In the modern era, deep learning techniques have emerged as powerful tools in image recognition. Convolutional Neural Networks, one of the deep learning tools, have attained an impressive outcome in this area. Applications such as identifying objects, faces, bones, handwritten digits, and traffic signs signify the importance of Convolutional Neural Networks in the real world. The effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks in image recognition motivates the researchers to extend its applications in the field of agriculture for recognition of plant species, yield management, weed detection, soil, and water management, fruit counting, diseases, and pest detection, evaluating the nutrient status of plants, and much more. The availability of voluminous research works in applying deep learning models in agriculture leads to difficulty in selecting a suitable model according to the type of dataset and experimental environment. In this manuscript, the authors present a survey of the existing literature in applying deep Convolutional Neural Networks to predict plant diseases from leaf images. This manuscript presents an exemplary comparison of the pre-processing techniques, Convolutional Neural Network models, frameworks, and optimization techniques applied to detect and classify plant diseases using leaf images as a data set. This manuscript also presents a survey of the datasets and performance metrics used to evaluate the efficacy of models. The manuscript highlights the advantages and disadvantages of different techniques and models proposed in the existing literature. This survey will ease the task of researchers working in the field of applying deep learning techniques for the identification and classification of plant leaf diseases.

With the proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in every walks of the society, including healthcare services; digitization and increased sophistication have been gaining pace. With increased patient volumes recording and management of patients data digital healthcare alternatives, particularly, Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) has gained prominence. However, traditional EHR based systems are plagued by data loss risks, security and immutability consensus over health records, gapped communication among constituted hospitals, inefficient clinical data retrieval systems among others. Blockchain has been developed as a decentralized technology that holds the promise to address the aforesaid facilities in EHR based systems. This paper presents a patient-centric design of a decentralized healthcare management system with blockchain based EHR using javascript based Smart Contracts. A working prototype based on hyperledger fabric and composer technology has also been implemented that guarantees the security of proposed model. Experiments with the hyperledger caliper benchmarking tool provides performance of metrics such as latency, throughput, resource utilization and so on under varied scenarios and control parameters and the results affirm the efficacy of the proposed approach.

With the rapid advancement of information technology, online information has been exponentially growing day by day, especially in the form of text documents such as news events, company reports, reviews on products, stocks-related reports, medical reports, tweets, and so on. Due to this, online monitoring and text mining has become a prominent task. During the past decade, significant efforts have been made on mining text documents using machine and deep learning models such as supervised, semisupervised, and unsupervised. Our area of the discussion covers state-of-the-art learning models for text mining or solving various challenging NLP (natural language processing) problems using the classification of texts. This paper summarizes several machine learning and deep learning algorithms used in text classification with their advantages and shortcomings. This paper would also help the readers understand various subtasks, along with old and recent literature, required during the process of text classification. We believe that readers would be able to find scope for further improvements in the area of text classification or to propose new techniques of text classification applicable in any domain of their interest.

The advancements in Industry 4.0 have opened up new ways for the structural deployment of Smart Grids (SGs) to face the endlessly rising challenges of the 21st century. SGs for Industry 4.0 can be better managed by optimized routing techniques. In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), the topology is not fixed and can be encountered by interference, mobility of nodes, propagation of multi-paths, and path loss. To extenuate these concerns for SGs, in this paper, we have presented a new version of the standard Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol for SGs to improve the management of control intervals that enhance the efficiency of the standard OLSR protocol without affecting its reliability. The adapted fault tolerant approach makes the proposed protocol more reliable for industrial applications. The process of grouping of nodes supports managing the total network cost by reducing severe flooding and evaluating an optimized head of clusters. The head of the unit is nominated according to the first defined expectation factor. With a sequence of rigorous performance evaluations under simulation parameters, the simulation results show that the proposed version of OLSR has proliferated Quality of Service (QoS) metrics when it is compared against the state-of-the-art-based conventional protocols, namely, standard OLSR, DSDV, AOMDV and hybrid routing technique.

The study focuses on the artificial intelligence empowered road vehicle- train collision risk prediction assessment, which may lead to the development of a road vehicle-train collision avoidance system for unmanned railway level crossings. The study delimits itself around the road vehicle-train collisions at unmanned railway level crossings on single line rail-road sections. The first objective of the study revolves around the rail-road collision risk evaluation by the development of road vehicle-train collision frequency and severity prediction model using Poisson and Gamma-log regression techniques respectively. Another study objective is the collision modification factor implementation on predicted risk factors, to reduce the road vehicle-train collision risk at the crossings. The collision risk has been predicted to be 3.52 times higher and 77% lower in one direction while in other directions it is 2.95 times higher and 80% lower than average risk at all unmanned railway level crossings. With collision modification factor application on higher risk contributing factors i.e. ‘crossing angle’ and ‘train visibility, it predicts to reduce the road vehicle-train collision risk to 85% approximately.

Wireless technology and the latest developments in a mobile object, has led to a Mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET), which is a collection of mobile nodes that are communicating with each other without requiring any fixed infrastructure. Due to the dynamic nature with a decentralized system, these networks are susceptible to different attacks such as Black Hole Attack (BHA), Gray Hole Attack (GHA), Sink Hole Attack (SHA) and many more. Several researchers have worked for the detection and mitigation of individual attacks, either GHA or BHA nodes. But the protection of MANET against a dual-threat is scarce. In this paper, the protection against dual attacks has been presented for BHA and GHA by using the concept of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) as a deep learning algorithm along with the swarm-based Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) optimization technique. The performance of the system has been increased by the selection of appropriate and best nodes for data packets transmission which is explained in the result section of this paper. For the network designing and simulation purposes, MATLAB software is used with communication and neural network toolboxes. The examined results show that the presented protocol performs better in contrast to the existing work under black hole as well as gray hole attack condition. A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that dynamically form a temporary network without using any existing network infrastructure.