The rapid development of generative adversarial networks has significantly advanced the generation of synthetic images, presenting valuable opportunities and ethical dilemmas in their potential misuse across various industries. The necessity to distinguish real from AI-generated content is becoming increasingly critical to preserve the integrity of online data. While traditional methods for detecting fake images resulting from image tampering rely on hand-crafted features, the sophistication of manipulated images produced by generative adversarial networks requires more advanced detection approaches. The lightweight approach proposed here is based on convolutional neural networks that comprise only eight convolutional and two hidden layers that effectively differentiate AI-generated images from real ones. The proposed approach was assessed using two benchmark datasets and custom-generated data from Sentinel-2 imagery. It demonstrated superior performance compared to four state-of-the-art methods on the CIFAKE dataset, achieving the highest accuracy of 97.32%, on par with the highest-performing state-of-the-art method. Explainable AI is utilized to enhance our comprehension of the complex processes involved in synthetic image recognition. We have shown that, unlike authentic images, where activations often center around the main object, in synthetic images, activations cluster around the edges of objects, in the background, or in areas with complex textures.

Blockchain and Data Mining are not simply buzzwords, but rather concepts that are playing an important role in the modern Information Technology (IT) revolution. Blockchain has recently been popularized by the rise of cryptocurrencies, while data mining has already been present in IT for many decades. Data stored in a blockchain can also be considered to be big data, whereas data mining methods can be applied to extract knowledge hidden in the blockchain. In a nutshell, this paper presents the interplay of these two research areas. In this paper, we surveyed approaches for the data mining of blockchain data, yet show several real-world applications. Special attention was paid to anomaly detection and fraud detection, which were identified as the most prolific applications of applying data mining methods on blockchain data. The paper concludes with challenges for future investigations of this research area.

With the global increase in the popularity of cryptocurrencies, the need for anomaly detection and fraudulent behavior is reaching an all-time high. In our paper, we propose a novel method of anomaly detection with the use of Numerical Association Rule Mining with Differential Evolution. The experiment was conducted by using the Dogecoin blockhain, and the dataset contained all of the transactions from one month. Our results contained 303 rules, with the best fitness function value of 0.8.