ABSTRACT Sarcasm, a complex linguistic form combining humor and criticism, often involves conveying meanings opposite to literal meanings, posing significant challenges in sentiment analysis. This endeavor becomes complicated when it comes to resource‐poor Indian indigenous languages like Telugu, which require more adequate resources and exhibit intricate morphology. Detecting sarcasm in such contexts necessitates the creation of a well‐balanced and annotated corpus. To address this gap, the primary aim of the paper is to curate a Telugu corpus of 10,000 conversations, including 5000 sarcastic and 5000 non‐sarcastic instances, using a multi‐annotator strategy. Additionally, this paper proposes a novel feature fusion network, that is, “FF‐Net”, that integrates neural features with manually extracted handcrafted features to detect sarcasm in Telugu conversational texts. To test and validate the proposed work, extensive experimentations were done and the results demonstrate the significance of using handcrafted features for sarcasm detection, with the proposed model achieving 95.65% accuracy, outperforming existing baselines by 2.75% and surpassing state‐of‐the‐art models by 2.80%. These results underline the efficacy of fusing automated and manual feature extraction techniques, offering a robust approach to sarcasm detection with improved performance.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and their adoption is growing at an exponential rate. However, they are vulnerable to security breaches, and traditional security mechanisms are not enough to protect them. The massive amounts of data generated by IoT devices can be easily manipulated or stolen, posing significant privacy concerns. This paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the integration of blockchain and IoT technologies and their potential to enhance the security and privacy of IoT systems. The paper examines various security issues and vulnerabilities in IoT and explores how blockchain-based solutions can be used to address them. It provides insights into the various security issues and vulnerabilities in IoT and explores how blockchain can be used to enhance security and privacy. The paper also discusses the potential applications of blockchain-based IoT (B-IoT) systems in various sectors, such as healthcare, transportation, and supply chain management. The paper reveals that the integration of blockchain and IoT has the potential to enhance the security, privacy, and trustworthiness of IoT systems. The multi-layered architecture of B-IoT, consisting of perception, network, data processing, and application layers, provides a comprehensive framework for the integration of blockchain and IoT technologies. The study identifies various security solutions for B-IoT, including smart contracts, decentralized control, immutable data storage, identity and access management (IAM), and consensus mechanisms. The study also discusses the challenges and future research directions in the field of B-IoT.

The emergence of COVID-19 has led to a surge in fake news on social media, with toxic fake news having adverse effects on individuals, society, and governments. Detecting toxic fake news is crucial, but little prior research has been done in this area. This study aims to address this gap and identify toxic fake news to save time spent on examining nontoxic fake news. To achieve this, multiple datasets were collected from different online social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The latest samples were obtained by collecting data based on the topmost keywords extracted from the existing datasets. The instances were then labeled as toxic/nontoxic using toxicity analysis, and traditional machine-learning (ML) techniques such as linear support vector machine (SVM), conventional random forest (RF), and transformer-based ML techniques such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) were employed to design a toxic-fake news detection (FND) and classification system. As per the experiments, the linear SVM method outperformed BERT SVM, RF, and BERT RF with an accuracy of 92% and -score, -score, and -score of 95%, 85%, and 87%, respectively. Upon comparison, the proposed approach has either suppressed or achieved results very close to the state-of-the-art techniques in the literature by recording the best values on performance metrics such as accuracy, F1-score, precision, and recall for linear SVM. Overall, the proposed methods have shown promising results and urge further research to restrain toxic fake news. In contrast to prior research, the presented methodology leverages toxicity-oriented attributes and BERT-based sequence representations to discern toxic counterfeit news articles from nontoxic ones across social media platforms.

Summary Social network analysis (SNA) has attracted a lot of attention in several domains in the past decades. It can be of 2‐folds: one is content‐based, and another one is structured‐based analysis. Link prediction is one of the emerging research problems, which comes under structured‐based analysis that deals with predicting the missing link, which is likely to appear in the future. In this article, the supervised machine learning techniques have been implemented to predict the possibilities of establishing the links in future. The major contribution in this article lies in feature construction from the topological structure of the network. Several structured‐based similarity measures have been considered for preparing the feature vector for each nonexisting links in the network. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been extensively validated by comparing with other link prediction algorithms using both real‐world and synthetic data sets.

