Quantum steganography plays a critical role in embedding confidential data into carrier messages using quantum computing schemes. The quantum variant of steganography outperforms its classical counterpart from security, embedding efficiency and capacity, imperceptibility, and time-complexity perspectives. Considerable work has been carried out in the literature focusing on quantum steganography. However, a holistic view of available schemes is missing. This paper provides an overview of latest advances in the field of quantum-steganography and image-steganography schemes. Moreover, the paper includes discussion of improvements made in the aforementioned fields, a brief explanation of the methodologies used for each presented algorithm, and a comparative study of existing schemes.

With the rapid advances in Information Technology (IT), the focus on engaging computing students to gain practical experience in the IT industry before graduation is becoming increasingly complex without incorporating pedagogical strategies of success in curricula. The goal is to enable computing major students to gain in-depth knowledge and practical understanding of the IT working environment before graduating through essential industry-driven practical skills based on international standards and best practices. Unfortunately, tracking and analyzing students’ practical skills performance during their IT field training programs, which are conducted primarily off-campus at various public and private organizations, before, during, and after the training period, is a daunting task for both the college instructors and the industry trainers. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a Sustainable University Field Training (SUNFIT) framework, which is a pedagogical approach towards mining the educational data using machine learning to integrate and measure the field training programs against the internationally recognized accreditation standards such as Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). The study employs machine learning models aimed at continuously measuring and monitoring international ABET accreditation requirements on computing major courses’ academic data, elucidating student performance across various semesters, integrating best practices, and producing an evidence-based rationale approach for evaluating weak learning outcomes (LOs) with minimal manual intervention, as well as preventing faculty-specific portfolio errors. The proposed approach could be easily developed by academics, researchers, or even students, and for a variety of purposes, including enhancing poor student outcomes (SOs). In addition, various data mining and machine learning approaches have been investigated over field training assessment data for successful prediction in subsequent cycles. The results are promising, with Naïve Bayes obtaining the highest accuracy of 90.54% followed by J48 and PART algorithms at 87.83%.

Plant taxonomy is the scientific study of the classification and naming of various plant species. It is a branch of biology that aims to categorize and organize the diverse variety of plant life on earth. Traditionally, plant taxonomy has been performed using morphological and anatomical characteristics, such as leaf shape, flower structure, and seed and fruit characters. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and especially deep learning can also play an instrumental role in plant taxonomy by automating the process of categorizing plant species based on the available features. This study investigated transfer learning techniques to analyze images of plants and extract features that can be used to cluster the species hierarchically using the k-means clustering algorithm. Several pretrained deep learning models were employed and evaluated. In this regard, two separate datasets were used in the study comprising of seed images of wild plants collected from Egypt. Extensive experiments using the transfer learning method (DenseNet201) demonstrated that the proposed methods achieved superior accuracy compared to traditional methods with the highest accuracy of 93% and F1-score and area under the curve (AUC) of 95%, respectively. That is considerable in contrast to the state-of-the-art approaches in the literature.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is an active area of research that has the potential to improve the efficiency and reliability of wireless communication systems significantly. AMC is the approach used in a communication system to detect the type of modulation format at the receiver end. This paper proposes a voting-based deep convolutional neural network (VB-DCNN) for classifying M-QAM and M-PSK signals. M-QAM and M-PSK signal waveforms are generated and passed through the fading channel in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The VB-DCNN extracts features from the input signal through convolutional layers, and classification is performed on these features. Multiple network instances are trained on different subsets of training data in the VB-DCNN. A network instance predicts the input signal during testing. Based on the votes, the final prediction is made. Different simulation experiments are carried out to analyze the performance of the trained network, and the DCNN is designed with the Deep Neural Network Toolbox in MATLAB. The generated frames are divided into training, validation, and test datasets. Lastly, the classification accuracy of the trained network is determined using test frames. The proposed model’s accuracy is near to 100% at lower SNRs. The simulation results show the superiority of the proposed VB-DCNN compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques.