Plant diseases can cause a considerable reduction in the quality and number of agricultural products. Guava, well known to be the tropics’ apple, is one significant fruit cultivated in tropical regions. It is attacked by 177 pathogens, including 167 fungal and others such as bacterial, algal, and nematodes. In addition, postharvest diseases may cause crucial production loss. Due to minor variations in various guava disease symptoms, an expert opinion is required for disease analysis. Improper diagnosis may cause economic losses to farmers’ improper use of pesticides. Automatic detection of diseases in plants once they emerge on the plants’ leaves and fruit is required to maintain high crop fields. In this paper, an artificial intelligence (AI) driven framework is presented to detect and classify the most common guava plant diseases. The proposed framework employs the $\Delta$E color difference image segmentation to segregate the areas infected by the disease. Furthermore, color (RGB, HSV) histogram and textural (LBP) features are applied to extract rich, informative feature vectors. The combination of color and textural features are used to identify and attain similar outcomes compared to individual channels, while disease recognition is performed by employing advanced machine-learning classifiers (Fine KNN, Complex Tree, Boosted Tree, Bagged Tree, Cubic SVM). The proposed framework is evaluated on a high-resolution (18 MP) image dataset of guava leaves and fruit. The best recognition results were obtained by Bagged Tree classifier on a set of RGB, HSV, and LBP features (99% accuracy in recognizing four guava fruit diseases (Canker, Mummification, Dot, and Rust) against healthy fruit). The proposed framework may help the farmers to avoid possible production loss by taking early precautions.

The need for timely identification of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT) has become critical in minimizing security risks as the number of IoT devices deployed rapidly grows globally and the volume of such attacks rises to unprecedented levels. Instant detection facilitates network security by speeding up warning and disconnection from the network of infected IoT devices, thereby preventing the botnet from propagating and thereby stopping additional attacks. Several methods have been developed for detecting botnet attacks, such as Swarm Intelligence (SI) and Evolutionary Computing (EC)-based algorithms. In this study, we propose a Local-Global best Bat Algorithm for Neural Networks (LGBA-NN) to select both feature subsets and hyperparameters for efficient detection of botnet attacks, inferred from 9 commercial IoT devices infected by two botnets: Gafgyt and Mirai. The proposed Bat Algorithm (BA) adopted the local-global best-based inertia weight to update the bat’s velocity in the swarm. To tackle with swarm diversity of BA, we proposed Gaussian distribution used in the population initialization. Furthermore, the local search mechanism was followed by the Gaussian density function and local-global best function to achieve better exploration during each generation. Enhanced BA was further employed for neural network hyperparameter tuning and weight optimization to classify ten different botnet attacks with an additional one benign target class. The proposed LGBA-NN algorithm was tested on an N-BaIoT data set with extensive real traffic data with benign and malicious target classes. The performance of LGBA-NN was compared with several recent advanced approaches such as weight optimization using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO-NN) and BA-NN. The experimental results revealed the superiority of LGBA-NN with 90% accuracy over other variants, i.e., BA-NN (85.5% accuracy) and PSO-NN (85.2% accuracy) in multi-class botnet attack detection.

Online sales and purchases are increasing daily, and they generally involve credit card transactions. This not only provides convenience to the end-user but also increases the frequency of online credit card fraud. In the recent years, in some countries, this fraud increase has led to an exponential increase in credit card fraud detection, which has become increasingly important to address this security issue. Recent studies have proposed machine learning (ML)-based solutions for detecting fraudulent credit card transactions, but their detection scores still need improvement due to the imbalance of classes in any given dataset. Few approaches have achieved exceptional results on different datasets. In this study, the Kaggle dataset was used to develop a deep learning (DL)-based approach to solve the text data problem. A novel text2IMG conversion technique is proposed that generates small images. The images are fed into a CNN architecture with class weights using the inverse frequency method to resolve the class imbalance issue. DL and ML approaches were applied to verify the robustness and validity of the proposed system. An accuracy of 99.87% was achieved by Coarse-KNN using deep features of the proposed CNN.

Sentiment analysis was nominated as a hot research topic a decade ago for its increasing importance in analyzing the people’s opinions extracted from social media platforms. Although the Arabic language has a significant share of the content shared across social media platforms, its content’s sentiment analysis is still limited due to its complex morphological structures and the varieties of dialects. Traditional machine learning and deep neural algorithms have been used in a variety of studies to predict sentiment analysis. Therefore, a need of changing current mechanisms is required to increase the accuracy of sentiment analysis prediction. This paper proposed an optimized heterogeneous stacking ensemble model for enhancing the performance of Arabic sentiment analysis. The proposed model combines three different of pre-trained Deep Learning (DL) models: Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) in conjunction with three meta-learners Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) in order to enhance model’s performance for predicting Arabic sentiment analysis. The performance of the proposed model with RNN, LSTM, GRU, and the five regular ML techniques: Decision Tree (DT), LR, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), RF, and Naive Bayes (NB) are compared using three benchmarks Arabic dataset. Parameters of Machine Learning (ML) and DL are optimized using Grid search and KerasTuner, respectively. Accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score were applied to evaluate the performance of the models and validate the results. The results show that the proposed ensemble model has achieved the best performance for each dataset compared with other models.

The primary goal of this research study, in the field of information technology (IT), is to improve the security and durability of software. A quantum computing-based security algorithm springs quite a lot of symmetrical approaches and procedures to ensure optimum software retreat. The accurate assessment of software’s durability and security is a dynamic aspect in assessing, administrating, and controlling security for strengthening the features of security. This paper essentially emphasises the demarcation and depiction of quantum computing from a software security perspective. At present, different symmetrical-based cryptography approaches or algorithms are being used to protect different government and non-government sectors, such as banks, healthcare sectors, defense, transport, automobiles, navigators, weather forecasting, etc., to ensure software durability and security. However, many crypto schemes are likely to collapse when a large qubit-based quantum computer is developed. In such a scenario, it is necessary to pay attention to the security alternatives based on quantum computing. Presently, the different factors of software durability are usability, dependability, trustworthiness, and human trust. In this study, we have also classified the durability level in the second stage. The intention of the evaluation of the impact on security over quantum duration is to estimate and assess the security durability of software. In this research investigation, we have followed the symmetrical hybrid technique of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS). The obtained results, and the method used in this estimation, would make a significant contribution to future research for organising software security and durability (SSD) in the presence of a quantum computer.