We propose a novel Energy-Predictive Drone Service (EPDS) framework for efficient package delivery within a skyway network. The EPDS framework incorporates a formal modeling of an EPDS and an adaptive bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) machine learning model. This model predicts the energy status and stochastic arrival times of other drones operating in the same skyway network. Leveraging these predictions, we develop a heuristic optimization approach for composite drone services. This approach identifies the most time-efficient and energy-efficient skyway path and recharging schedule for each drone in the network. We conduct extensive experiments using a real-world drone flight dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.

We propose an integrity-preserving framework for managing trust information in crowdsourced IoT environments. The integrity of trust information is paramount for ensuring accurate trust assessment. Traditional trust frameworks assume that distributed storing entities of trust information are trustworthy, making them vulnerable to internal attacks. In this respect, entities responsible for storing trust data could tamper with information for personal gain and competitive advantage. Trust assessment using such tampered data could lead to inaccurate evaluations and may mislead IoT users within the environment. We propose a novel Tampering Detection Approach (TDA) to identify the tampering in trust information. Furthermore, we propose a technique to discover the tampering sophistication level. A set of experiments is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches. Results demonstrate that our TDA achieves a 40% accuracy improvement in detecting tampered data compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Fall detection is critical to support the growing elderly population, projected to reach 2.1 billion by 2050. However, existing methods often face data scarcity challenges or compromise privacy. We propose a novel IoT-based Fall Detection as a Service (FDaaS) framework to assist the elderly in living independently and safely by accurately detecting falls. We design a service-oriented architecture that leverages Ultra-wideband (UWB) radar sensors as an IoT health-sensing service, ensuring privacy and minimal intrusion. We address the challenges of data scarcity by utilizing a Fall Detection Generative Pre-trained Transformer (FD-GPT) that uses augmentation techniques. We developed a protocol to collect a comprehensive dataset of the elderly daily activities and fall events. This resulted in a real dataset that carefully mimics the elderly's routine. We rigorously evaluate and compare various models using this dataset. Exper-imental results show our approach achieves 90.72% accuracy and 89.33% precision in distinguishing between fall events and regular activities of daily living.

We propose a novelQuality of Experience (QoE)metric as a key criterion for optimizing the composition of energy services within a crowdsourced IoT environment. Two novel composition approaches, namely, Importance-based and Heuristic-based, are proposed to ensure the highest QoE for consumers. The Importance-based approach prioritizes time slots based on their significance. The Heuristic-based approach considers the importance of time slots and the availability of services to maximize QoE while minimizing service provisioning costs. We conduct extensive experiments using real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches. The results demonstrate that both approaches enhance consumer satisfaction by optimizing energy allocation, with the Heuristic-based approach outperforming the Importance-based method in minimizing rewards.

We propose a novel service-based framework for drone service resilience. Our framework monitors inter-drone interference that may lead to drone service failure. We present a novel drone service interference taxonomy to formally identify different interference types in a skyway network. We then propose a heuristic-based approach that leverages spatio-temporal proximity analysis to detect the occurrence of inter-drone interference. In addition, we present an interference severity assessment to quantify their impact on drone services' efficiency. We conduct a set of experiments using real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach. The results indicate that the proposed heuristic-based approach detects the occurrence of inter-drone interferences with an accuracy of 95%. In addition, the proposed method is$\approx$70% more efficient than the baseline exhaustive approach and$\approx$48% faster than the K-means approach.

We propose a failure-resilient Swarm-based Drones-as-a-Service (SDaaS) framework for reliable delivery services. Our framework is specifically tailored to address soft failures, characterized by degradation in drone performance. Failures within drone swarms are an inherent part of real-world scenarios and should be factored to ensure the reliability of services. This framework emphasizes post-assessment of failures as a critical step in preplanning for subsequent service compositions. The framework detects soft service failures from tolerable behavior deviations using margin-aware pruning. Furthermore, a failure severity score is computed using signal-based heuristic. Our aim is to minimize the impact of soft failures on consumers by delivering services within the expected time. This is achieved through formation reordering and service recomposition. Experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed model with respect to failure correlation scores and service delivery times.

We propose a novel impact conflict detection framework for IoT services in multi-resident smart homes. The proposed impact assessment model is developed based on the integral of a signal deviation strategy. We mine the residents’ previous service usage records to design a robust preference estimation model. We design an impact conflict detection approach using temporal proximity and preferential proximity techniques. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

We propose a novel framework for achieving precision landing in drone services. The proposed framework consists of two distinct decoupled modules, each designed to address a specific aspect of landing accuracy. The first module is concerned with intrinsic errors, where new error models are introduced. This includes a spherical error model that takes into account the orientation of the drone. Additionally, we propose a live position correction algorithm that employs the error models to correct for intrinsic errors in real time. The second module focuses on external wind forces and presents an aerodynamics model with wind generation to simulate the drone’s physical environment. We utilize reinforcement learning to train the drone in simulation with the goal of landing precisely under dynamic wind conditions. Experimental results, conducted through simulations and validated in the physical world, demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly increases landing accuracy while maintaining a low onboard computational cost.

