Online social networks (OSN) provide relevant information on users' opinion about different themes. Thus, applications, such as monitoring and recommendation systems (RS) can collect and analyze this data. This paper presents a Knowledge-Based Recommendation System (KBRS), which includes an emotional health monitoring system to detect users with potential psychological disturbances, specifically, depression and stress. Depending on the monitoring results, the KBRS, based on ontologies and sentiment analysis, is activated to send happy, calm, relaxing or motivational messages to users with psychological disturbances. Also, the solution includes a mechanism to send warning messages to authorized persons, in case a depression disturbance is detected by the monitoring system. The detection of depressive and stressful sentence is performed through a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) - Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN); the proposed method reached an accuracy of 0.89 and 0.90 to detect depressed and stressed users, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed KBRS reached a rating of 94% of very satisfied users, as opposed to 69% reached by a RS without the use of either a sentiment metric and ontologies. Additionally, subjective test results demonstrated that the proposed solution consumes low memory, processing and energy from current mobile electronic devices.

Currently, with the increasing number of devices connected to the Internet, search for network vulnerabilities to attackers has increased, and protection systems have become indispensable. There are prevalent security attacks, such as the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which have been causing significant damage to companies. However, through security attacks, it is possible to extract characteristics that identify the type of attack. Thus, it is essential to have fast and effective security identification models. In this work, a novel Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on the Tree-CNN hierarchical algorithm with the Soft-Root-Sign (SRS) activation function is proposed. The model reduces the training time of the generated model for detecting DDoS, Infiltration, Brute Force, and Web attacks. For performance assessment, the model is implemented in a medium-sized company, analyzing the level of complexity of the proposed solution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hierarchical model achieves a significant reduction in execution time, around 36%, and an average detection accuracy of 0.98 considering all the analyzed attacks. Therefore, the results of performance evaluation show that the proposed classifier based on Tree-CNN is of low complexity and requires less processing time and computational resources, outperforming other current IDS based on machine learning algorithms.

Data centralization can potentially increase Internet of Things (IoT) usage. The trend is to move IoT devices to a centralized server with higher memory capacity and a more robust management interface. Hence, a larger volume of data will be transmitted, resulting in more network security issues. Cloud IoT offers more advantages for deploying and managing IoT systems through minimizing response delays, optimal latency, and effective network load distribution. As a result, sophisticated network attack strategies are deployed to leverage the vulnerabilities in the extensive network space and exploit user information. Several attempts have been made to provide network intrusion detection systems (IDS) to the cloud IoT interface using machine learning and deep learning approaches on dedicated IDS datasets. This paper proposes a transfer learning IDS based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture that has shown excellent results on image classification. We use five pre-trained CNN models, including VGG16, VGG19, Inception, MobileNet, and EfficientNets, to train on two selected datasets: CIC-IDS2017 and CSE-CICIDS2018. Before the training, we carry out preprocessing, imbalance treatment, dimensionality reduction, and conversion of the feature vector into images suitable for the CNN architecture using Quantile Transformer. Three best-performing models (InceptionV3, MobileNetV3Small, and EfficientNetV2B0) are selected to develop an ensemble model called efficient-lightweight ensemble transfer learning (ELETL-IDS) using the model averaging approach. On evaluation, the findings show that the ELETL-IDS outperformed existing state-of-the-art proposals in all evaluation metrics, reaching 100% in accuracy, precision, recall, and F-score. We use Matthew’s Correlation Coefficient (MCC) to validate this result and compared it to the AUC-ROC, which maintained an exact value of 0.9996. To this end, our proposed model is lightweight, efficient, and reliable enough to be deployed in cloud IoT systems for intrusion detection.

