Higher education is essential because it exposes students to a variety of areas. The academic performance of IT students is crucial and might fail if it isn’t documented to identify the features influencing them, as well as their strengths and shortcomings. The student academic prediction system needs to be enhanced so that teachers can forecast their students’ performance. Numerous studies have been conducted to increase the prediction accuracy of IT students, but they encountered difficulties with unbalanced data and algorithm tuning. To address these issues, the study proposed different machine learning (ML) algorithms that handled imbalanced data by applying the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and employing hyperparameter tuning algorithms to enhance prediction during the training process. The ML models we used were decision tree (DT), k-nearest neighbor, and XGBoost. The models were fine-tuned by applying Ant colony optimization (ACO) and artificial bee colony optimization techniques. Subsequently, these optimization techniques further enhanced the performance of the models. After comparing them, the results showed that SMOTE and ACO combined with the DT model outperformed other models for academic prediction. Additionally, the study utilized the Kendall Tau correlation coefficient technique to analyze the correlation between features and identify factors that positively or negatively impact student success.

Utility-based computing popularly known as “cloud computing” offers several computing services to the users. Due to the proliferation in the users of cloud computing, there is an unprecedented increase in the demand for computation resources to execute cloud services. Thus, there is a requirement to investigate currently available resources like virtual machines, CPU, RAM, and storage to allocate cloud services. The allocation and QoS of cloud services are highly dependent on allocation schemes. The optimized solutions allocate resources to submitted jobs to reduce the overall cost to the end-users/service provider without degrading the performance of virtual machines. The allocation techniques also consider the harvesting of energy consumption required for running the cloud services. In this paper, we have utilized a Rock Hyrax-based optimization technique to allocate resources to the submitted jobs with reduced energy consumption. The proposed Rock Hyrax algorithm has been simulated on the CloudSim simulator for various scenarios. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been measured over various Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as makespan, energy efficiency, response time, throughput, and cost. The gathered results validate the proposed algorithm that improves the QoS parameters by 3%-8% as compared to algorithms when both jobs and resources are considered to be dynamic in nature.

Cognitive Radio Ad-hoc Networks (CRAHNs) are under constant attacks from compromised primary & secondary nodes. These attacks focus on bandwidth manipulation, internal configuration manipulation, and selective spoofing, which can disturb the normal working of the CRAHNs. Researchers propose various security models to mitigate these attacks, each with limitations. Most of these models have higher complexity, while others cannot be used to mitigate multiple attack types. To overcome these issues while maintaining higher security and Quality of Service (QoS) under attacks, this text proposes a design of a novel blockchain-based security model for improving attack resilience in CRAHNs. The model initially collects multiple information sets from different cognitive radio controllers and creates active & redundant miners for the storage of these sets. The number of active & redundant miners is decided via a Mayfly Optimizer (MO) Model, which assists in improving resource utilization while reducing deployment costs. Cognitive rules and configurations are stored on these nodes and updated via a secure blockchain verification. Due to this, the proposed model demonstrated significant improvements in cognitive radio communications across various metrics, even under different attack scenarios. It reduced communication delay by up to 18.5%, increased communication throughput by up to 19.5%, and improved the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) by up to 19.4% when compared with existing models such as SRC, Prob Less, and DDQL. Additionally, the model achieved energy savings of up to 12.5%. These enhancements were made possible by the optimized selection of miner nodes, enabling quicker mining for high-speed communication, low-energy mining tasks for prolonged use, and high-performance mining for consistency. The results affirm the model’s suitability for various real-time cognitive radio scenarios. Due to the integration of the MO Model, the CRAHN showcases better communication speed, lower energy consumption, higher throughput, and higher packet delivery performance when compared with existing methods under real-time scenarios.