Topic Modelling and Sentimental Analysis of Students’Reviews

Globally,educational institutions have reported a dramatic shift to online learning in an effort to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.The fundamental concern has been the continuance of education.As a result,several novel solutions have been developed to address technical and pedagogical issues.However,these were not the only difficulties that students faced.The implemented solutions involved the operation of the educational process with less regard for students’changing circumstances,which obliged them to study from home.Students should be asked to provide a full list of their concerns.As a result,student reflections,including those from Saudi Arabia,have been analysed to identify obstacles encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic.However,most of the analyses relied on closed-ended questions,which limited student involvement.To delve into students’responses,this study used open-ended questions,a qualitative method(content analysis),a quantitative method(topic modelling),and a sentimental analysis.This study also looked at students’emotional states during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.In terms of determining trends in students’input,the results showed that quantitative and qualitative methods produced similar outcomes.Students had unfavourable sentiments about studying during COVID-19 and positive sentiments about the face-to-face study.Furthermore,topic modelling has revealed that the majority of difficulties are more related to the environment(home)and social life.Students were less accepting of online learning.As a result,it is possible to conclude that face-to-face study still attracts students and provides benefits that online study cannot,such as social interaction and effective eye-to-eye communication.

Application of the SECI Model Using Web Tools to Support Diabetes Self-Management and Education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The area of knowledge management, the SECI mode in particular, has great value in terms of enriching patients’ knowledge about their diseases and its complications. Despite its effectiveness, the application of knowledge management in the healthcare sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia seems deficient, leading to insufficient practice of self-management and education of different prevalent diseases in the Kingdom. Moreover, the SECI model seems to be only focusing in the conversion of human knowledge and ignore knowledge stored in databases and other technological means. In this paper, we propose a framework to support diabetic patients and healthcare professionals in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to self-manage their disease. Data mining and the SECI model can provide effective mechanisms to support people with diabetes mellitus. The area of data mining has long been utilised to discover useful knowledge whereas the SECI model facilitates knowledge conversion between tacit and explicit knowledge among different individuals. The paper also investigates the possibilities of applying the model in the web environment and reviews the tools available in the internet that can apply the four modes of the SECI model. This review helps in providing a new median for knowledge management by addressing several cultural obstacles in the Kingdom.

Reliable Failure Restoration with Bayesian Congestion Aware for Software Defined Networks

SoftwareDefined Networks(SDN)introduced better network management by decoupling control and data plane.However,communication reliability is the desired property in computer networks.The frequency of communication link failure degrades network performance,and service disruptions are likely to occur.Emerging network applications,such as delaysensitive applications,suffer packet loss with higher Round Trip Time(RTT).Several failure recovery schemes have been proposed to address link failure recovery issues in SDN.However,these schemes have various weaknesses,which may not always guarantee service availability.Communication paths differ in their roles;some paths are critical because of the higher frequency usage.Other paths frequently share links between primary and backup.Rerouting the affected flows after failure occurrences without investigating the path roles can lead to post-recovery congestion with packet loss and system throughput.Therefore,there is a lack of studies to incorporate path criticality and residual path capacity to reroute the affected flows in case of link failure.This paper proposed Reliable Failure Restoration with Congestion Aware for SDN to select the reliable backup path that decreases packet loss and RTT,increasing network throughput while minimizing post-recovery congestion.The affected flows are redirected through a path with minimal risk of failure,while Bayesian probability is used to predict post-recovery congestion.Both the former and latter path with a minimal score is chosen.The simulation results improved throughput by(45%),reduced packet losses(87%),and lowered RTT(89%)compared to benchmarking works.