We propose a novel resident identification framework to identify residents in a multi-occupant smart environment. The proposed framework employs a feature extraction model based on the concepts of positional encoding. The feature extraction model considers the locations of homes as a graph. We design a novel algorithm to build such graphs from layout maps of smart environments. The Node2Vec algorithm is used to transform the graph into high-dimensional node embeddings. A Long Short-Term Memory model is introduced to predict the identities of residents using temporal sequences of sensor events with the node embeddings. Extensive experiments show that our proposed scheme effectively identifies residents in a multi-occupant environment. Evaluation results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves 94.5% and 87.9% accuracy, respectively.

In the context of social media, the integrity of images is often dubious. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Exif2Vec , a novel framework specifically designed to discover modifications in social media images. The proposed framework leverages an image’s metadata to discover changes in an image. We use a service-oriented approach that considers discovery of changes in images as a service . A novel word-embedding-based approach is proposed to discover semantic inconsistencies in an image metadata that are reflective of the changes in an image. These inconsistencies are used to measure the severity of changes. The novelty of the approach resides in that it does not require the use of images to determine the underlying changes. We use a pretrained Word2Vec model to conduct experiments. The model is validated on two different fact-checked image datasets, i.e., images related to general context and a context-specific image dataset. Notably, our findings showcase the remarkable efficacy of our approach, yielding results of up to 80% accuracy. This underscores the potential of our framework.

Human mobility patterns refer to the regularities and trends in the way people move, travel, or navigate through different geographical locations over time. Detecting human mobility patterns is essential for a variety of applications, including smart cities, transportation management, and disaster response. The accuracy of current mobility prediction models is less than 25%. The low accuracy is mainly due to the fluid nature of human movement. Typically, humans do not adhere to rigid patterns in their daily activities, making it difficult to identify hidden regularities in their data. To address this issue, we proposed a web platform to visualize human mobility patterns by abstracting the locations into a set of places to detect more realistic patterns. However, the platform was initially designed to detect individual mobility patterns, making it unsuitable for representing the crowd in a smart city scale. Therefore, we extend the platform to visualize the mobility of multiple users from a city-scale perspective. Our platform allows users to visualize a graph of visited places based on their historical records using a modified PrefixSpan approach. Additionally, the platform synchronizes, aggregates, and displays crowd mobility patterns across various time intervals within a smart city. We showcase our platform using a real dataset.

We propose a novel failure-sentient framework for swarm-based drone delivery services. The framework ensures that those drones that experience a noticeable degradation in their performance (called soft failure) and which are part of a swarm, do not disrupt the successful delivery of packages to a consumer. The framework composes a weighted continual federated learning prediction module to accurately predict the time of failures of individual drones and uptime after failures. These predictions are used to determine the severity of failures at both the drone and swarm levels. We propose a speed-based heuristic algorithm with lookahead optimization to generate an optimal set of services considering failures. Experimental results on real datasets prove the efficiency of our proposed approach in terms of prediction accuracy, delivery times, and execution times.

We propose a novel Energy Loss Prediction(ELP) framework that estimates the energy loss in sharing crowdsourced energy services. Crowdsourcing wireless energy services is a novel and convenient solution to enable the ubiquitous charging of nearby IoT devices. Therefore, capturing the wireless energy sharing loss is essential for the successful deployment of efficient energy service composition techniques. We propose Easeformer, a novel attention-based algorithm to predict the battery levels of IoT devices in a crowdsourced energy sharing environment. The predicted battery levels are used to estimate the energy loss. A set of experiments were conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework. We conducted extensive experiments on real wireless energy datasets to demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods.

We propose a novel activity-based profiling framework to estimate IoT users’ harvested energy based on their daily activities. Energy is harvested from natural sources such as the kinetic movement of IoT users. The profiling framework captures the users’ physical activity data to define activity-based profiles. These profiles are utilized to estimate the harvested energy by IoT users. We train and evaluate our framework based on a real Fitbit dataset.

We propose a novel spatio-temporal service composition framework for crowdsourcingmultipleIoT energy services to cater tomultipleenergy requests. We define a new energy service model to leverage thewearable-basedenergy and wireless power transfer technologies. We reformulate the problem of spatio-temporal service composition to provision multiple energy requests asa matching problem. We leverage thefragmentednature of energy to offerpartialservices to maximize the utilization of energy services. We proposeEnergyFlowComp, a modified Maximum Flow matching algorithm that efficiently provisions IoT energy services to accommodate multiple energy requests. Moreover, we proposePartialFlowComp, an extension of theEnergyFlowCompapproach that considers thepartial-temporaloverlapbetween services and requests in provisioning. We conduct an extensive set of experiments to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework.

