As 5G and AI continue to develop, there has been a significant surge in the healthcare industry. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed immense challenges to the global health system. This study proposes an FL-supported edge computing model based on federated learning (FL) for predicting clinical outcomes of COVID-19 patients during hospitalization. The model aims to address the challenges posed by the pandemic, such as the need for sophisticated predictive models, privacy concerns, and the non-IID nature of COVID-19 data. The model utilizes the FATE framework, known for its privacy-preserving technologies, to enhance predictive precision while ensuring data privacy and effectively managing data heterogeneity. The model's ability to generalize across diverse datasets and its adaptability in real-world clinical settings are highlighted by the use of SHAP values, which streamline the training process by identifying influential features, thus reducing computational overhead without compromising predictive precision. The study demonstrates that the proposed model achieves comparable precision to specific machine learning models when dataset sizes are identical and surpasses traditional models when larger training data volumes are employed. The model's performance is further improved when trained on datasets from diverse nodes, leading to superior generalization and overall performance, especially in scenarios with insufficient node features. The integration of FL with edge computing contributes significantly to the reliable prediction of COVID-19 patient outcomes with greater privacy. The research contributes to healthcare technology by providing a practical solution for early intervention and personalized treatment plans, leading to improved patient outcomes and efficient resource allocation during public health crises.

The university course scheduling problem (UCSP) aims at optimally arranging courses to corresponding rooms, faculties, students, and timeslots with constraints. Previously, the university staff solved this thorny problem by hand, which is very time-consuming and makes it easy to fall into chaos. Even some meta-heuristic algorithms are proposed to solve UCSP automatically, while most only utilize one single algorithm, so the scheduling results still need improvement. Besides, they lack an in-depth analysis of the inner algorithms. Therefore, this paper presents a novel and practical approach based on Tabu search and simulated annealing algorithms for solving USCP. Firstly, the initial solution of the UCSP instance is generated by one construction heuristic algorithm, the first fit algorithm. Secondly, we defined one union move selector to control the moves and provide diverse solutions from initial solutions, consisting of two changing move selectors. Thirdly, Tabu search and simulated annealing (SA) are combined to filter out unacceptable moves in a parallel mode. Then, the acceptable moves are selected by one adaptive decision algorithm, which is used as the next step to construct the final solving path. Benefits from the excellent design of the union move selector, parallel tabu search and SA, and adaptive decision algorithm, the proposed method could effectively solve UCSP since it fully uses Tabu and SA. We designed and tested the proposed algorithm in one real-world (PKNU-UCSP) and ten random UCSP instances. The experimental results confirmed its effectiveness. Besides, the in-depth analysis confirmed each component's effectiveness for solving UCSP.

Breast cancer is a major health concern affecting women and men globally. Early detection and accurate classification of breast cancer are vital for effective treatment and survival of patients. This study addresses the challenge of accurately classifying breast tumors using machine learning classifiers such as MLP, AdaBoostM1, logit Boost, Bayes Net, and the J48 decision tree. The research uses a dataset available publicly on GitHub to assess the classifiers' performance and differentiate between the occurrence and non-occurrence of breast cancer. The study compares the 10-fold and 5-fold cross-validation effectiveness, showing that 10-fold cross-validation provides superior results. Also, it examines the impact of varying split percentages, with a 66% split yielding the best performance. This shows the importance of selecting appropriate validation techniques for machine learning-based breast tumor classification. The results also indicate that the J48 decision tree method is the most accurate classifier, providing valuable insights for developing predictive models for cancer diagnosis and advancing computational medical research.

Fast decision support systems and accurate diagnosis have become significant in the rapidly growing healthcare sector. As the number of disparate medical IoT devices connected to the human body rises, fast and interrelated healthcare data retrieval gets harder and harder. One of the most important requirements for the Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) is semantic interoperability. The state-of-the-art HIoT systems have problems with bandwidth and latency. An extension of cloud computing called fog computing not only solves the latency problem but also provides other benefits including resource mobility and on-demand scalability. The recommended approach helps to lower latency and network bandwidth consumption in a system that provides semantic interoperability in healthcare organizations. To evaluate the system's language processing performance, we simulated it in three different contexts. 1. Polysemy resolution system 2. System for hyponymy-hypernymy resolution with polysemy 3. System for resolving polysemy, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and holonymy. In comparison to the other two systems, the third system has lower latency and network usage. The proposed framework can reduce the computation overhead of heterogeneous healthcare data. The simulation results show that fog computing can reduce delay, network usage, and energy consumption.