Enhancing Parkinson’s Disease Prediction Using Machine Learning and Feature Selection Methods

Several millions of people suffer from Parkinson’s disease globally.Parkinson’s affects about 1%of people over 60 and its symptoms increase with age.The voice may be affected and patients experience abnormalities in speech that might not be noticed by listeners,but which could be analyzed using recorded speech signals.With the huge advancements of technology,the medical data has increased dramatically,and therefore,there is a need to apply data mining and machine learning methods to extract new knowledge from this data.Several classification methods were used to analyze medical data sets and diagnostic problems,such as Parkinson’s Disease(PD).In addition,to improve the performance of classification,feature selection methods have been extensively used in many fields.This paper aims to propose a comprehensive approach to enhance the prediction of PD using several machine learning methods with different feature selection methods such as filter-based and wrapper-based.The dataset includes 240 recodes with 46 acoustic features extracted from3 voice recording replications for 80 patients.The experimental results showed improvements when wrapper-based features selection method was used with K-NN classifier with accuracy of 88.33%.The best obtained results were compared with other studies and it was found that this study provides comparable and superior results.

Digital Forensics for Skulls Classification in Physical Anthropology Collection Management

The size,shape,and physical characteristics of the human skull are distinct when considering individual humans.In physical anthropology,the accurate management of skull collections is crucial for storing and maintaining collections in a cost-effective manner.For example,labeling skulls inaccurately or attaching printed labels to skulls can affect the authenticity of collections.Given the multiple issues associated with the manual identification of skulls,we propose an automatic human skull classification approach that uses a support vector machine and different feature extraction methods such as gray-level co-occurrence matrix features,Gabor features,fractal features,discrete wavelet transforms,and combinations of features.Each underlying facial bone exhibits unique characteristics essential to the face’s physical structure that could be exploited for identification.Therefore,we developed an automatic recognition method to classify human skulls for consistent identification compared with traditional classification approaches.Using our proposed approach,we were able to achieve an accuracy of 92.3–99.5%in the classification of human skulls with mandibles and an accuracy of 91.4–99.9%in the classification of human skills without mandibles.Our study represents a step forward in the construction of an effective automatic human skull identification system with a classification process that achieves satisfactory performance for a limited dataset of skull images.

New bounds on the mutual information for discrete constellations and application to wireless channel estimation

The lack of closed-form expressions of the mutual information for discrete constellations has limited its uses for analyzing reliable communication over wireless fading channels.In order to address this issue,this paper proposes analytically-tractable lower bounds on the mutual information based on Arithmetic-Mean-Geometric-Mean(AMGM)inequality.The new bounds can apply to a wide range of discrete constellations and reveal some insights into the rate behavior at moderate to high Signal-to-Noise Ratio(SNR)values.The usability of the bounds is further demonstrated to approximate the optimum pilot overhead in stationary fading channels.

Energy Theft Detection in Smart Grids with Genetic Algorithm-Based Feature Selection

As big data,its technologies,and application continue to advance,the Smart Grid(SG)has become one of the most successful pervasive and fixed computing platforms that efficiently uses a data-driven approach and employs efficient information and communication technology(ICT)and cloud computing.As a result of the complicated architecture of cloud computing,the distinctive working of advanced metering infrastructures(AMI),and the use of sensitive data,it has become challenging tomake the SG secure.Faults of the SG are categorized into two main categories,Technical Losses(TLs)and Non-Technical Losses(NTLs).Hardware failure,communication issues,ohmic losses,and energy burnout during transmission and propagation of energy are TLs.NTL’s are human-induced errors for malicious purposes such as attacking sensitive data and electricity theft,along with tampering with AMI for bill reduction by fraudulent customers.This research proposes a data-driven methodology based on principles of computational intelligence as well as big data analysis to identify fraudulent customers based on their load profile.In our proposed methodology,a hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Support Vector Machine(GA-SVM)model has been used to extract the relevant subset of feature data from a large and unsupervised public smart grid project dataset in London,UK,for theft detection.A subset of 26 out of 71 features is obtained with a classification accuracy of 96.6%,compared to studies conducted on small and limited datasets.

