Edge devices, which are integral to IoT ecosystems, are highly vulnerable to cyberattacks due to their limited computing power, storage, and network capacity. Traditionally, machine learning solutions based on CPUs, GPUs, and cloud infrastructure have mitigated such risks, but latency remains a significant challenge, allowing threats to cause damage before they can be detected. To address this, we explore the potential of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) to optimize models for low-powered, resource-constrained devices. Using TensorFlow Lite, we conducted experiments with deep learning models on edge devices, providing comparative results on their feasibility regarding security and privacy, without relying on cloud infrastructure. Our experiments on the USTC-TFC2016 and Ransomware PCAP datasets demonstrate the impact of various quantization techniques on accuracy, model size, and inference time. Quantization techniques demonstrated significant trade-offs between accuracy, model size, and inference time. While dynamic and static float16 quantization balanced performance on the USTC-TFC2016 dataset, preserving 85.67% accuracy and halving DenseNet169’s size, QAT boosted accuracy to 94.90% with slower inference times. Static int8 achieved the smallest size, shrinking models to 12.46 MB, but accuracy dropped sharply. For the Ransomware dataset, static float16 kept accuracy at 38.89% while cutting DenseNet169’s size to 23.99 MB. Dynamic quantization delivered the fastest inference, reducing MobileNetV2’s time to 0.001049 seconds. QAT preserved accuracy at 36.11% for DenseNet121, while static int8 compressed models to just 2.59 MB, but with significant accuracy loss.

The software supply chain (SSC) attack has become one of the crucial issues that are being increased rapidly with the advancement of the software development domain. In general, SSC attacks execute during the software development processes lead to vulnerabilities in software products targeting downstream customers and even involved stakeholders. Machine Learning approaches are proven in detecting and preventing software security vulnerabilities. Besides, emerging quantum machine learning can be promising in addressing SSC attacks. Considering the distinction between traditional and quantum machine learning, performance could be varies based on the proportions of the experimenting dataset. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis between quantum neural networks (QNN) and conventional neural networks (NN) with a software supply chain attack dataset known as ClaMP. Our goal is to distinguish the performance between QNN and NN and to conduct the experiment, we develop two different models for QNN and NN by utilizing Pennylane for quantum and TensorFlow and Keras for traditional respectively. We evaluated the performance of both models with different proportions of the ClaMP dataset to identify the f1 score, recall, precision, and accuracy. We also measure the execution time to check the efficiency of both models. The demonstration result indicates that execution time for QNN is slower than NN with a higher percentage of datasets. Due to recent advancements in QNN, a large level of experiments shall be carried out to understand both models accurately in our future research.

Bridges play a vital part in the transportation system by ensuring the connectedness of transportation systems, which is critical for a country’s social and economic prosperity by offering daily mobility to the people. However, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE 2017), many U.S. bridges are in critical condition, raising safety issues, with 9.1 and 13.6 percent of the country’s 614,387 bridges, respectively, structurally defective, and functionally obsolete. Every day, 178 million people traverse these structurally defective bridges. Furthermore, the average annual failure rate is expected to be between 87 and 222. Bridge breakdowns have disastrous repercussions, and in many cases, result in death. While bridge authorities strive to improve bridge conditions, budget limits make it difficult to make cost-effective maintenance decisions. Bridge authorities distribute limited repair resources based on projected future bridge conditions. As a result, building a data-driven, autonomous, and effective bridge condition prediction model is critical for improving maintenance decision-making. In this paper, we present a novel bridge condition prediction framework using advanced Machine Learning (ML) algorithms on the National Bridge Inventory (NBI) dataset. The framework consists of two stages, where the most informative features from the NBI dataset are selected using the Recursive Feature Elimination process and in the 2ndstep, ML classifiers are applied to the selected features for bridge condition prediction. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can effectively predict bridge conditions by producing highly accurate results in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score.

