The fast growth of technology in online communication and social media platforms alleviated numerous difficulties during the COVID-19 epidemic. However, it was utilized to propagate falsehoods and misleading information about the disease and the vaccination. In this study, we investigate the ability of deep neural networks, namely, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bi-directional LSTM, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and a hybrid of CNN and LSTM networks, to automatically classify and identify fake news content related to the COVID-19 pandemic posted on social media platforms. These deep neural networks have been trained and tested using the “COVID-19 Fake News” dataset, which contains 21,379 real and fake news instances for the COVID-19 pandemic and its vaccines. The real news data were collected from independent and internationally reliable institutions on the web, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the United Nations (UN), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and their official accounts on Twitter. The fake news data were collected from different fact-checking websites (such as Snopes, PolitiFact, and FactCheck). The evaluation results showed that the CNN model outperforms the other deep neural networks with the best accuracy of 94.2%.

The emergence of fifth generation networks opens the doors for Internet of Things environment to spread widely. The number of connected devices to fifth generation networks is expected to increase to more than 1.7 billion users by 2025. Each year, millions of modern devices go online at the beginning of the school year and after the holidays, and you can even notice the publicity of Internet of Things devices swinging with the seasons. Nowadays, these devices are considered to be very important to our daily life. That is because they provide power to our homes, organize our work operations and let communications more suitable. As a result of the increasing number of connected devices to fifth generation networks, the necessity to protect these Internet of Things devices against different types of cyber-attacks is also increased. For this reason, many researchers proposed different protocols and schemes to achieve the security of the Internet of Things devices. In this article, we introduce a survey of some protocols proposed by researchers in different domains and make a comparative study between them in terms of their category, authentication process, evaluation methodology, advantages, target, development year and applications within Internet of Things environment. The objective of this survey is to provide researchers with rich information about these protocols and their uses within Internet of Things systems, whether they can be used for cloud radio access networks, Internet of Things general purposes, telecommunications systems, e-healthcare systems or drone delivery service systems. It can also assist them in choosing the proper protocol to be used according to the type of their Internet of Things system.

In this study, an effective local minima detection and definition algorithm is introduced for a mobile robot navigating through unknown static environments. Furthermore, five approaches are presented and compared with the popular approach wall-following to pull the robot out of the local minima enclosure namely; Random Virtual Target, Reflected Virtual Target, Global Path Backtracking, Half Path Backtracking, and Local Path Backtracking. The proposed approaches mainly depend on changing the target location temporarily to avoid the original target’s attraction force effect on the robot. Moreover, to avoid getting trapped in the same location, a virtual obstacle is placed to cover the local minima enclosure. To include the most common shapes of deadlock situations, the proposed approaches were evaluated in four different environments; V-shaped, double U-shaped, C-shaped, and cluttered environments. The results reveal that the robot, using any of the proposed approaches, requires fewer steps to reach the destination, ranging from 59 to 73 m on average, as opposed to the wall-following strategy, which requires an average of 732 m. On average, the robot with a constant speed and reflected virtual target approach takes 103 s, whereas the identical robot with a wall-following approach takes 907 s to complete the tasks. Using a fuzzy-speed robot, the duration for the wall-following approach is greatly reduced to 507 s, while the reflected virtual target may only need up to 20% of that time. More results and detailed comparisons are embedded in the subsequent sections.