Recently, data management and processing for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has become a topic of active research in several fields of computer science, such as the distributed systems, the database systems, and the data mining. The main aim of deploying the WSNs-based applications is to make the real-time decision which has been proved to be very challenging due to the highly resource-constrained computing, communicating capacities, and huge volume of fast-changed data generated by WSNs. This challenge motivates the research community to explore novel data mining techniques dealing with extracting knowledge from large continuous arriving data from WSNs. Traditional data mining techniques are not directly applicable to WSNs due to the nature of sensor data, their special characteristics, and limitations of the WSNs. This work provides an overview of how traditional data mining algorithms are revised and improved to achieve good performance in a wireless sensor network environment. A comprehensive survey of existing data mining techniques and their multilevel classification scheme is presented. The taxonomy together with the comparative tables can be used as a guideline to select a technique suitable for the application at hand. Based on the limitations of the existing technique, an adaptive data mining framework of WSNs for future research is proposed.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the key components of the ICT infrastructure of smart cities due to its great potential for intelligent management of infrastructures and facilities and the enhanced delivery of services in support of sustainable cities. Smart cities typically rely on IoT, where a wide variety of devices communicate with each other and collaborate across heterogeneous and distributed computing environments to provide information and services to urban entities and urbanites. However, leveraging the IoT within software applications raises tremendous challenges, such as data acquisition, device heterogeneity, service management, security and privacy, interoperability, scalability, flexibility, data processing, and visualization. Middleware for IoT has been recognized as the system that can provide the necessary infrastructure of services and has become increasingly important for IoT over the last few years. This study aims to review and synthesize the relevant literature to identify and discuss the core challenges of existing IoT middleware. Furthermore, it augments the information landscape of IoT middleware with big data applications to achieve the required level of services supporting sustainable cities. In doing so, it proposes a novel IoT middleware for smart city applications, namely Generic Middleware for Smart City Applications (GMSCA), which brings together many studies to further capture and invigorate the application demand for sustainable solutions which IoT and big data can offer. The proposed middleware is implemented, and its feasibility is assessed by developing three applications addressing various scenarios. Finally, the GMSCA is tested by conducting load balance and performance tests. The results prove the excellent functioning and usability of the GMSCA.

Social media postings are increasingly being used in modern days disaster management. Along with the textual information, the contexts and cues inherent in the images posted on social media play an important role in identifying appropriate emergency responses to a particular disaster. In this paper, we proposed a disaster taxonomy of emergency response and used the same taxonomy with an emergency response pipeline together with deep-learning-based image classification and object identification algorithms to automate the emergency response decision-making process. We used the card sorting method to validate the completeness and correctness of the disaster taxonomy. We also used VGG-16 and You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithms to analyze disaster-related images and identify disaster types and relevant cues (such as objects that appeared in those images). Furthermore, using decision tables and applied analytic hierarchy processes (AHP), we aligned the intermediate outputs to map a disaster-related image into the disaster taxonomy and determine an appropriate type of emergency response for a given disaster. The proposed approach has been validated using Earthquake, Hurricane, and Typhoon as use cases. The results show that 96% of images were categorized correctly on disaster taxonomy using YOLOv4. The accuracy can be further improved using an incremental training approach. Due to the use of cloud-based deep learning algorithms in image analysis, our approach can potentially be useful to real-time crisis management. The algorithms along with the proposed emergency response pipeline can be further enhanced with other spatiotemporal features extracted from multimedia information posted on social media.

Disasters and crises are inevitable in this world. In the aftermath of a disaster, a society’s overall growth, resources, and economy are greatly affected as they cause damages from minor to huge proportions. Around the world, countries are interested in improving their emergency decision-making. The institutions are paying attention to collecting different types of data related to crisis information from various resources, including social media, to improve their emergency response. Previous efforts have focused on collecting, extracting, and classifying crisis data from text, audio, video, or files; however, the development of user-friendly multimodal disaster data dashboards to support human-to-system interactions during an emergency response has received little attention. Our paper seeks to fill this gap by proposing usable designs of interactive dashboards to present multimodal disaster information. For this purpose, we first investigated social media data and metadata for the required elicitation and analysis purposes. These requirements are then used to develop interactive multimodal dashboards to present complex disaster information in a usable manner. To validate our multimodal dashboard designs, we have conducted a heuristic evaluation. Experts have evaluated the interactive disaster dashboards using a customized set of heuristics. The overall assessment showed positive feedback from the evaluators. The proposed interactive multimodal dashboards complement the existing techniques of collecting textual, image, audio, and video emergency information and their classifications for usable presentation. The contribution will help the emergency response personnel in terms of useful information and observations for prompt responses to avoid significant damage.

Tomato production is affected by various threats, including pests, pathogens, and nutritional deficiencies during its growth process. If control is not timely, these threats affect the plant-growth, fruit-yield, or even loss of the entire crop, which is a key danger to farmers’ livelihood and food security. Traditional plant disease diagnosis methods heavily rely on plant pathologists that incur high processing time and huge cost. Rapid and cost-effective methods are essential for timely detection and early intervention of basic food threats to ensure food security and reduce substantial economic loss. Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computer vision allow researchers to develop image-based automatic diagnostic tools to quickly and accurately detect diseases. In this work, we proposed an AI-based approach to detect diseases in tomato plants. Our goal is to develop an end-to-end system to diagnose essential crop problems in real-time, ensuring high accuracy. This paper employs various deep learning models to recognize and predict different diseases caused by pathogens, pests, and nutritional deficiencies. Various Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are trained on a large dataset of leaves and fruits images of tomato plants. We compared the performance of ShallowNet (a shallow network trained from scratch) and the state-of-the-art deep learning network (models are fine-tuned via transfer learning). In our experiments, DenseNet consistently achieved high performance with an accuracy score of 95.31% on the test dataset. The results verify that deep learning models with the least number of parameters, reasonable complexity, and appropriate depth achieve the best performance. All experiments are implemented in Python, utilizing the Keras deep learning library backend with TensorFlow.

Searching for a free parking space can lead to traffic congestion, increasing fuel consumption, and greenhouse gas pollution in urban areas. With an efficient parking infrastructure, the cities can reduce carbon emissions caused by additional fuel combustion, waiting time, and traffic congestion while looking for a free parking slot. A potential solution to mitigating parking search is the provision of parking-related data and prediction. Previously many external data sources have been considered in prediction models; however, the underlying impact of contextual data points and prediction has not received due attention. In this work, we integrated parking occupancy, pedestrian, weather, and traffic data to analyze the impact of external factors on on-street parking prediction. A comparative analysis of well-known Machine (ML) Learning and Deep Learning (DL) techniques, including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), Decision Trees (DT), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Gradient Boosting (GA), Adaptive Boosting (AB), and linear SVC for the prediction of OnStreet parking space availability has been conducted. The results show that RF outperformed other techniques evaluated with an average accuracy of 81% and an AUC of 0.18. The comparative analysis shows that less complex algorithms like RF, DT, and KNN outperform complex algorithms like MLP in terms of prediction accuracy. All four data sources have positively impacted the prediction, and the proposed solution can determine the best possible parking slot based on weather conditions, traffic flow, and pedestrian volume. The experiments on live prediction showed an ingest rate of 0.1 and throughput of 0.3 events per second, demonstrating a fast and reliable prediction approach for available slots within a 5–10 min time frame. The study is scalable for larger time frames and faster predictions that can be implemented for IoT-based big data-driven environments for on-street and off-street parking.