Abstract The task of predicting the risk of defaulting of a lender using tools in the domain of AI is an emerging one and in growing demand, given the revolutionary potential of AI. Various attributes like income, properties acquired, educational status, and many other socioeconomic factors can be used to train a model to predict the possibilities of nonrepayment of a loan or its chances. Most of the techniques and algorithms used in this regard previously do not submit any attention to the uncertainty in predictions for out of distribution (OOD) in a dataset, which contributes to overfitting, leading to relatively lower accuracy for predicting these data points. Specifically, for credit risk classification, this is a serious concern, given the structure of the available datasets and the trend they follow. With a focus on this issue, we propose a robust and better methodology that uses a recent and efficient family of nonlinear neural network activation functions, which mimics the properties induced by the widely‐used Matérn family of kernels in Gaussian process (GP) models. We tested the classification performance metrics on three openly available datasets after prior preprocessing. We achieved a high mean classification accuracy of 87.4% and a lower mean negative log predictive density loss of 0.405.

Abstract The recent pandemic saw the operations of many businesses shifting to virtual mode. Tasks like psychometric analysis of individuals, for various applications, are conducted online. In this article, we introduce a novel system to analyze the semantics of an individual's tweets from their Twitter profile using LIWC and SALLEE scores. These scores can be used to evaluate less fortunate, thin‐filed candidates using their Twitter profiles. With increased access to phones and the internet, many organizations are focusing on making credit systems available to the masses by introducing psychometric analysis. This article proposes a dynamic model for evaluating the personality of a Twitter user using the textual content shared on their page. The model will allow stakeholders to ascertain the personality of user according to any personality model. To analyze if this is viable and flexible approach to model any kind of personality model, we take MBTI personality dataset and train classifier to predict personality types. Then these results are correlated with a linguistic score to find correlation between the two. We found that proposed approach, outperformed the other relevant works also some aspects of these linguistic scores show a heavy correlation with certain personality types.

Summary Cloud computing and smart gadgets are the need of smart world these days. This often leads to latency and irregular connectivity issues in many situations. In order to overcome this issue, an emerging technique of fog computing is used for cloud and smart devices. A decentralized computing infrastructure in which all the elements, that is, storage, compute, data and the applications in use, are passed in an efficient and logical place between cloud and the data source, is called Fog computing. The cloud computing and services are generally extended by fog computing, which brings the power and advantages of data creation and data analysis at the network edge. Real‐time location based services and applications with mobility support are enabled due to the physical proximity of users and high speed internet connection to the cloud. Fog computing is promoted with leveraging load balancing techniques so as to balance the load which is done in two ways, that is, static load balancing and dynamic load balancing. In this paper, different load balancing algorithms are discussed and their comparative analysis has been carried out. Round Robin load balancing is the simplest and easiest load balancing technique to be implemented in fog computing environments. The major problem of Source IP Hash load balancing algorithm is that each change can redirect to anyone with a different server, and thus, is least preferred in fog networks. The mechanisms to make energy efficient load balancing are also considered as the part of this paper.

Summary The problem with property valuation is that it is extremely complex. It is difficult to objectively model the pricing process or fairly estimate a property value. Many factors can contribute to this complexity such as spatial and time factors. Evaluators and researchers have been trying to model the process for centuries. Up until recently, when computer‐aided valuation systems provided better solutions in the data evaluation and real estate valuation. Nevertheless, they may suffer from low transparency, inaccuracy, and inefficiency. This work explores the ability of machine learning techniques (MLTs) in enhancing economic activities by increasing the accuracy of house price prediction. In this article, XGBoost algorithm has been integrated with outlier sum‐statistic (OS) approach. In the real estate industry, the price of property plays a crucial role in economic growth. The research attempts to predict the price of a house using MLTs. Here, the price of the property is predicted using Extreme Gradient (XG) boosting algorithm and hedonic regression pricing. Both XGBoost and hedonic pricing models use 13 variables as inputs to predict house prices. The contribution of this research lies in the practicality of using XGboost technique to predict house prices. Finally, the accuracy of the prediction algorithms is reported with XGBoosting showing the highest accuracy of 84.1% while the accuracy of the hedonic regression algorithm is 42%.

To monitor environments, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used for collecting data in divers domains such as smart factories, smart buildings, etc. In such environments, different medium access control (MAC) protocols are available to sensor nodes for wireless communications and are of a paramount importance to enhance the network performance. Proposed MAC layer protocols for WSNs are generally designed to achieve a good performance in packet reception rate. Once chosen, the MAC protocol is used and remains the same throughout the network lifetime even if its performance decreases over time. In this paper, we adopt supervised machine learning techniques to predict the performance of CSMA/CA MAC protocol based on the packet reception rate. Our approach consists of three steps: experiments for data collection, offline modeling and performance evaluation. Our analysis shows that XGBoost prediction model is the better supervised machine learning technique to enhance network performance at the MAC layer level. In addition, we use SHAP method to explain predictions.

