Dealing with air pollution is one of the major environmental challenges in a smart city environment. Real-time monitoring of pollution data enables the metropolitans to analyze the current traffic situation of the city and take their decisions accordingly. Deployment of the Internet of things (IoT) based sensors has considerably changed the dynamics of predicting air quality. Existing research has used different machine learning tools for pollution prediction; however, comparative analysis of these techniques is often required to have a better understanding of their processing time for multiple datasets. In this paper, we have performed the pollution prediction using four advanced regression techniques and have presented a comparative study to analyze the best model for accurately predicting the air quality with reference to data size and processing time. We have used Apache Spark for conducting experiments and performing pollution estimation using multiple available data sets. Mean Absolute error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) have been used as evaluation criteria for the comparison of regression models. Furthermore, the processing time of each technique by standalone learning and by fitting the hyperparameter tuning on Apache Spark has also been calculated to find the best-fitted model in terms of processing time and least error rate.

Attackers increasingly seek to compromise organizations and their critical data with advanced stealthy methods, often utilising legitimate tools. In the main, organisations employ reactive approaches for cyber security, focused on rectifying immediate incidents and preventing repeat attacks, through protections such as vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT) security information and event management (SIEM), firewalls, anti-spam/anti-malware solutions and system patches. Such system have weaknesses in addressing modern modern stealthy attacks. Proactive approaches, have been seen as part of the solution to this problem. However, approaches such as VAPT have limited scope and only works with threats that have already been discovered. Promising methods such as threat hunting are gaining momentum, enabling organisations to identify and rapidly respond to any potential attacks, though they have been criticised for their significant cost. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid model for uncovering tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) through offensive security, specifically threat hunting via adversary emulation. The proposed technique is based on a novel approach of inducing adversary emulation (mapping each respective phase) model inside the threat hunting approach. The experimental results show that the proposed approach uses threat hunting via adversary emulation and has countervailing effects on hunting advance level threats. Moreover, the threat detection ability of the proposed approach utilizes minimum resources. The proposed approach can be used to develop the offensive security-aware environment for organizations to uncover advanced attack mechanisms and test their ability for attack detection.

Traffic flow prediction is the most critical part of any traffic management system in a smart city. It can help a driver to pick the most optimized way to their target destination. Air pollution data are often connected with traffic congestion and there exists plenty of research on the connection between air pollution and traffic congestion using different machine learning approaches. A scheme for efficiently predicting traffic flow using ensemble techniques such as bagging and air pollution has not yet been introduced. Therefore, there is a need for a more accurate traffic flow prediction system for the smart cities. The aim of this research is to forecast traffic flow using pollution data. The contribution is twofold: Firstly, a comparison has been made using different simple regression techniques to find out the best-performing model. Secondly, bagging and stacking ensemble techniques have been used to find out the most accurate model of the two comparisons. The results show that the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) bagging ensemble provides far better results than all the other regression models used in this study. The experimental results show that the KNN bagging ensemble model reduces the error rate in predicting the traffic congestion by more than 30%.

Electric power grids are lagging in flexibility and time-response. A smart grid is an improved version of electrical grids that leverages Internet of Things (IoT) based devices to improve the overall infrastructure from the grid stations to intelligent appliances. It provides better understanding of supply and demand and overall flow of data depending based upon the requirements. Modern approach towards Smart grid envisions to provide electricity consumers with the opportunity to manage their respective power usage. Population increase has played a major role in the adoption of smart grid as a lot of electrical energy is consumed in the residential sector and a lot of architectures have been proposed for better flow of information from the smart meter to connectors and devices for improved customer participation. Customer needs have been very important in the smart grid. However, the customers have never been provided with the ease of choosing their own kind of benefits from the smart grid. In this work, we propose an enhanced architecture working effectively for multiple users based on their requirements. The users would be able to choose their type of scheduling techniques based on their requirements. These requirements may include cost reduction and increasing user comfort for better consumption of electricity and reliable systems. These requirements can be achieved using different Bio inspired computing based scheduling algorithms. Furthermore, in this work, we provide a comparison of these bio inspired scheduling techniques, i.e., Enhanced Differential Evolution, Bacterial Foraging Algorithm and Grey Wolf Optimization integrated in smart grid architecture for providing better consumption of electricity and achieving reliable systems. These algorithms mainly aim to schedule load, minimize electricity bills and maximize the user comfort depending on user demand.

Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the most significant resource and its scheduling is one of the main functions of an operating system. In timeshared systems, Round Robin (RR) is most widely used scheduling algorithm. The efficiency of RR algorithm is influenced by the quantum time, if quantum is small, there will be overheads of more context switches and if quantum time is large, then given algorithm will perform as First Come First Served (FCFS) in which there is more risk of starvation. In this paper, a new CPU scheduling algorithm is proposed named as Amended Dynamic Round Robin (ADRR) based on CPU burst time. The primary goal of ADRR is to improve the conventional RR scheduling algorithm using the active quantum time notion. Quantum time is cyclically adjusted based on CPU burst time. We evaluate and compare the performance of our proposed ADRR algorithm based on certain parameters such as, waiting time, turnaround time etc. and compare the performance of our proposed algorithm. Our numerical analysis and simulation results in MATLAB reveals that ADRR outperforms other well-known algorithms such as conventional Round Robin, Improved Round Robin (IRR), Optimum Multilevel Dynamic Round Robin (OMDRR) and Priority Based Round Robin (PRR)