Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become an integral part of our lives and are increasingly used in almost every field. Subsequently, there are a large number of latency-sensitive IoT applications (e.g., face recognition and autonomous driving) targeted for mobile edge computing environments. These IoT applications are often split into multiple collaborative tasks and offloaded onto containers or virtual machines (VMs) with certain failure rates and recovery rates. If these containers or VMs are not deployed in the same edge servers, the bandwidth resources of edge clouds must be consumed to transfer data. These factors increase the completion time of IoT applications to different degrees, and then affect their reliability level. Therefore, there exists equilibrium between the reliability level and bandwidth consumption. In this article, we investigate the equilibrium of minimizing the bandwidth consumption of IoT applications while maximizing the reliability level of these IoT applications during task offloading. We propose a multiobjective optimization problem, and transform it to a single-objective optimization problem. Furthermore, we introduce two efficient approaches to acquire two near-optimal solutions. The results of simulation experiments demonstrate that our proposed approaches can observably enhance the reliability level and reduce the bandwidth consumption of IoT applications compared with other related approaches. Meanwhile, we also make a comparative analysis of our proposed approaches.

Digital assets involved in smart contracts are on the rise. Security vulnerabilities in smart contracts have resulted in significant losses for the blockchain community. Existing smart contract vulnerability detection techniques have been typically single-purposed and focused only on the source code or opcode of contracts. This paper presents a new smart contract vulnerability detection method, which extracts features from different levels of smart contracts to train machine learning models for effective detection of vulnerabilities. Specifically, we propose to extract 2-gram features from the opcodes of smart contracts and token features from the source code using a pre-trained CodeBERT model, thereby capturing the semantic information of smart contracts at different levels. The 2-gram and token features are separately aggregated and then fused and input into machine-learning models to mine the vulnerability features of contracts. Over 10,266 smart contracts are used to verify the proposed method. Widespread reentrancy, timestamp dependence, and transaction-ordering dependence vulnerabilities are considered. Experiments show the fused features can help significantly improve smart contract vulnerability detection compared to the single-level features. The detection accuracy is as high as 98%, 98% and 94% for the three vulnerabilities, respectively. The average detection time is 0.99 second per contract, indicating the proposed method is suitable for automatic batch detection of vulnerabilities in smart contracts.

With the rapid upgrading and explosive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in mobile-edge computing, more and more IoT applications with high resource requirements are developed and utilized. Meanwhile, there are large quantities of edge nodes (e.g., switches and edge servers) with limited resources, higher operating costs, and certain failure probabilities in the mobile-edge computing environment. Therefore, when an IoT application is split into multiple collaborative tasks and offloaded into multiple edge clouds, there is an urgent need to increase the availability level of the task allocation scheme and the resource utilization of edge servers under the condition of certain communication delay. In this article, we first present a joint optimization objective to evaluate the unavailability level, communication delay, and resource wastage while allocating the same batch of IoT applications to multiple edge clouds. We then propose an approach to minimize the joint optimization objective under the condition of certain communication delay. Finally, we performed a comprehensive simulation experiment analysis to demonstrate that our proposed approach is superior to other related approaches.

Vehicle edge computing (VEC) offers users low-latency and high-reliability services by using computational resources at the network's edge. Nevertheless, because of inadequate infrastructure and limited resources, computation-intensive and delay-sensitive vehicle applications cannot be performed efficiently at the edge. Therefore, several studies have used the idle resources of parked vehicles to assist in computation offloading. In this paper, we propose a parked vehicle-assisted vehicle edge computing architecture considering multi-agent collaboration, including intelligent vehicles and edge servers. Additionally, we propose a framework for a parallel Internet of Vehicles (IoV) utilizing computational experiment. The service provider is assigned the role of owning VEC resources and recruiting parking vehicle resources. The model was constructed by using the resource consumption-service relationship of both offloading parties to ensure service quality. First, a Stackelberg game model was constructed based on the interaction between requesting vehicles and a service provider. The latter was the leader, and the requesting vehicles were the followers. The Nash equilibrium for optimal pricing and offloading allocations was attained and verified, and a distributed gradient-based equilibrium algorithm was designed to solve the Stackelberg game model and obtain the final decision through mutual communication. The method also protects the privacy of participants and respects the willingness of requesting vehicles to offload. Finally, the simulation experiments confirmed that the proposed algorithm can achieve game equilibrium. Furthermore, it outperformed state-of-the-art algorithms in improving the service provider's utility.

Bacillus coagulans has a potential role in improving intestinal injury. However, the specific mechanism is still unclear. In this study, the protective effect of B. coagulans MZY531 on intestinal mucosa injury in cyclophosphamide (CYP)-induced immunosuppressed mice were investigated. The results indicated that the immune organ (thymus and spleen) indices of B. coagulans MZY531 treatment groups were significantly increased compared to the CYP group. B. coagulans MZY531 administration promotes the expression of immune proteins (IgA, IgE, IgG, and IgM). B. coagulans MZY531 could upregulate the ileum levels of IFN-γ, IL-2, IL-4, and IL-10 in immunosuppressed mice. Moreover, B. coagulans MZY531 restores the villus height and crypt depth of the jejunum and alleviates injury of intestinal endothelial cells caused by CYP. Furthermore, the western blotting results showed that B. coagulans MZY531 ameliorated CYP-induced intestinal mucosal injury and inflammatory via up-regulates the ZO-1 pathway and down-regulates the expression of the TLR4/MyD88/NF-κB pathway. After treatment with B. coagulans MZY531, the relative abundance of Firmicutes phylum was dramatically increased, as well as the genera of Prevotella and Bifidobacterium, and reducing harmful bacteria. These findings suggested that B. coagulans MZY531 has a potential immunomodulatory activity on chemotherapy-induced immunosuppression.