Industry 5.0 puts forward higher requirements for smart cities, including low-carbon, sustainable, and people-oriented, which pose challenges to the design of smart cities. In response to the above challenges, this study introduces the cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) and parallel system theory into the design of smart cities, and constructs a smart city framework based on parallel system theory. On this basis, in order to enhance the security of smart cities, a sustainable patrol subsystem for smart cities has been established. The intelligent patrol system uses a drone platform, and the trajectory planning of the drone is a key problem that needs to be solved. Therefore, a mathematical model was established that considers various objectives, including minimizing carbon emissions, minimizing noise impact, and maximizing coverage area, while also taking into account the flight performance constraints of drones. In addition, an improved metaheuristic algorithm based on ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm was designed for trajectory planning of patrol drones. Finally, a digital environmental map was established based on real urban scenes and simulation experiments were conducted. The results show that compared with the other three metaheuristic algorithms, the algorithm designed in this study has the best performance.

Maritime activities are on the rise, there is a growing demand for high-quality communication services that can cover larger areas. However, the transmission of high data rates to maritime users is challenging due to path loss from land base stations, which limits the transmission power. To overcome this challenge, researchers have been exploring the use of buoys in a marine environment as relays for communication technology. This paper proposes a simulation-based approach to investigate the impact of various beamwidths on communication performance when using a buoy as a relay. The objective is to determine the optimal beamwidth that yields the highest data rate for the target location. The approach is based on an offshore wave model where the direction of the buoy changes according to the height of the wave. The study investigates the performance of the relay in the downlink situation using receive beamforming, and the capacity at the user in the three-hop situation is verified using an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay that uses transmit beamforming to the user. The simulation results suggest that the beamwidth of the relay should be adjusted according to the wave conditions to optimize the data rate and relay position that satisfies a data rate superior to the direct path to the target position. Using a buoy as a relay can be a promising solution for enhancing maritime communications, and the simulation-based approach proposed in this paper can provide insights into how to optimize beamwidth for effective communication system design and implementation. In conclusion, the study results suggest that the use of buoys as relays for maritime communication is a feasible solution for expanding coverage and enhancing communication quality. The proposed simulation-based approach provides a useful tool for identifying relay beamwidths for achieving higher data rates in different wave conditions. These findings have significant implications for the design and deployment of communication systems in maritime environments.

Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation (UVOS) is a highly challenging problem in computer vision as the annotation of the target object in the testing video is unknown at all. The main difficulty is to effectively handle the complicated and changeable motion state of the target object and the confusion of similar background objects in video sequence. In this paper, we propose a novel deep Dual-stream Co-enhanced Network (DC-Net) for UVOS via bidirectional motion cues refinement and multi-level feature aggregation, which can fully take advantage of motion cues and effectively integrate different level features to produce high-quality segmentation mask. DC-Net is a dual-stream architecture where the two streams are co-enhanced by each other. One is a motion stream with a Motion-cues Refine Module (MRM), which learns from bidirectional optical flow images and produces fine-grained and complete distinctive motion saliency map, and the other is an appearance stream with a Multi-level Feature Aggregation Module (MFAM) and a Context Attention Module (CAM) which are designed to integrate the different level features effectively. Specifically, the motion saliency map obtained by the motion stream is fused with each stage of the decoder in the appearance stream to improve the segmentation, and in turn the segmentation loss in the appearance stream feeds back into the motion stream to enhance the motion refinement. Experimental results on three datasets (Davis2016, VideoSD, SegTrack-v2) demonstrate that DC-Net has achieved comparable results with some state-of-the-art methods.

Rice pest identification is essential in modern agriculture for the health of rice crops. As global rice consumption rises, yields and quality must be maintained. Various methodologies were employed to identify pests, encompassing sensor-based technologies, deep learning, and remote sensing models. Visual inspection by professionals and farmers remains essential, but integrating technology such as satellites, IoT-based sensors, and drones enhances efficiency and accuracy. A computer vision system processes images to detect pests automatically. It gives real-time data for proactive and targeted pest management. With this motive in mind, this research provides a novel farmland fertility algorithm with a deep learning-based automated rice pest detection and classification (FFADL-ARPDC) technique. The FFADL-ARPDC approach classifies rice pests from rice plant images. Before processing, FFADL-ARPDC removes noise and enhances contrast using bilateral filtering (BF). Additionally, rice crop images are processed using the NASNetLarge deep learning architecture to extract image features. The FFA is used for hyperparameter tweaking to optimise the model performance of the NASNetLarge, which aids in enhancing classification performance. Using an Elman recurrent neural network (ERNN), the model accurately categorises 14 types of pests. The FFADL-ARPDC approach is thoroughly evaluated using a benchmark dataset available in the public repository. With an accuracy of 97.58, the FFADL-ARPDC model exceeds existing pest detection methods.

