As one of the cyber–physical–social systems that plays a key role in people's daily activities, a smart city is producing a considerable amount of industrial data associated with transportation, healthcare, business, social activities, and so on. Effectively and efficiently fusing and mining such data from multiple sources can contribute much to the development and improvements of various smart city applications. However, the industrial data collected from the smart city are often sensitive and contain partial user privacy such as spatial–temporal context information. Therefore, it is becoming a necessity to secure user privacy hidden in the smart city data before these data are integrated together for further mining, analyses, and prediction. However, due to the inherent tradeoff between data privacy and data availability, it is often a challenging task to protect users’ context privacy while guaranteeing accurate data analysis and prediction results after data fusion. Considering this challenge, a novel privacy-aware data fusion and prediction approach for the smart city industrial environment is put forward in this article, which is based on the classic locality-sensitive hashing technique. At last, our proposal is evaluated by a set of experiments based on a real-world dataset. Experimental results show better prediction performances of our approach compared to other competitive ones.
The ever-increasing popularity of recommendation systems allows users to find appropriate services without excessive effort. However, due to the unstable and complex network environment, the historical behavior data of users are quite sparse in most cases. The inherent drawbacks render preference prediction infeasible for cold-start users and have become a crucial issue to be resolved in recommendation systems. To deal with the problems, we first present a Trust-based Collaborative Filtering (TbCF) algorithm to perform basic rating prediction in a manner consistent with the existing CF methods. Then, we propose the Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Recommendation approach with User-Item-Trust Records ( $\text {UIT}_{\text {hybrid}}$ ), a novel approach that incorporates user trust into the existing CF-based methods in a harmonious way to supplement rating information. $\text {UIT}_{\text {hybrid}}$ employs multiple perspectives to extract proper services and achieves a good tradeoff between the robustness, accuracy, and diversity of the recommendation. We conduct extensive real-world experiments on the Epinions data set to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of $\text {UIT}_{\text {hybrid}}$ .
14 February 2022 in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering
We focus on performing object detection in images taken under low-light conditions, which is critical task and often occurs in mobile multimedia computing environment. Unlike former methods to obtain enhanced images before detection with variant kinds of manually designed filters, we propose an edge computing and multi-task driven framework to complete tasks of image enhancement and object detection with fast response. The proposed framework consists of two stages, namely cloud-based enhancement stage and edge-based detection stage. In cloud-based enhancement stage, we establish connection between mobile users and cloud servers to input rescaled and small-size illumination parts of lowlight images, where enhancement subnetworks are dynamically combined to output several enhanced illumination parts and corresponding weights based on low-light context of input images. During edge-based detection stage, cloud-computed weights offers informativeness information on extracted feature maps to enhance their representation abilities, which results in accurate predictions on labels and positions for objects. By applying the proposed framework in cloud computing system, experimental results show it significantly improves detection performance in mobile multimedia and low-light environment.
Recent advancements in wireless technology have created an exponential rise in the number of connected devices leading to the internet of things (IoT) revolution. Large amounts of data are captured, processed and transmitted through the network by these embedded devices. Security of the transmitted data is a major area of concern in IoT networks. Numerous encryption algorithms have been proposed in these years to ensure security of transmitted data through the IoT network. Tiny encryption algorithm (TEA) is the most attractive among all, with its lower memory utilization and ease of implementation on both hardware and software scales. But one of the major issues of TEA and its numerous developed versions is the usage of the same key through all rounds of encryption, which yields a reduced security evident from the avalanche effect of the algorithm. Also, the encryption and decryption time for text is high, leading to lower efficiency in IoT networks with embedded devices. This paper proposes a novel tiny symmetric encryption algorithm (NTSA) which provides enhanced security for the transfer of text files through the IoT network by introducing additional key confusions dynamically for each round of encryption. Experiments are carried out to analyze the avalanche effect, encryption and decryption time of NTSA in an IoT network including embedded devices. The results show that the proposed NTSA algorithm is much more secure and efficient compared to state-of-the-art existing encryption algorithms.
17 March 2022 in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
The development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has spawned a series of driving assistance services (e.g., collision warning), which improves the safety and intelligence of transportation. In IoV, the driving assistance services need to be met in time due to the rapid speed of vehicles. By introducing edge computing into the IoV, the insufficiency of local computation resources in vehicles is improved, providing high quality services for users. Nevertheless, the resources provided by edge servers are often limited which fail to meet all the needs of users in IoV simultaneously. Thereby, how to minimize the tasks processing latency of users in the case of limited edge server resources is still a challenge. To handle the above problem, a task offloading scheme F-TORA based on Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy neural network (T-S FNN) and game theory is designed. Primarily, the cloud server predicts the future traffic flow of each section through T-S FNN and transmits the prediction results to the roadside units (RSUs). Then, the RSU adjusts the current load based on the captured future traffic flow data. After the load balancing of each RSU, the optimal task offloading strategy is determined for the users by game theory. Following, the edge server acts as an agent to allocate computing resources for the offloaded tasks by Q-learning algorithm. Finally, the robust performance of the proposed method is validated by comparative experiments.