Abstract Background The COVID‐19 pandemic has precipitated global apprehensions about increased fatalities and raised concerns about gaps in healthcare infrastructure and accessibility the world over. Consequently, the importance of timely prediction and treatment of the disease to reduce transmission and mortality rates cannot be emphasized enough. Various symptoms of the disease have been identified as it progresses from the time it is contracted. COVID‐19 has been found to internally affect the lungs, and the four progressive stages of the infection can be categorized as mild, moderate, severe, and critical. Therefore, an accurate analysis of the current stage of the disease that can help predict its progression has become critical. X‐ray imaging has been found to be an effective screening procedure for predicting the various stages of this epidemic. Although many different approaches using machine learning, as well as deep learning were utilized to predict and classify diseases in general, till date, such an approach has not been used to predict the various stages of COVID‐19 by using X‐ray imaging to identify and classify those stages. Materials and method The proposed hybrid method used three public datasets for its implementation. In this work, extensive images were used for the purposes of testing and training. The dataset‐1 consists of 1200 COVID‐19 as well as 1200 Non‐COVID‐19 images, while dataset‐2 used 700 COVID‐19 as well as 700 Non‐COVID‐19 images, and finally, dataset‐III utilized 1900 COVID‐19 as well as 1900 Non‐COVID‐19 images for purposes of testing and training. The proposed work undertook the task of pre‐processing using textual and morphological features, while the segmentation and prediction of COVID‐19 as well as Non‐COVID‐19 images were undertaken using VGG‐16 with light GBM for better prediction and handing of huge datasets, and finally, the classification of the various stages of COVID‐19 images was performed using Deep Belief Network. Results The outcomes of the proposed work were subjected to several iterations which were then compared using different parameters such as accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity. In general, the prediction and grouping of the various stages of COVID‐19 by using affected images were found to be 99.2%, 99.4% and 99.5%, respectively. The bacterial pneumonia prediction rates were observed to be 98.5%, 99.4% and 98.3%, respectively. The average classification of the stages were found to be 98.1%, 98.6% and 98.3%, while the combined multi‐classification prediction rates were observed to be 98.6%, 99.1% and 98.7%, respectively.

The Covid-19 pandemic has emerged as one of the most disquieting worldwide public health emergencies of the 21st century and has thrown into sharp relief, among other factors, the dire need for robust forecasting techniques for disease detection, alleviation as well as prevention. Forecasting has been one of the most powerful statistical methods employed the world over in various disciplines for detecting and analyzing trends and predicting future outcomes based on which timely and mitigating actions can be undertaken. To that end, several statistical methods and machine learning techniques have been harnessed depending upon the analysis desired and the availability of data. Historically speaking, most predictions thus arrived at have been short term and country-specific in nature. In this work, multimodel machine learning technique is called EAMA for forecasting Covid-19 related parameters in the long-term both within India and on a global scale have been proposed. This proposed EAMA hybrid model is well-suited to predictions based on past and present data. For this study, two datasets from the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare of India and Worldometers, respectively, have been exploited. Using these two datasets, long-term data predictions for both India and the world have been outlined, and observed that predicted data being very similar to real-time values. The experiment also conducted for statewise predictions of India and the countrywise predictions across the world and it has been included in the Appendix.

Over recent years, the Industrial Internet of Things and connectivity of the various sensors on the industrial and automaton front have played a crucial role in the manufacturing process. Production ventures are predominantly represented by Industry 4.0 so produce colossal information. Data outsourcing is one of the ways to manage the overhead of the massive data generated from the various resource-constrained devices utilized in the industrial environment. Therefore, the crowdsourced data from many organizations are outsourced to the cloud system. However, privacy and security challenges such as illegal admittance, data leakage are raised by the outsourced storage. Data authentication is an optimistic approach to establishing the integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity of the data. The certificateless signcryption scheme is most appropriate for lightweight devices established in the industrial ecosystem. In this article, we propose a privacy-conserving, lightweight data aggregation scheme to attain security in an industrial network. In the proposed model, the data owner collects the industrial data from various resource-constrained devices and sends this data to the data aggregator and proficiently data obtained by the industrial data user securely. Particularly, in this article, we propose a proficient certificateless aggregated signcryption scheme, which provides a data aggregation element in comparison to existing schemes. Our proposed scheme includes mutual authentication, public viability, integrity and confidentiality of data, volatile to key escrow, and privacy-preserving aspects for the industrial data. Performance evaluation and result analysis demonstrate that the proposed protocol performs better than other schemes significantly.

Online social networks (OSNs) have become an integral mode of communication among people and even nonhuman scenarios can also be integrated into OSNs. The evergrowing rise in the popularity of OSNs can be attributed to the rapid growth of Internet technology. OSN becomes the easiest way to broadcast media (news/content) over the Internet. In the wake of emerging technologies, there is dire need to develop methodologies, which can minimize the spread of fake messages or rumors that can harm society in any manner. In this article, a model is proposed to investigate the propagation of such messages currently coined as fake news. The proposed model describes how misinformation gets disseminated among groups with the influence of different misinformation refuting measures. With the onset of the novel coronavirus-19 pandemic, dubbed COVID-19, the propagation of fake news related to the pandemic is higher than ever. In this article, we aim to develop a model that will be able to detect and eliminate fake news from OSNs and help ease some OSN users stress regarding the pandemic. A system of differential equations is used to formulate the model. Its stability and equilibrium are also thoroughly analyzed. The basic reproduction number (R0) is obtained which is a significant parameter for the analysis of message spreading in the OSNs. If the value of R0 is less than one (R01 the rumor will persist in the OSN. Realworld trends of misinformation spreading in OSNs are discussed. In addition, the model discusses the controlling mechanism for untrusted message propagation. The proposed model has also been validated through extensive simulation and experimentation.