To improve the brightness of images and reveal hidden information in dark areas is the main objective of low-light image enhancement (LLIE). LLIE methods based on deep learning show good performance. However, there are some limitations to these methods, such as the complex network model requires highly configurable environments, and deficient enhancement of edge details leads to blurring of the target content. Single-scale feature extraction results in the insufficient recovery of the hidden content of the enhanced images. This paper proposed an edge detection-based multi-scale feature enhancement network for LLIE (EDMFEN). To reduce the loss of edge details in the enhanced images, an edge extraction module consisting of a Sobel operator is introduced to obtain edge information by computing gradients of images. In addition, a multi-scale feature enhancement module (MSFEM) consisting of multi-scale feature extraction block (MSFEB) and a spatial attention mechanism is proposed to thoroughly recover the hidden content of the enhanced images and obtain richer features. Since the fused features may contain some useless information, the MSFEB is introduced so as to obtain the image features with different perceptual fields. To use the multi-scale features more effectively, a spatial attention mechanism module is used to retain the key features and improve the model performance after fusing multi-scale features. Experimental results on two datasets and five baseline datasets show that EDMFEN has good performance when compared with the stateof-the-art LLIE methods.

Mobile cloud computing is a very attractive service paradigm that outsources users' data computing and storage from mobile devices to cloud data centers. To protect data privacy, users often encrypt their data to ensure data sharing securely before data outsourcing. However, the bilinear and power operations involved in the encryption and decryption computation make it impossible for mobile devices with weak computational power and network transmission capability to correctly obtain decryption results. To this end, this paper proposes an outsourcing decryption algorithm of verifiable transformed ciphertext. First, the algorithm uses the key blinding technique to divide the user's private key into two parts, i.e., the authorization key and the decryption secret key. Then, the cloud data center performs the outsourcing decryption operation of the encrypted data to achieve partial decryption of the encrypted data after obtaining the authorization key and the user's outsourced decryption request. The verifiable random function is used to prevent the semi-trusted cloud data center from not performing the outsourcing decryption operation as required so that the verifiability of the outsourcing decryption is satisfied. Finally, the algorithm uses the authorization period to control the final decryption of the authorized user. Theoretical and experimental analyses show that the proposed algorithm reduces the computational overhead of ciphertext decryption while ensuring the verifiability of outsourcing decryption.

With the development of covert communication technologies, the number of covert communication technologies using blockchain as a carrier is increasing. However, using the transaction amount of digital currency as a carrier for covert communication has problems such as low embedding rate, large consumption of transaction amount, and easy detection. In this paper, firstly, by experimentally analyzing the distribution of bitcoin transaction amounts, we determine the most suitable range of amounts for matrix decomposition. Secondly, we design a novel matrix decomposition method that can successfully decompose a large amount matrix into two small amount matrices and utilize the elements in the small amount matrices for covert communication. Finally, we analyze the feasibility of the novel matrix decomposition method in this scheme in detail from four aspects, and verify it by experimental comparison, which proves that our scheme not only improves the embedding rate and reduces the consumption of transaction amount, but also has a certain degree of resistance to detection.

Terahertz (THz) communication is becoming a key technology for future 6G wireless networks because of its ultra-wide band. However, the implementation of THz communication systems confronts formidable challenges, notably beam splitting effects and high computational complexity associated with them. Our primary objective is to design a hybrid precoder that minimizes the Euclidean distance from the fully digital precoder. The analog precoding part adopts the delay-phase alternating minimization (DP-AltMin) algorithm, which divides the analog precoder into phase shifters and time delayers. This effectively addresses the beam splitting effects within THz communication by incorporating time delays. The traditional digital precoding solution, however, needs matrix inversion in THz massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems, resulting in significant computational complexity and complicating the design of the analog precoder. To address this issue, we exploit the characteristics of THz massive MIMO communication systems and construct the digital precoder as a product of scale factors and semi-unitary matrices. We utilize Schatten norm and Hölder's inequality to create semi-unitary matrices after initializing the scale factors depending on the power allocation. Finally, the analog precoder and digital precoder are alternately optimized to obtain the ultimate hybrid precoding scheme. Extensive numerical simulations have demonstrated that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods in mitigating the beam splitting issue, improving system performance, and exhibiting lower complexity. Furthermore, our approach exhibits a more favorable alignment with practical application requirements, underlying its practicality and efficiency.

