MEC-enabled 5G Use Cases: A Survey on Security Vulnerabilities and Countermeasures

The future of mobile and internet technologies are manifesting advancements beyond the existing scope of science. The concepts of automated driving, augmented-reality, and machine-type-communication are quite sophisticated and require an elevation of the current mobile infrastructure for launching. The fifth-generation (5G) mobile technology serves as the solution, though it lacks a proximate networking infrastructure to satisfy the service guarantees. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) envisages such an edge computing platform. In this survey, we are revealing security vulnerabilities of key 5G-based use cases deployed in the MEC context. Probable security flows of each case are specified, while countermeasures are proposed for mitigating them.

Reflections on the Innovation of University Scientific Research Management in the Era of Big Data

In China, universities are important centers for SR (scientific research) and innovation, and the quality of SR management has a significant impact on university innovation. The informatization of SR management is a critical component of university development in the big data environment. As a result, it is crucial to figure out how to improve SR management. As a result, this paper builds a four-tier B/W/D/C (Browser/Web/Database/Client) university SR management innovation information system based on big data technology and thoroughly examines the system’s hardware and software configuration. The SVM-WNB (Support Vector Machine-Weighted NB) classification algorithm is proposed, and the improved algorithm runs in parallel on the Hadoop cloud computing platform, allowing the algorithm to process large amounts of data efficiently. The optimization strategy proposed in this paper can effectively optimize the execution of scientific big data applications according to a large number of simulation experiments and real-world multidata center environment experiments.

Research on dynamic and secure storage of financial data based on cloud platform

Traditional financial data storage methods are prone to data leakage and narrow data coverage. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic and secure storage method of financial data based on cloud platform.In order to improve the ability of enterprise data management, the paper constructs a financial cloud computing platform, mining financial data by rough set theory, and analyzing the results of frequent pattern mining of financial data by fuzzy attribute characteristics.According to the granularity theory, the financial data is classified and processed, and the CSA cloud risk model is established to realize the dynamic and secure storage of financial data.The experimental results show that. The maximum data storage delay of this method is no more than 4.1 s, the maximum data leakage risk coefficient is no more than 0.5, the number of data types can reach 30, and the data storage coverage is improved.

Mapping Blue and Red Color-Coated Steel Sheet Roof Buildings over China Using Sentinel-2A/B MSIL2A Images

Accurate and efficiently updated information on color-coated steel sheet (CCSS) roof materials in urban areas is of great significance for understanding the potential impact, challenges, and issues of these materials on urban sustainable development, human health, and the environment. Thanks to the development of Earth observation technologies, remote sensing (RS) provides abundant data to identify and map CCSS materials with different colors in urban areas. However, existing studies are still quite challenging with regards to the data collection and processing costs, particularly in wide geographical areas. Combining free access high-resolution RS data and a cloud computing platform, i.e., Sentinel-2A/B data sets and Google Earth Engine (GEE), this study aims at CCSS material identification and mapping. Specifically, six novel spectral indexes that use Sentinel-2A/B MSIL2A data are proposed for blue and red CCSS material identification, namely the normalized difference blue building index (NDBBI), the normalized difference red building index NDRBI, the enhanced blue building index (EBBI), the enhanced red building index (ERBI), the logical blue building index (LBBI) and the logical red building index (LRBI). These indexes are qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated on a very large number of urban sites all over the P.R. China and compared with the state-of-the-art redness and blueness indexes (RI and BI, respectively). The results demonstrate that the proposed indexes, specifically the LRBI and LBBI, are highly effective in visual evaluation, clearly detecting and discriminating blue and red CCSS covers from other urban materials. Results show that urban areas from the northern parts of P.R. China have larger proportions of blue and red CCSS materials, and areas of blue and red CCSS material buildings are positively correlated with population and urban size at the provincial level across China.

Effect of Locust Invasion and Mitigation Using Remote Sensing Techniques: A Case Study of North Sindh Pakistan

This study comprises the identification of the locust outbreak that happened in February 2020. It is not possible to conduct ground-based surveys to monitor such huge disasters in a timely and adequate manner. Therefore, we used a combination of automatic and manual remote sensing data processing techniques to find out the aftereffects of locust attack effectively. We processed MODIS -normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI ) manually on ENVI and Landsat 8 NDVI using the Google Earth Engine (GEE ) cloud computing platform. We found from the results that, (a) NDVI computation on GEE is more effective, prompt, and reliable compared with the results of manual NDVI computations; (b) there is a high effect of locust disasters in the northern part of Sindh, Thul, Ghari Khairo, Garhi Yaseen, Jacobabad, and Ubauro, which are more vulnerable; and (c) NDVI value suddenly decreased to 0.68 from 0.92 in 2020 using Landsat NDVI and from 0.81 to 0.65 using MODIS satellite imagery. Results clearly indicate an abrupt decrease in vegetation in 2020 due to a locust disaster. That is a big threat to crop yield and food production because it provides a major portion of food chain and gross domestic product for Sindh, Pakistan.

