Tracing Data Flow Diagram for a Flood Early Warning System (FEWS) in Malaysia Using Prescriptive Big Data Analytics

With the advent of big data era, it is commendable if this facility could also be a method of problem solving to the environmental issues, disaster management, and geographical sciences. In this research, the study of flood events particularly in Malaysia is using the approach of prescriptive big data analytics. The big data of flood events which is managed by more than one authorizing agencies in Malaysia is proposed to be tackled by designing a feasible smart engine that is able to integrate most data forms and sets that are available from the participating agencies. The critical part of this research is to conform the practicality of integrating those big data into a structured data management so that it is traceable and able to return the desired results. This article is deliberating on the possibilities of tracing the big data of flood events which has undergone the process of rigorous prescriptive data analytics and knowledge engineering to return the searched results

Scalable and Secure Big Data IoT System Based on Multifactor Authentication and Lightweight Cryptography

© 2013 IEEE. Organizations share an evolving interest in adopting a cloud computing approach for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Integrating IoT devices and cloud computing technology is considered as an effective approach to storing and managing the enormous amount of data generated by various devices. However, big data security of these organizations presents a challenge in the IoT-cloud architecture. To overcome security issues, we propose a cloud-enabled IoT environment supported by multifactor authentication and lightweight cryptography encryption schemes to protect big data system. The proposed hybrid cloud environment is aimed at protecting organizations\u27 data in a highly secure manner. The hybrid cloud environment is a combination of private and public cloud. Our IoT devices are divided into sensitive and nonsensitive devices. Sensitive devices generate sensitive data, such as healthcare data; whereas nonsensitive devices generate nonsensitive data, such as home appliance data. IoT devices send their data to the cloud via a gateway device. Herein, sensitive data are split into two parts: one part of the data is encrypted using RC6, and the other part is encrypted using the Fiestel encryption scheme. Nonsensitive data are encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption scheme. Sensitive and nonsensitive data are respectively stored in private and public cloud to ensure high security. The use of multifactor authentication to access the data stored in the cloud is also proposed. During login, data users send their registered credentials to the Trusted Authority (TA). The TA provides three levels of authentication to access the stored data: first-level authentication - read file, second-level authentication - download file, and third-level authentication - download file from the hybrid cloud. We implement the proposed cloud-IoT architecture in the NS3 network simulator. We evaluated the performance of the proposed architecture using metrics such as computational time, security strength, encryption time, and decryption time

Mobile Flood Assistant (MO-FA): Assisting flood victims with mobile technology

This paper presents the features and architecture of a mobile-based application that is developed to assist flood victims and rescue teams in search and rescue operations.Mobile Flood Assistant (Mo-FA) is an integrated Android-based mobile application to assist Malaysian citizens who live in flood prone areas with an early warning alert and to facilitate the current practice in search and rescue operation.Mo-FA consists of 2 main modules namely Flood Information and Notification Module, and e-SOS Module.The Flood Information and Notification Module aims to provide early warning to the public on possible flood occurrence.It is also able to provide flood-related information such as the amount of rain and river water level using the data obtained from Department of Irrigation and Drainage (DID). Relevant information such as the nearest evacuation centers and routes will be displayed on a map to facilitate affected victims to move to a safe area. The second module aims to facilitate the rescue teams to locate the victims’ whereabouts upon receiving SOS message sent by the victims.Considering the fact that mobile phone is a device which we keep close to us at almost all the time, Mo-FA could become a perfect tool to provide various flood related information and to provide a method for quick information distribution to the public and rescue teams

Soft biometrics: gender recognition from unconstrained face images using local feature descriptor

Gender recognition from unconstrained face images is a challenging task due to the high degree of misalignment, pose, expression, and illumination variation. In previous works, the recognition of gender from unconstrained face images is approached by utilizing image alignment, exploiting multiple samples per individual to improve the learning ability of the classifier, or learning gender based on prior knowledge about pose and demographic distributions of the dataset. However, image alignment increases the complexity and time of computation, while the use of multiple samples or having prior knowledge about data distribution is unrealistic in practical applications. This paper presents an approach for gender recognition from unconstrained face images. Our technique exploits the robustness of local feature descriptor to photometric variations to extract the shape description of the 2D face image using a single sample image per individual. The results obtained from experiments on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset describe the effectiveness of the proposed method. The essence of this study is to investigate the most suitable functions and parameter settings for recognizing gender from unconstrained face images

