-of-gas exception, and the entire transaction

Simple implementation and autonomous operation features make the Internet-of-Things (IoT) vulnerable to malware attacks. Static analysis of IoT malware executable files is a feasible approach to understanding the behavior of IoT malware for mitigation and prevention. However, current analytic approaches based on opcodes or call graphs typically do not work well with diversity in central processing

Testing has been a major factor that limits our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The method of sample pooling and group test has recently been introduced and adopted. However, it is still not clearly known how to determine the appropriate group size. In this paper, we treat asymptomatic COVID-19 screening acceleration as an optimization problem, and solve the problem using an analytical approach

When scaling a distributed ORAM to a two-party secure computation, the overhead is dominated by the number of pseudo-random generator (PRG) calls in generation and evaluation of a distributed point function (DPF), which are O (log n ) and O ( n ) respectively, where n is the number of data blocks. We propose a distributed ORAM scheme, in which the PRG calls are reduced to O (log( zn/λ )) for generation

Honeypots have been widely used in the security community to understand the cyber threat landscape, for example to study unauthorized penetration attempts targeting industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) and observing the behaviors in such activities. However, some better-resourced cyber attackers may attempt to identify honeypots and develop strategies to compromise them, aka anti-honeypot. In this

As an important bearer network of the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication technology, the optical transport network (OTN) needs to have high-quality network performance and management capabilities. Proof by facts, the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and software-defined networking (SDN) can improve significant optimization effects and management for optical transport networks

Providing transparency and trust among participants and stakeholders and ensuring an efficient operation are current supply chain challenges. These challenges are difficult to resolve because the records of supply chains may be exposed to alterations by participants. Blockchain technology has been identified as a promising solution to resolve these challenges. In this paper, we introduce blockchain

The current COVID-19 pandemic and its uncertainty have given rise to various myths and rumours. These myths spread incredibly fast through social media, which has caused massive panic in society. In this paper, we comprehensively examined the prevailing myths related to COVID-19 in regard to the diffusion of myths, people's engagement with myths and people's subjective emotions to myths. First, we

Grant-free multiple access is a critical mechanism introduced in 5G new radio (NR) to support ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) services. Pilot authentication (PA) is a key security mechanism to guarantee reliable performance of grant-free URLLC. However, PA can be easily paralyzed by pilot-aware attack since pilot signals are usually publicly known, and unprotected. To solve this, we

Self-organizing networks provide rapid and convenient networking for many situations and have gained extensive research. With the progress of researches, security issues have attracted people's attention. There is no central node in self-organizing networks, and therefore the traditional key distribution methods based on public infrastructure do not work. The standardized pre-shared keys have predictable

In this article, we put forward the substantial challenges in cyber resilience in the domain of autonomous systems and outline foundational solutions to address these challenges. These solutions fall into two broad themes: resilience-by-design and resilience-by-reaction . We use several application drivers from autonomous systems to motivate the challenges in cyber resilience and to demonstrate the

The removal of impulse noise is a crucial pre-processing step in image processing systems. In recent years, numerous noise-removal methods have been proposed to improve denoizing performance and reconstruct noise-free images. However, removing high-density impulse noise remains a major challenge. In this paper, to address the image denoizing problem associated with high-density noise, we propose a

In this paper, we introduce SPQER (pronounced speaker), a novel approach to evaluate the quality of experience for real-time Voice over IP (VoIP) communication in mobile and lossy networks. Traditional speech quality metrics, e.g., Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) or the Hearing-Aid Speech Quality Index (HASQI), directly compare frequencies and amplitudes to calculate the received signal

In the past, the security of most public-key encryption or key encapsulation schemes is shown in an ideal model, where private keys, secret keys and random values are assumed to be absolutely secure to adversaries. However, this ideal model is not practical due to side-channel attacks in the sense that adversaries could gain partial information of these secret values involved in decryption operations

Recently, blockchain has elicited escalating attention from academia to industry. However, blockchain is still in its initial stage, and remains a great number of non-trivial problems to be delved before being used as a generic platform. The most intractable one is the scalability problem. The deep reinforcement learning empowered adaptivity can help the blockchain network break through the bottleneck

Various communication systems have been developed to integrate the haptic channel in digital communication. Future directions of such haptic technologies are moving towards realistic virtual reality applications and human-robot social interaction. With the digitisation of touch, robots equipped with touch sensors and actuators can communicate with humans on a more emotional and intimate level, such

Point cloud video provides 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) viewing experiences to allow users to freely select the viewing angles of 3D scenes and is expected to be the next-generation video. This paper studies the point cloud video streaming and proposes a fuzzy logic-based point cloud video streaming scheme to solve the inherent technical issues. In particular, a point cloud video is first partitioned

The traditional Internet has encountered a bottleneck in allocating network resources for emerging technology needs. Network virtualization (NV) technology as a future network architecture, the virtual network embedding (VNE) algorithm it supports shows great potential in solving resource allocation problems. Combined with the efficient machine learning (ML) algorithm, a neural network model close

Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have received extensive attention recently. Massive data has been stored on permission-less blockchains. The analysis of massive blockchain data can bring huge business values. However, the absence of well-processed up-to-date blockchain datasets impedes big data analytics of blockchain data. To fill this gap, we collect and process the up-to-date on-chain data from

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that can achieve the purpose of collaborative learning from a large amount of data that belong to different parties without sharing the raw data among the data owners. FL can sufficiently utilize the computing capabilities of multiple learning agents to improve the learning efficiency while providing a better privacy solution for the

Analytics firm Cyence estimated Amazon's four-hour cloud computing outage in 2017 “cost S&P 500 companies at least $150 million” and traffic monitoring firm Apica claimed “54 of the top 100 online retailers saw site performance slump by at least 20 percent”. According to Ponemon, 2015 data center outages cost Fortune 1000 companies between $1.25 and $2.5 billion. Despite potential risks, the cloud

Widely deployed smart cameras are generating a large amount of video data and capable of processing frames on devices. Empowered by edge computing, the video data can also be offloaded to edge servers for processing. By leveraging the on-device processing and computation offloading, we propose a federated video analytics system named FedVision to efficiently provision video analytics across devices

Internet of Things (IoT) have widely penetrated in different aspects of modern life and many intelligent IoT services and applications are emerging. Recently, federated learning is proposed to train a globally shared model by exploiting a massive amount of user-generated data samples on IoT devices while preventing data leakage. However, the device, statistical and model heterogeneities inherent in

A novel data hiding method for covert communication via the QR code image based on adjustments of the shapes of the QR code modules using image processing techniques is proposed. A module block consisting of two module pairs is taken as the unit for message-bit embedding by adjusting the vertical and horizontal internal boundaries in the module pairs. Eliminations of the resulting boundary line zigzaggedness

Determining the qualitative States-of-the-Internet requires an accurate knowledge of queueing delay over an end-to-end path. However, the measurement of queueing delay in a large network is still considered a complex and open problem. Existing schemes that measure queueing delay compensate for this complexity using a high infrastructural support and administrative access to the path under test even

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