BISWSRBS: A Winograd-based CNN Accelerator with a Fine-grained Regular Sparsity Pattern and Mixed Precision Quantization

Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a high-performance computing platform for Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) inference. Winograd algorithm, weight pruning, and quantization are widely adopted to reduce the storage and arithmetic overhead of CNNs on FPGAs. Recent studies strive to prune the weights in the Winograd domain, however, resulting in irregular sparse patterns and leading to low parallelism and reduced utilization of resources. Besides, there are few works to discuss a suitable quantization scheme for Winograd. In this article, we propose a regular sparse pruning pattern in the Winograd-based CNN, namely, Sub-row-balanced Sparsity (SRBS) pattern, to overcome the challenge of the irregular sparse pattern. Then, we develop a two-step hardware co-optimization approach to improve the model accuracy using the SRBS pattern. Based on the pruned model, we implement a mixed precision quantization to further reduce the computational complexity of bit operations. Finally, we design an FPGA accelerator that takes both the advantage of the SRBS pattern to eliminate low-parallelism computation and the irregular memory accesses, as well as the mixed precision quantization to get a layer-wise bit width. Experimental results on VGG16/VGG-nagadomi with CIFAR-10 and ResNet-18/34/50 with ImageNet show up to 11.8×/8.67× and 8.17×/8.31×/10.6× speedup, 12.74×/9.19× and 8.75×/8.81×/11.1× energy efficiency improvement, respectively, compared with the state-of-the-art dense Winograd accelerator [20] with negligible loss of model accuracy. We also show that our design has 4.11× speedup compared with the state-of-the-art sparse Winograd accelerator [19] on VGG16.

Mangrove Vegetation Mapping Using Sentinel-2A Imagery Based on Google Earth Engine Cloud Computing Platform

Mangroves are trees whose habitat is affected by tides, and their presence has decreased from year to year. Today, mapping technology has undergone many developments, including the availability of images of various resolutions and cloud-based image processing. One of the popular platforms today is the Google Earth Engine. Google Earth Engine is a cloud-based platform that makes it easy to access high-performance computing resources for extensive processing. The advantage of using Google Earth Engine is that users do not have to be IT experts without experts in application development, WEB programming, and HTML. This study aims to conduct a study on mangrove mapping in Gili Genting District with Sentinel-2A imagery using a Google Earth Engine. This location was chosen since there are still many mangroves, especially on the Gili Raja and Gili Genting Islands. From this research, it can be concluded that cloud computing-based Sentinel-2A image processing shows that the vegetation value of NDVI results ranges from -0.923208 to 0.75579. The classification results show that mangrove forests' overall presence on Gili Genting Island is more expansive than Gili Raja Island with 16.74 ha and 14.75 ha. The use of the Google Earth Engine platform simplifies the analysis process because image processing can be done once with various scripts so that analysis becomes faster.

On Secure E-Voting over Blockchain

This article discusses secure methods to conduct e-voting over a blockchain in three different settings: decentralized voting, centralized remote voting, and centralized polling station voting. These settings cover almost all voting scenarios that occur in practice. A proof-of-concept implementation for decentralized voting over Ethereum’s blockchain is presented. This work demonstrates the suitable use of a blockchain not just as a public bulletin board but, more importantly, as a trustworthy computing platform that enforces the correct execution of the voting protocol in a publicly verifiable manner. We also discuss scaling up a blockchain-based voting application for national elections. We show that for national-scale elections the major verifiability problems can be addressed without having to depend on any blockchain. However, a blockchain remains a viable option to realize a public bulletin board, which has the advantage of being a “preventive” measure to stop retrospective changes on previously published records as opposed to a “detective” measure like the use of mirror websites. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy ;

A Programmable Ontology Encompassing the Functional Logic of the Drosophila Brain

The Drosophila brain has only a fraction of the number of neurons of higher organisms such as mice. Yet the sheer complexity of its neural circuits recently revealed by large connectomics datasets suggests that computationally modeling the function of fruit fly brain at this scale posits significant challenges. To address these challenges, we present here a programmable ontology that expands the scope of the current Drosophila brain anatomy ontologies to encompass the functional logic of the fly brain. The programmable ontology provides a language not only for defining functional circuit motifs but also for programmatically exploring their functional logic. To achieve this goal, we tightly integrated the programmable ontology with the workflow of the interactive FlyBrainLab computing platform. As part of the programmable ontology, we developed NeuroNLP++, a web application that supports free-form English queries for constructing functional brain circuits fully anchored on the available connectome/synaptome datasets, and the published worldwide literature. In addition, we present a methodology for including a model of the space of odorants into the programmable ontology, and for modeling olfactory sensory circuits of the antenna of the fruit fly brain that detect odorant sources. Furthermore, we describe a methodology for modeling the functional logic of the antennal lobe circuit consisting of massive local feedback loops, a characteristic feature observed across Drosophila brain regions. Finally, using a circuit library, we demonstrate the power of our methodology for interactively exploring the functional logic of the massive number of feedback loops in the antennal lobe.

Estimation and Analysis of Sports Energy Consumption Based on Gait Tactile Parameters

The morbidity of obesity and related metabolic syndrome is on the rise, which may be related to the decrease of physical activity. Therefore, keeping energy balance is the basic premise to prevent multiple metabolic syndromes, and the research on the composition and application of energy consumption has become a hot spot. The combination of expectation-maximization algorithm and MapReduce computing model realizes the migration of traditional algorithm to “cloud computing” platform. The physical fitness evaluation algorithm based on collaborative filtering is constructed, and a gait tactile recognition algorithm is proposed by feature selection based on the MEMS sensor. Finally, the algorithm is tested, and a conclusion is drawn. This algorithm is effective in monitoring and recognizing human gait. With the increase of weightlessness characteristics, the sensitivity of detection remains unchanged, and the specificity will increase. In a word, it is scientific and effective. Thus, the reference for establishing the index system of tactile biomechanical parameters of adolescent gait and studying the low-cost and portable energy measurement method of multiparameter indexes is provided.