Traditional network intrusion detection approaches encounter feasibility and sustainability issues to combat modern, sophisticated, and unpredictable security attacks. Deep neural networks (DNN) have been successfully applied for intrusion detection problems. The optimal use of DNN-based classifiers requires careful tuning of the hyper-parameters. Manually tuning the hyperparameters is tedious, time-consuming, and computationally expensive. Hence, there is a need for an automatic technique to find optimal hyperparameters for the best use of DNN in intrusion detection. This paper proposes a novel Bayesian optimization-based framework for the automatic optimization of hyperparameters, ensuring the best DNN architecture. We evaluated the performance of the proposed framework on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion detection. The experimental results show the framework’s effectiveness as the resultant DNN architecture demonstrates significantly higher intrusion detection performance than the random search optimization-based approach in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused a pandemic outbreak with affecting 213 nations worldwide. Global policymakers are imposing many measures to slow and reduce the rapid growth of the infections. On the other hand, the healthcare system is encountering significant challenges for a massive number of COVID-19 confirmed or suspected individuals seeking treatment. Therefore, estimating the number of confirmed cases is necessary to provide valuable insights into the growth of the outbreak and facilitate policy making process. In this study, we apply ARIMA models as well as LSTM-based recurrent neural network to forecast the daily cumulative confirmed cases. The LSTM architecture generates more precise forecasting by leveraging both short- and long-term temporal dependencies from the pandemic time series data. Due to the stochastic nature in optimization and random initialization of weights in neural network, the LSTM based model produce less reproducible outcome. In this paper, we propose a reproducible-LSTM (r-LSTM) framework that produces a reproducible and robust results leveraging z-score outlier detection method. We performed five round of nested cross validation to show the consistency in evaluating model performance. The experimental results demonstrate that r-LSTM outperformed the ARIMA model producing minimum MAPE, RMSE, and MAE.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the White House and a coalition of leading research groups have prepared the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) containing over 51,000 scholarly articles, including over 40,000 with full text, about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and related coronaviruses. Medical professional including physicians frequently seek answers to specific questions to improve guidelines and decisions. The huge resource of medical literature is important sources to generate new insights that can help medical communities to provide relevant knowledge and overall fight against the infectious disease. There are ongoing attempts to develop intelligent systems to automatically extract relevant knowledge from many unstructured documents. In this paper, we propose an efficient question answering framework based on automatically analyzing thousands of articles to generate both long text answers (sections/ paragraphs) in response to the questions that are posed by medical communities. In the process of developing the framework, we explored natural language processing techniques like query expansion, data preprocessing, and vector space models early. We show the initial results of an example query answering for the incubation period.

Android, the most dominant Operating System (OS), experiences immense popularity for smart devices for the last few years. Due to its' popularity and open characteristics, Android OS is becoming the tempting target of malicious apps which can cause serious security threat to financial institutions, businesses, and individuals. Traditional anti-malware systems do not suffice to combat newly created sophisticated malware. Hence, there is an increasing need for automatic malware detection solutions to reduce the risks of malicious activities. In recent years, machine learning algorithms have been showing promising results in classifying malware where most of the methods are shallow learners like Logistic Regression (LR). In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework, called Droid-NNet, for malware classification. However, our proposed method Droid-NNet is a deep learner that outperforms existing cutting-edge machine learning methods. We performed all the experiments on two datasets (Malgenome-215 & Drebin-215) of Android apps to evaluate Droid-NNet. The experimental result shows the robustness and effectiveness of Droid-NNet.

Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is a segmentation process that decomposes a scanned document image into its blocks of interest and classifies them. DLA is essential in a large number of applications, such as Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems, and structured data extraction from documents. However, identification of document blocks in DLA is challenging due to variations of block locations, inter-and intra-class variability, and background noises. In this paper, we propose a novel texture-based convolutional neural network for document layout analysis, called DoT-Net. DoT-Net is a multiclass classifier that can effectively identify document component blocks such as text, image, table, mathematical expression, and line-diagram, whereas most related methods have focused on the text vs. non-text block classification problem. DoT-Net can capture textural variations among the multiclass regions of documents. Our proposed method DoT-Net achieved promising results outperforming state-of-the-art document layout classifiers on accuracy, F1 score, and AUC. The open-source code of DoT-Net is available at https://github.com/datax-lab/DoTNet.