Gender recognition on real world faces based on shape representation and neural network

Gender as a soft biometric attribute has been extensively investigated in the domain of computer vision because of its numerous potential application areas. However, studies have shown that gender recognition performance can be hindered by improper alignment of facial images. As a result, previous experiments have adopted face alignment as an important stage in the recognition process, before performing feature extraction. In this paper, the problem of recognizing human gender from unaligned real world faces using single image per individual is investigated. The use of feature descriptor to form shape representation of face images with any arbitrary orientation from the cropped version of Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset is proposed. By combining the feature extraction technique with artificial neural network for classification, a recognition rate of 89.3% is attained

A novel architecture to verify offline hand-written signature using convolutional neural network

Hand-written signatures are marked on documents to establish legally binding evidence of identity and intent. However, they are prone to forgery, and the design of an accurate feature extractor to distinguish between highlyskilled forgeries and genuine signatures is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) architecture for Signature Verification (SV). The algorithm is trained using two signatures, genuine and forged. Then the SV module performs a classification task to determine if any two signatures are of the same individual or not. The simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve 27% (relatively) better results than the benchmark scheme. The paper also integrated different data augmentation techniques for the signature data, which further improved the efficiency of the proposed method by 14% (relative)

Soft biometrics: Gemder recognition from unconstrained face images using local feature descriptor

Gender recognition from unconstrained face images is a challenging task due to the high degree of misalignment, pose, expression, and illumination variation.In previous works, the recognition of gender from unconstrained face images is approached by utilizing image alignment, exploiting multiple samples per individual to improve the learning ability of the classifier, or learning gender based on prior knowledge about pose and demographic distributions of the dataset. However, image alignment increases the complexity and time of computation, while the use of multiple samples or having prior knowledge about data distribution is unrealistic in practical applications.This paper presents an approach for gender recognition from unconstrained face images. Our technique exploits the robustness of local feature descriptor to photometric variations to extract the shape description of the 2D face image using a single sample image per individual. The results obtained from experiments on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset describe the effectiveness of the proposed method.The essence of this study is to investigate the most suitable functions and parameter settings for recognizing gender from unconstrained face images

An effective approach for managing power consumption in cloud computing infrastructure

Cloud computing offers a dynamic provisioning of server capabilities as a scalable virtualized service. Big datacenters which deliver cloud computing services consume a lot of power. This results in high operational cost and large carbon emission. One way to lower power consumption without affecting the cloud services quality is to consolidate resources for reducing power. In this paper, we introduce a DNA-based Fuzzy Genetic Algorithm (DFGA) that employs DNA-based scheduling strategies to reduce power consumption in cloud datacenters. It is a power-aware architecture for managing power consumption in the cloud computing infrastructure. We also identify the performances metrics that are needed to evaluate the proposed work performance. The experimental results show that DFGA reduced power consumption when comparing with other algorithms. Our proposed work deals with real time task which is not static, and concentrates on the dynamic users since they are involved in cloud

Online signature verification using neural network and Pearson correlation features

In this paper, we proposed a method for feature extraction in online signature verification. We first used signature coordinate points and pen pressure of all signatures, which are available in the SIGMA database. Then, Pearson correlation coefficients were selected for feature extraction. The obtained features were used in back-propagation neural network for verification. The results indicate an accuracy of 82.42%

Wireless Technologies for Social Distancing in the Time of COVID-19: Literature Review, Open Issues, and Limitations

This research aims to provide a comprehensive background on social distancing as well as effective technologies that can be used to facilitate the social distancing practice. Scenarios of enabling wireless and emerging technologies are presented, which are especially effective in monitoring and keeping distance amongst people. In addition, detailed taxonomy is proposed summarizing the essential elements such as implementation type, scenarios, and technology being used. This research reviews and analyzes existing social distancing studies that focus on employing different kinds of technologies to fight the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This study main goal is to identify and discuss the issues, challenges, weaknesses and limitations found in the existing models and/or systems to provide a clear understanding of the area. Articles were systematically collected and filtered based on certain criteria and within ten years span. The findings of this study will support future researchers and developers to solve specific issues and challenges, fill research gaps, and improve social distancing systems to fight pandemics similar to COVID-19