A Novel Explainable CNN Model for Screening COVID-19 on X-ray Images

Due to the rapid propagation characteristic of the Coronavirus(COVID-19)disease,manual diagnostic methods cannot handle the large number of infected individuals to prevent the spread of infection.Despite,new automated diagnostic methods have been brought on board,particularly methods based on artificial intelligence using different medical data such as X-ray imaging.Thoracic imaging,for example,produces several image types that can be processed and analyzed by machine and deep learning methods.X-ray imaging materials widely exist in most hospitals and health institutes since they are affordable compared to other imaging machines.Through this paper,we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)model(COV2Net)that can detect COVID-19 virus by analyzing the X-ray images of suspected patients.This model is trained on a dataset containing thousands of X-ray images collected from different sources.The model was tested and evaluated on an independent dataset.In order to approve the performance of the proposed model,three CNN models namely Mobile-Net,Residential Energy Services Network(Res-Net),and Visual Geometry Group 16(VGG-16)have been implemented using transfer learning technique.This experiment consists of a multi-label classification task based on X-ray images for normal patients,patients infected by COVID-19 virus and other patients infected with pneumonia.This proposed model is empowered with Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping(Grad-CAM)and Grad-Cam++techniques for a visual explanation and methodology debugging goal.The finding results show that the proposed model COV2Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

A Cyber Kill Chain Approach for Detecting Advanced Persistent Threats

The number of cybersecurity incidents is on the rise despite significant investment in security measures.The existing conventional security approaches have demonstrated limited success against some of the more complex cyber-attacks.This is primarily due to the sophistication of the attacks and the availability of powerful tools.Interconnected devices such as the Internet of Things(IoT)are also increasing attack exposures due to the increase in vulnerabilities.Over the last few years,we have seen a trend moving towards embracing edge technologies to harness the power of IoT devices and 5G networks.Edge technology brings processing power closer to the network and brings many advantages,including reduced latency,while it can also introduce vulnerabilities that could be exploited.Smart cities are also dependent on technologies where everything is interconnected.This interconnectivity makes them highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks,especially by the Advanced Persistent Threat(APT),as these vulnerabilities are amplified by the need to integrate new technologies with legacy systems.Cybercriminals behind APT attacks have recently been targeting the IoT ecosystems,prevalent in many of these cities.In this paper,we used a publicly available dataset on Advanced Persistent Threats(APT)and developed a data-driven approach for detecting APT stages using the Cyber Kill Chain.APTs are highly sophisticated and targeted forms of attacks that can evade intrusion detection systems,resulting in one of the greatest current challenges facing security professionals.In this experiment,we used multiple machine learning classifiers,such as Naïve Bayes,Bayes Net,KNN,Random Forest and Support Vector Machine(SVM).We used Weka performance metrics to show the numeric results.The best performance result of 91.1%was obtained with the Naïve Bayes classifier.We hope our proposed solution will help security professionals to deal with APTs in a timely and effective manner.

AudiWFlow:Confidential,collusion-resistant auditing of distributed workflows

We discuss the problem of accountability when multiple parties cooperate towards an end result,such as multiple companies in a supply chain or departments of a government service under different authorities.In cases where a fully trusted central point does not exist,it is difficult to obtain a trusted audit trail of a workflow when each individual participant is unaccountable to all others.We propose AudiWFlow,an auditing architecture that makes participants accountable for their contributions in a distributed workflow.Our scheme provides confidentiality in most cases,collusion detection,and availability of evidence after the workflow terminates.AudiWFlow is based on verifiable secret sharing and real-time peer-to-peer verification of records;it further supports multiple levels of assurance to meet a desired trade-off between the availability of evidence and the overhead resulting from the auditing approach.We propose and evaluate two implementation approaches for AudiWFlow.The first one is fully distributed except for a central auxiliary point that,nevertheless,needs only a low level of trust.The second one is based on smart contracts running on a public blockchain,which is able to remove the need for any central point but requires integration with a blockchain.