In recent years, the sentiment analysis has been explored by several Internet services to recommend contents in accordance with human emotions, which are expressed through informal texts posted on social networks. However, the metrics used in the sentiment analysis only classify a sentence with positive, neutral or negative intensity, and do not detect sentiment variations in accordance with the user's profile. In this arena, this paper presents a music recommendation system based on a sentiment intensity metric, named enhanced Sentiment Metric (eSM) that is the association of a lexicon-based sentiment metric with a correction factor based on the user's profile. This correction factor is discovered by means of subjective tests, conducted in a laboratory environment. Based on the experimental results, the correction factor is formulated and used to adjust the final sentiment intensity. The users' sentiments are extracted from sentences posted on social networks and the music recommendation system is performed through a framework of low complexity for mobile devices, which suggests songs based on the current user's sentiment intensity. Also, the framework was built considering ergonomic criteria of usability. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated with remote users using the crowdsourcing method, reaching a rating of 91% of user satisfaction, outperforming a randomly assigned song suggestion that reached 65% of user satisfaction. Furthermore, the paper presents low perceived impacts on the analysis of energy consumption, network and latency in accordance with the processing and memory perception of the recommendation system, showing advantages for the consumer electronic world.

Social networks have a large amount of data available, but often, people do not provide some of their personal data, such as age, gender, and other demographics. Although the sentiment analysis uses such data to develop useful applications in people's daily lives, there are still failures in this type of analysis, either by the restricted number of words contained in the word dictionaries or because they do not consider the most diverse parameters that can influence the sentiments in a sentence; thus, more reliable results can be obtained, if the users profile information and their writing characteristics are considered. This research suggests that one of the most relevant parameter contained in the user profile is the age group, showing that there are typical behaviors among users of the same age group, specifically, when these users write about the same topic. A detailed analysis with 7000 sentences was performed to determine which characteristics are relevant, such as, the use of punctuation, number of characters, media sharing, topics, among others; and which ones can be disregarded for the age groups classification. Different learning machine algorithms are tested for the classification of the teenager and adult age group, and the deep convolutional neural network had the best performance, reaching a precision of 0.95 in the validation tests. Furthermore, in order to validate the usefulness of the proposed model for classifying age groups, it is implemented into the enhanced sentiment metric (eSM). In the performance validation, subjective tests are performed and the eSM with the proposed model reached a root mean square error and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.25 and 0.94, respectively, outperforming the eSM metric, when the age group information is not available.

Following the recent advances in wireless communication leading to increased Internet of Things (IoT) systems, many security threats are currently ravaging IoT systems, causing harm to information. Considering the vast application areas of IoT systems, ensuring that cyberattacks are holistically detected to avoid harm is paramount. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have demonstrated high capacity in helping to mitigate attacks on IoT devices and other edge systems with reasonable accuracy. However, the dynamics of operation of intruders in IoT networks require more improved IDS models capable of detecting multiple attacks with a higher detection rate and lower computational resource requirement, which is one of the challenges of IoT systems. Many ensemble methods have been used with different ML classifiers, including decision trees and random forests, to propose IDS models for IoT environments. The boosting method is one of the approaches used to design an ensemble classifier. This paper proposes an efficient method for detecting cyberattacks and network intrusions based on boosted ML classifiers. Our proposed model is named BoostedEnML. First, we train six different ML classifiers (DT, RF, ET, LGBM, AD, and XGB) and obtain an ensemble using the stacking method and another with a majority voting approach. Two different datasets containing high-profile attacks, including distributed denial of service (DDoS), denial of service (DoS), botnets, infiltration, web attacks, heartbleed, portscan, and botnets, were used to train, evaluate, and test the IDS model. To ensure that we obtained a holistic and efficient model, we performed data balancing with synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and adaptive synthetic (ADASYN) techniques; after that, we used stratified K-fold to split the data into training, validation, and testing sets. Based on the best two models, we construct our proposed BoostedEnsML model using LightGBM and XGBoost, as the combination of the two classifiers gives a lightweight yet efficient model, which is part of the target of this research. Experimental results show that BoostedEnsML outperformed existing ensemble models in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, and area under the curve (AUC), reaching 100% in each case on the selected datasets for multiclass classification.