Forecasting Temperature in a Smart Home with Segmented Linear Regression

The 9th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Information Technology (SEIT), August 19-21, 2019, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canad

Social Alignment Contagion in Online Social Networks

Researchers have already observed social contagion effects in both in-person and online interactions. However, such studies have primarily focused on users’ beliefs, mental states, and interests. In this article, we expand the state of the art by exploring the impact of social contagion on social alignment, i.e., whether the decision to socially align oneself with the general opinion of the users on the social network is contagious to one’s connections on the network or not. The novelty of our work in this article includes: 1) unlike earlier work, this article is among the first to explore the contagiousness of the concept of social alignment on social networks; 2) our work adopts an instrumental variable approach to determine reliable causal relations between observed social contagion effects on the social network; and 3) our work expands beyond the mere presence of contagion in social alignment and also explores the role of population heterogeneity on social alignment contagion. Based on the systematic collection and analysis of data from two large social network platforms, namely, Twitter and Foursquare, we find that a user’s decision to socially align or distance from social topics and sentiments influences the social alignment decisions of their connections on the social network. We further find that such social alignment decisions are significantly impacted by population heterogeneity

Detecting Cyber-Attacks on Wireless Mobile Networks Using Multicriterion Fuzzy Classifier with Genetic Attribute Selection

With the proliferation of wireless and mobile network infrastructures and capabilities, a wide range of exploitable vulnerabilities emerges due to the use of multivendor and multidomain cross-network services for signaling and transport of Internet- and wireless-based data. Consequently, the rates and types of cyber-attacks have grown considerably and current security countermeasures for protecting information and communication may be no longer sufficient. In this paper, we investigate a novel methodology based on multicriterion decision making and fuzzy classification that can provide a viable second-line of defense for mitigating cyber-attacks. The proposed approach has the advantage of dealing with various types and sizes of attributes related to network traffic such as basic packet headers, content, and time. To increase the effectiveness and construct optimal models, we augmented the proposed approach with a genetic attribute selection strategy. This allows efficient and simpler models which can be replicated at various network components to cooperatively detect and report malicious behaviors. Using three datasets covering a variety of network attacks, the performance enhancements due to the proposed approach are manifested in terms of detection errors and model construction times

Pancreatic surgery outcomes: multicentre prospective snapshot study in 67 countries

Background: Pancreatic surgery remains associated with high morbidity rates. Although postoperative mortality appears to have improved with specialization, the outcomes reported in the literature reflect the activity of highly specialized centres. The aim of this study was to evaluate the outcomes following pancreatic surgery worldwide.Methods: This was an international, prospective, multicentre, cross-sectional snapshot study of consecutive patients undergoing pancreatic operations worldwide in a 3-month interval in 2021. The primary outcome was postoperative mortality within 90 days of surgery. Multivariable logistic regression was used to explore relationships with Human Development Index (HDI) and other parameters.Results: A total of 4223 patients from 67 countries were analysed. A complication of any severity was detected in 68.7 percent of patients (2901 of 4223). Major complication rates (Clavien-Dindo grade at least IIIa) were 24, 18, and 27 percent, and mortality rates were 10, 5, and 5 per cent in low-to-middle-, high-, and very high-HDI countries respectively. The 90-day postoperative mortality rate was 5.4 per cent (229 of 4223) overall, but was significantly higher in the low-to-middle-HDI group (adjusted OR 2.88, 95 per cent c.i. 1.80 to 4.48). The overall failure-to-rescue rate was 21 percent; however, it was 41 per cent in low-to-middle-compared with 19 per cent in very high-HDI countries.Conclusion: Excess mortality in low-to-middle-HDI countries could be attributable to failure to rescue of patients from severe complications. The authors call for a collaborative response from international and regional associations of pancreatic surgeons to address management related to death from postoperative complications to tackle the global disparities in the outcomes of pancreatic surgery (NCT04652271; ISRCTN95140761)