We propose a novel framework for swarm-based drone delivery services with in-flight energy recharging. The framework aims to enhance the delivery time of multiple packages by reducing the number of stops and recharging times at intermediate stations. The proposed framework considers variousintrinsic and extrinsicdelivery constraints. We propose to usesupport droneswhose sole purpose is to recharge other drones in the swarm during their flight. In this respect, we compute the optimal set of optimal support drones to minimize the probability of delivery services and recharging time at the next stations. We also use two settings to position the support drones in a flight formation for comparative purposes. Two novelenergy sharingmethods are proposed, namely, Priority-based and Fairness-based methods. A re-ordering method of the delivery drones is presented to facilitate the in-flight energy composition process. An enhanced A* algorithm is implemented to compose the optimal services in terms of delivery time. Experimental results prove the efficiency of our proposed approach.

We propose a novel framework for crowdsourced images to determine the likelihood of an image beingfake. We use a service-oriented approach to model and represent crowdsourced images uploaded on social media, asimage services. Trust may, in some circumstances, be determined by using only the non-functional attributes of an image service, i.e., image metadata. We defineintention of changesas a key parameter to ascertain fake image services. A novel framework is proposed to estimate the intention of underlying changes considering change in semantics of an image. Our experiments show high accuracy using a large real dataset.

We propose a novel Quality of Experience (QoE) metric as a key criterion to optimize the composition of energy services in a crowdsourced IoT environment. A novel importance-based composition algorithm is proposed to ensure the highest QoE for consumers. A set of experiments is conducted to evaluate the proposed approaches’ effectiveness and efficiency.

We propose a novel framework for the recommendation of swarm-based drone delivery services based on the consumers preferences. We propose a density-based pruning approach that uses the concept of partnerships with charging station providers to reduce the search space of swarm-based drone service delivery providers. A weighted service composition algorithm is proposed that considers the providers capabilities and consumers’ preferences in selecting the best next service. We propose a voting-based recommendation algorithm to select the best providers. We conduct a set of experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the framework in terms of consumer satisfaction, run-time, and search space reduction cost.

We present DIY-IPS - Do It Yourself - Indoor Positioning System, an open-source real-time indoor positioning mobile application. DIY-IPS detects users' indoor position by employing dual-band RSSI fingerprinting of available WiFi access points. The app can be used, without additional infrastructural costs, to detect users' indoor positions in real time. We published our app as an open source to save other researchers time recreating it. The app enables researchers/users to (1) collect indoor positioning datasets with a ground truth label, (2) customize the app for higher accuracy or other research purposes (3) test the accuracy of modified methods by live testing with ground truth. We ran preliminary experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the app.

Understanding human mobility is essential for the development of smart cities and social behavior research. Human mobility models may be used in numerous applications, including pandemic control, urban planning, and traffic management. The existing models' accuracy in predicting users' mobility patterns is less than 25%. The low accuracy may be justified by the flexible nature of human movement. Indeed, humans are not rigid in their daily movement. In addition, the rigid mobility models may result in missing the hidden regularities in users' records. Thus, we propose a novel perspective to study and analyze human mobility patterns and capture their flexibility. Typically, the mobility patterns are represented by a sequence of locations. We propose to define the mobility patterns by abstracting these locations into a set of places. Labeling these locations will allow us to detect close-to-reality hidden patterns. We present IMAP, an Individual huMAn mobility Patterns visualizing platform. Our platform enables users to visualize a graph of the places they visited based on their history records. In addition, our platform displays the most frequent mobility patterns computed using a modified PrefixSpan approach.

We propose a novel framework for composing crowdsourced wireless energy services to satisfy users’ energy requirements in a crowdsourced Internet of Things (IoT) environment. A new energy service model is designed to transform the harvested energy from IoT devices into crowdsourced services. We propose a new energy service composability model that considers the spatio-temporal aspects and the usage patterns of the IoT devices. A multiple local knapsack-based approach is developed to select an optimal set of partial energy services based on the deliverable energy capacity of IoT devices. We propose a heuristic-based composition approach using the temporal and energy capacity distributions of services. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

We propose a novel proactive composition framework of wireless energy services in a crowdsourced IoT environment. We define a new model for energy services and requests that includes providers' and consumers' mobility patterns and energy usage behavior. The proposed composition approach leverages the mobility and energy usage behavior to generate energy services and requests proactively. Preliminary experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of generating proactive energy requests and composing proactive services.

We propose a novel type of service composition, called elastic composition which provides a reliable framework in a highly fluctuating IoT energy provisioning settings. We rely on crowdsourcing IoT energy (e.g., wearables) to provide wireless energy to nearby devices. We introduce the concepts of soft deadline and hard deadline as key criteria to cater for an elastic composition framework. We conduct a set of experiments on real-world datasets to assess the efficiency of the proposed approach.