This study is related to the detection of fake accounts on Instagram dataset that used by previous works. For this purpose, various Machine Learning algorithms have been used such as Bagging and Boosting to detect fake accounts on Instagram. Machine Learning now allows eight to learn directly from data rather than human knowledge, with an increased level of accuracy. To balance the two classes of data, we used the SMOTE algorithm which allows to obtain the same number of individuals for each class. We also incorporated methods for interpreting complex Machine Learning Models to understand the reasons for a model decision like SHAP values and LIME, we preferred to use SHAP values because it provides a local and global explanation of the model and also the values add up to the real estimation of the model, which LIME does not provide. Results show an overall accuracy of 96% for the XGBoost and Random Forest. In what follows, an online fake detecting system has been developed to detect malicious accounts on the Instagram.

The rapid development and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in modern networks and Industry 4.0 have attracted substantial interest from cybersecurity researchers. In this study, we propose a software-defined framework that improves network intrusion detection systems by using manufacturer usage description (MUD) to enhance the behavioral monitoring in IoT networks. We aim to explore whether Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices typically serve a common role in cyber–physical systems, and their communications exhibit predictable patterns that can be defined in MUD profile(s) formally and succinctly. We design a framework that utilizes the concept of digital twins and software-defined networking to improve the security of IIoT environments. The MUD data are profiled, and the actions are evaluated on the network digital twin before they are used in the physical network. The behavioral profiling system is updated in real time, thereby improving the overall system security and compliance to policies in the IoT deployment. Evaluation results show that our solution outperforms existing approaches substantially in terms of attack detection accuracy, predicting security incidents, response time, and resource usage.

Software-defined networks (SDNs) can help facilitate dynamic network resource provisioning in demanding applications, such as those involving Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices and systems. For example, SDN-based systems can support increasing demands of multitenancy at the network layer, complex demands of microservices, etc. A typical (large) manufacturing setting generally comprises a broad and diverse range of IoT devices and applications to support different services (e.g., transactions on enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, maintenance prediction, asset management, and outage prediction). Hence, this work introduces a demand–supply-based economic model to enhance the efficiency of different multitenancy attributes at the network layer, which captures the computational complexity of industrial ERP-IoT transactions and performs network resource provisioning, based on the demand–supply principle. The proposed model is accompanied by a flow scheduler, which dynamically assigns ERP-IoT traffic flow entries on network devices to specific preconfigured queues. This scheduler is used to increase service providers’ utility. The evaluation of the proposed model suggests the utility of our proposed approach.

Vehicular clouds (VCs) have become a promising research area due to its on-demand solutions, resource pooling, unified services, autonomous cloud formation and transformational management. It makes use of the underutilized resources of vehicles on the parking lot, roadways, driveways and streets, and creates the infrastructure to support various services offered by the cloud service provider (CSP) by deploying virtual machines (VMs). However, these vehicles can leave the coverage/grid of VC due to its mobility and change in the environment. Therefore, the hosted VMs on those vehicles can be transferred to other potential vehicles (i.e., migration) in order to avoid disruption of services. These services can be viewed as user requests (URs) submitted to the CSP by cloud users. Here, the challenging tasks are to map the URs to the VMs (or vehicles) and identify the potential vehicles for migration, and they need immediate attention. In this paper, we propose a smart cloud service management (SCSM) algorithm for VCs and address the above challenges. This algorithm consists of three phases, namely assignment of vehicles to grids, URs to grids and URs to vehicles by considering the mobility pattern of vehicles. The performance of SCSM is assessed using three traffic congestion scenarios and thirty-six instances of four datasets, and compared with round-robin (RR) and deficit weighted RR (DWRR) using seven performance metrics. The comparison results show that SCSM achieves 58% and 57% (33% and 33%) better than RR and DWRR in makespan (number of migrations) and other performance metrics.

Abstract The facility layout problem (FLP) is a combinatorial optimization problem. The performance of the layout design is significantly impacted by diverse, multiple factors. The use of algorithmic or procedural design methodology in ranking and identification of efficient layout is ineffective. In this context, this study proposes a three‐stage methodology where data envelopment analysis (DEA) is augmented with unsupervised and supervised machine learning (ML). In stage 1, unsupervised ML is used for the clustering of the criteria in which the layouts need to be evaluated using homogeneity. Layouts are generated using simulated annealing, chaotic simulated annealing, and hybrid firefly algorithm/chaotic simulated annealing meta‐heuristics. In stage 2, the nonparametric DEA approach is used to identify efficient and inefficient layouts. Finally, supervised ML utilizes the performance frontiers from DEA (efficiency scores) to generate a trained model for getting the unique rankings and predicted efficiency scores of layouts. The proposed methodology overcomes the limitations associated with large datasets that contain many inputs / outputs from the conventional DEA and improves the prediction accuracy of layouts. A Gaussian distribution product demand dataset for time period T = 5 and facility size N = 12 is used to prove the effectiveness of the methodology.