The paper is an attempt to study the individual's intention to use mobile banking. In light of the results obtained from the study, the proposed model offers a better fit with the data and explains the intention of individuals to use mobile banking services. Government support, trust, and compatibility significantly contribute to the Perceived behavioral control of a bank customer to use mobile banking while Perceived ease of use, Perceived usefulness, Security and privacy, and risk have a significant positive impact on the attitude of the individuals to utilize mobile banking service. The study uses primary data and the final instrument was administered to 950 respondents, across the country of which 904 data were used for the analysis after editing to accommodate the missing values. The study has adopted structural equation modeling approach to analyze the relationships between the variables in the study. The proposed framework in this study can be utilized to identify the factors that promote the adoption of mobile banking practices and the study also has the potential to provide updated and comprehensive literature on mobile banking, which can accelerate future research in this field.

In this paper, the optimizations of multi-hop cooperative molecular communication (CMC) system in cylindrical anomalous-diffusive channel in three-dimensional enviroment are investigated. First, we derive the performance of bit error probability (BEP) of CMC system under decode-and-forward relay strategy. Then for achieving minimum average BEP, the optimization variables are detection thresholds at cooperative nodes and destination node, and the corresponding optimization problem is formulated. Furthermore, we use conjugate gradient (CG) algorithm to solve this optimization problem to search optimal detection thresholds. The numerical results show the optimal detection thresholds can be obtained by CG algorithm, which has good convergence behaviors with fewer iterations to achieve minimized average BEP compared with gradient decent algorithm and Bisection method which are used in molecular communication.

While the incorporating ESG indicator is recognized as crucial for sustainability and increased firm value, inconsistent disclosure of ESG data and vague assessment standards have been key challenges. To address these issues, this study proposes an ambiguous text-based automated ESG rating strategy. Earnings Call Transcript data were classified as E, S, or G using the Refinitiv-Sustainable Leadership Monitor's over 450 metrics. The study employed advanced natural language processing techniques such as BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, FinBERT, and ELECTRA models to precisely classify ESG documents. In addition, the authors computed the average predicted probabilities for each label, providing a means to identify the relative significance of different ESG factors. The results of experiments demonstrated the capability of the proposed methodology in enhancing ESG assessment criteria established by various rating agencies and highlighted that companies primarily focus on governance factors. In other words, companies were making efforts to strengthen their governance framework. In conclusion, this framework enables sustainable and responsible business by providing insight into the ESG information contained in Earnings Call Transcript data.

Thorough understanding of user demands and formulation of product development strategies are crucial in product design, and can effectively stimulate consumer behavior. Scientific categorization and classification of demands contribute to accurate design development, design efficiency, and success rates. In recent years, e-commerce has become important consumption platforms for smart wearable products. However, there are few studies on product design and development among those related to promoting platform product services and sales. Meanwhile, design strategies focusing on real consumer needs are scarce among smart wearable product design studies. Therefore, an empirical consumer demand analysis method is proposed and design development strategies are formulated based on a categorized interpretation of demands. Using representative smart bracelets from wearable smart products as a case, this paper classifies consumer demands with three methods: big data semantic analysis, KANO model analysis, and satisfaction analysis. The results reveal that analysis methods proposed herein can effectively classify consumer demands and confirm that differences in consumer demand categories have varying impacts on consumer behavior. On this basis, corresponding design strategies are proposed based on four categories of consumer demands, aiming to make product design the leading factor and promote consumer behavior on e-commerce platforms. This research further enriches demand research on smart wearable products on e-commerce platforms, and optimizes products from a design perspective, thereby promoting consumption. In future research, different data analysis methods will be tried to compare and analyze changes in consumer demands and influencing factors, thus improving research on impact factors of product design in e-commerce.

The importance of indoor positioning has grown in numerous application areas such as emergency response, logistics, and industrial automation. In ships, indoor positioning is also needed to provide services to passengers on board. Due to the complex structure and dynamic nature of ship environments, conventional positioning techniques have limitations in providing accurate positions. Compared to other indoor positioning technologies, Bluetooth 5.1-based indoor positioning technology is highly suitable for ship environments. Bluetooth 5.1 attains centimeter-level positioning accuracy by collecting In-phase and Quadrature (IQ) samples from wireless signals. However, distorted IQ samples can lead to significant errors in the final estimated position. Therefore, we propose an indoor positioning method for ships that utilizes a Deep Neural Network (DNN) combined with IQ fingerprint maps to overcome the challenges associated with accurate location detection within the ship. The results indicate that the accuracy of our proposed method can reach up to 97.76%.