Cardiovascular diseases are considered as the most life-threatening syndromes with the highest mortality rate globally. Over a period of time, they have become very common and are now overstretching the healthcare systems of countries. The major factors of cardiovascular diseases are high blood pressure, family history, stress, age, gender, cholesterol, Body Mass Index (BMI), and unhealthy lifestyle. Based on these factors, researchers have proposed various approaches for early diagnosis. However, the accuracy of proposed techniques and approaches needs certain improvements due to the inherent criticality and life threatening risks of cardiovascular diseases. In this article, a MaLCaDD (Machine Learning based Cardiovascular Disease Diagnosis) framework is proposed for the effective prediction of cardiovascular diseases with high precision. Particularly, the framework first deals with the missing values (via mean replacement technique) and data imbalance (via Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique -SMOTE). Subsequently, Feature Importance technique is utilized for feature selection. Finally, an ensemble of Logistic Regression and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifiers is proposed for prediction with higher accuracy. The validation of framework is performed through three benchmark datasets (i.e. Framingham, Heart Disease and Cleveland) and the accuracies of 99.1%, 98% and 95.5 % are achieved respectively. Finally, the comparative analysis prove that MaLCaDD predictions are more accurate (with reduced set of features) as compared to the existing state-of-the-art approaches. Therefore, MaLCaDD is highly reliable and can be applied in real environment for the early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases.

E-learning in higher education is exponentially increased during the past decade due to its inevitable benefits in critical situations like natural disasters (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic etc.) and war circumstances. The reliable, fair, and seamless execution of online exams in E-learning is highly significant. Particularly, online exams are conducted on E-learning platforms without the physical presence of students and instructors at the same place. This poses several issues like integrity and security during online exams. To address such issues, researchers frequently proposed different techniques and tools. However, a study summarizing and analyzing latest developments, particularly in the area of online examination, is hard to find in the literature. In this article, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of online examination is performed to select and analyze 53 studies published during the last five years (i.e. Jan 2016 to July 2020). Subsequently, five leading online exams features targeted in the selected studies are identified. Moreover, underlying development approaches for the implementation of online exams solutions are explored. Furthermore, 16 important techniques / algorithms and 11 datasets are presented. In addition to this, 21 online exams tools proposed in the selected studies are identified. Additionally, 25 leading existing tools used in the selected studies are also presented. Finally, the participation of countries in online exam research is investigated. Key factors for the global adoption of online exams are identified and compared with major online exams features. This facilitates the selection of right online exam system for a particular country on the basis of existing E-learning infrastructure and overall cost. To conclude, the findings of this article provide a solid platform for the researchers and practitioners of the domain to select appropriate features along with underlying development approaches, tools, and techniques for the implementation of a particular online exams solution as per given requirements.

Vehicular networks improve quality of life, security, and safety, making them crucial to smart city development. With the rapid advancement of intelligent vehicles, the confidentiality and security concerns surrounding vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have garnered considerable attention. VANETs are intrinsically more vulnerable to attacks than wired networks due to high mobility, common network medium, and lack of centrally managed security services. Intrusion detection (ID) servers are the first protection layer against cyberattacks in this digital age. The most frequently used mechanism in a VANET is intrusion detection systems (IDSs), which rely on vehicle collaboration to identify attackers. Regrettably, existing cooperative IDSs get corrupted and cause the IDSs to operate abnormally. This article presents an approach to intrusion detection based on the distributed federated learning (FL) of heterogeneous neural networks for smart cities. It saves time and resources by using the most efficient intruder detection approach. First, vehicles use a federated learning technique to develop local, deep learning-based IDS classifiers for VANET data streams. They then share their locally learned classifiers upon request, significantly reducing communication overhead with neighboring vehicles. Then, an ensemble of federated heterogeneous neural networks is constructed for each vehicle, including locally and remotely trained classifiers. Finally, the global ensemble model is again shared with local devices for their updating. The effectiveness of the suggested method for intrusion detection in VANETs is evaluated using performance indicators such as attack detection rates, classification accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores over a ToN-IoT data stream. The ID model shows 0.994 training and 0.981 testing accuracy.

The trend of learning from videos instead of documents has increased. There could be hundreds and thousands of videos on a single topic, with varying degrees of context, content, and depth of the topic. The literature claims that learners are nowadays less interested in viewing a complete video but prefers the topic of their interests. This develops the need for indexing of video lectures. Manual annotation or topic-wise indexing is not new in the case of videos. However, manual indexing is time-consuming due to the length of a typical video lecture and intricate storylines. Automatic indexing and annotation is, therefore, a better and efficient solution. This research aims to identify the need for automatic video indexing for better information retrieval and ease users navigating topics inside a video. The automatically identified topics are referred to as “Index Points.” 137-layer YoloV4 Darknet Neural Network creates a custom object detector model. The model is trained on approximately 6000 video frames and then tested on a suite of 50 videos of around 20 hours of run time. Shot Boundary detection is performed using Structural Similarity fused with a Binary Search Pattern algorithm which outperformed the state-of-the-art SSIM technique by reducing the processing time to approximately 21% and providing around 96% accuracy. Generation of accurate index points in terms of true positives and false negatives is detected through precision, recall, and F1 score, which varies between 60-80% for every video. The results show that the proposed algorithm successfully generates a digital index with reasonable accuracy in topic detection.

The information extraction from unstructured text segments is a complex task. Although manual information extraction often produces the best results, it is harder to manage biomedical data extraction manually because of the exponential increase in data size. Thus, there is a need for automatic tools and techniques for information extraction in biomedical text mining. Relation extraction is a significant area under biomedical information extraction that has gained much importance in the last two decades. A lot of work has been done on biomedical relation extraction focusing on rule-based and machine learning techniques. In the last decade, the focus has changed to hybrid approaches showing better results. This research presents a hybrid feature set for classification of relations between biomedical entities. The main contribution of this research is done in the semantic feature set where verb phrases are ranked using Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and a ranking algorithm. Support Vector Machine and Naïve Bayes, the two effective machine learning techniques, are used to classify these relations. Our approach has been validated on the standard biomedical text corpus obtained from MEDLINE 2001. Conclusively, it can be articulated that our framework outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches used for relation extraction on the same corpus.