Amid the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the closure of educational institutes leads to an unprecedented rise in online learning. For limiting the impact of COVID-19 and obstructing its widespread, educational institutions closed their campuses immediately and academic activities are moved to e-learning platforms. The effectiveness of e-learning is a critical concern for both students and parents, specifically in terms of its suitability to students and teachers and its technical feasibility with respect to different social scenarios. Such concerns must be reviewed from several aspects before e-learning can be adopted at such a larger scale. This study endeavors to investigate the effectiveness of e-learning by analyzing the sentiments of people about e-learning. Due to the rise of social media as an important mode of communication recently, people’s views can be found on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. This study uses a Twitter dataset containing 17,155 tweets about e-learning. Machine learning and deep learning approaches have shown their suitability, capability, and potential for image processing, object detection, and natural language processing tasks and text analysis is no exception. Machine learning approaches have been largely used both for annotation and text and sentiment analysis. Keeping in view the adequacy and efficacy of machine learning models, this study adopts TextBlob, VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning), and SentiWordNet to analyze the polarity and subjectivity score of tweets’ text. Furthermore, bearing in mind the fact that machine learning models display high classification accuracy, various machine learning models have been used for sentiment classification. Two feature extraction techniques, TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) and BoW (Bag of Words) have been used to effectively build and evaluate the models. All the models have been evaluated in terms of various important performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The results reveal that the random forest and support vector machine classifier achieve the highest accuracy of 0.95 when used with Bow features. Performance comparison is carried out for results of TextBlob, VADER, and SentiWordNet, as well as classification results of machine learning models and deep learning models such as CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short Term Memory), CNN-LSTM, and Bi-LSTM (Bidirectional-LSTM). Additionally, topic modeling is performed to find the problems associated with e-learning which indicates that uncertainty of campus opening date, children’s disabilities to grasp online education, and lagging efficient networks for online education are the top three problems.

The cryptocurrency market has been developed at an unprecedented speed over the past few years. Cryptocurrency works similar to standard currency, however, virtual payments are made for goods and services without the intervention of any central authority. Although cryptocurrency ensures legitimate and unique transactions by utilizing cryptographic methods, this industry is still in its inception and serious concerns have been raised about its use. Analysis of the sentiments about cryptocurrency is highly desirable to provide a holistic view of peoples’ perceptions. In this regard, this study performs both sentiment analysis and emotion detection using the tweets related to the cryptocurrency which are widely used for predicting the market prices of cryptocurrency. For increasing the efficacy of the analysis, a deep learning ensemble model LSTM-GRU is proposed that combines two recurrent neural networks applications including long short term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU). LSTM and GRU are stacked where the GRU is trained on the features extracted by LSTM. Utilizing term frequency-inverse document frequency, word2vec, and bag of words (BoW) features, several machine learning and deep learning approaches and a proposed ensemble model are investigated. Furthermore, TextBlob and Text2Emotion are studied for emotion analysis with the selected models. Comparatively, a larger number of people feel happy with the use of cryptocurrency, followed by fear and surprise emotions. Results suggest that the performance of machine learning models is comparatively better when BoW features are used. The proposed LSTM-GRU ensemble shows an accuracy of 0.99 for sentiment analysis, and 0.92 for emotion prediction and outperforms both machine learning and state-of-the-art models.

Drowsiness when in command of a vehicle leads to a decline in cognitive performance that affects driver behavior, potentially causing accidents. Drowsiness-related road accidents lead to severe trauma, economic consequences, impact on others, physical injury and/or even death. Real-time and accurate driver drowsiness detection and warnings systems are necessary schemes to reduce tiredness-related driving accident rates. The research presented here aims at the classification of drowsy and non-drowsy driver states based on respiration rate detection by non-invasive, non-touch, impulsive radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar. Chest movements of 40 subjects were acquired for 5 m using a lab-placed IR-UWB radar system, and respiration per minute was extracted from the resulting signals. A structured dataset was obtained comprising respiration per minute, age and label (drowsy/non-drowsy). Different machine learning models, namely, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Logistic regression, Gradient Boosting Machine, Extra Tree Classifier and Multilayer Perceptron were trained on the dataset, amongst which the Support Vector Machine shows the best accuracy of 87%. This research provides a ground truth for verification and assessment of UWB to be used effectively for driver drowsiness detection based on respiration.

Blood cancer has been a growing concern during the last decade and requires early diagnosis to start proper treatment. The diagnosis process is costly and time-consuming involving medical experts and several tests. Thus, an automatic diagnosis system for its accurate prediction is of significant importance. Diagnosis of blood cancer using leukemia microarray gene data and machine learning approach has become an important medical research today. Despite research efforts, desired accuracy and efficiency necessitate further enhancements. This study proposes an approach for blood cancer disease prediction using the supervised machine learning approach. For the current study, the leukemia microarray gene dataset containing 22,283 genes, is used. ADASYN resampling and Chi-squared (Chi2) features selection techniques are used to resolve imbalanced and high-dimensional dataset problems. ADASYN generates artificial data to make the dataset balanced for each target class, and Chi2 selects the best features out of 22,283 to train learning models. For classification, a hybrid logistics vector trees classifier (LVTrees) is proposed which utilizes logistic regression, support vector classifier, and extra tree classifier. Besides extensive experiments on the datasets, performance comparison with the state-of-the-art methods has been made for determining the significance of the proposed approach. LVTrees outperform all other models with ADASYN and Chi2 techniques with a significant 100% accuracy. Further, a statistical significance T-test is also performed to show the efficacy of the proposed approach. Results using k-fold cross-validation prove the supremacy of the proposed model.

With the proliferation of the blockchain technology ecosystems such as mining pools, crypto exchanges, full Bitcoin nodes, wallets, and pool protocol servers in recent years, the denial of service (DoS) attack vector has become more prevalent, and the attacks are targeted to the peer-to-peer networks and blockchain users. Despite blockchain enhancing security with decentralized design, secured distributed storage, and privacy, it is still vulnerable to new attack threats. If an attempted DoS is successful on blockchain, the impact is most likely massive given the fact that it is predominantly used for finance applications. An extensive account of the current state-of-the-art for possible DoS and corresponding mitigation techniques is not discussed in the existing research. This paper analyzes and categorizes the existing state-of-the-art DoS attack methods, detection techniques, and mitigation solutions targeting blockchain peer-to-peer networks as well as conventional network crypto exchanges. The review of the prior research shows that the blockchain ecosystem can be a target to successfully perform DoS attacks in the future, and technological advancements in blockchain are needed to mitigate potential attacks.

Bank lending to SMEs plays a vital role in economic growth, contributing significantly to employment and GDP. Access to bank lending is crucial for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as they contribute significantly to global employment and GDP. New financial technologies promise better bank operations, fewer costs, and enhanced credit supply to SMEs. However, there is still a lack of empirical findings on how these technologies can solve demand-side bank lending problems for small- and medium-sized firms. This study gathered data from a sample of 381 respondents, comprising CEOs, managers, officers, loan managers, IT consultants, and other relevant stakeholders. The findings indicate that the adoption of blockchain technologies, as well as the adoption of Big Data technologies encompassing cloud computing, data analytics, algorithms, and programming, along with the adoption of mobile banking technologies, have had a substantial positive impact on bank credit supplies for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Pakistan. This novel study contributes to existing knowledge in two ways. First, it provides knowledge to SMEs looking to adopt new technologies; second, it provides knowledge to a manager looking to finance the SMEs with information asymmetries. This research also provides key findings for researchers and policymakers.