Cloud multi-factor authentication is a critical security measure that helps strengthen cloud security from unauthorized access and data breaches. Multi-factor authentication verifies that authentic cloud users are only authorized to access cloud apps, data, services, and resources, making it more secure for enterprises and less inconvenient for users. The number of authentication factors varies based on the security framework’s architecture and the required security level. Therefore, implementing a secured multi-factor authentication framework in a cloud platform is a challenging process. In this paper, we developed an adaptive multi-factor multi-layer authentication framework that embeds an access control and intrusion detection mechanisms with an automated selection of authentication methods. The core objective is to enhance a secured cloud platform with low false positive alarms that makes it more difficult for intruders to access the cloud system. To enhance the authentication mechanism and reduce false alarms, multiple authentication factors that include the length, validity, and value of the user factor is implemented with a user’s geolocation and user’s browser confirmation method that increase the identity verification of cloud users. An additional AES-based encryption component is applied to data, which are protected from being disclosed. The AES encryption mechanism is implemented to conceal the login information on the directory provider of the cloud. The proposed framework demonstrated excellent performance in identifying potentially malicious users and intruders, thereby effectively preventing any intentional attacks on the cloud services and data.

Gene expressions are considered among the most used features in cancer classification. The available gene expression data has a small number of samples and a relatively big number of dimensions, and that makes it not suitable for deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architectures, which exhibit state-of-the-art performance in many fields. In this paper, we propose a lightweight CNN architecture for breast cancer classification using gene expression data downloaded from Pan-Cancer Atlas using “Illumina HiSeq” platform. The downloaded gene expression data is preprocessed and then transformed into 2D-images. We started the preprocessing by removing the outlier samples, which are determined based on the Array-Array Intensity Correlation (AAIC), which defines a symmetric square matrix of Spearman correlation. Then we applied a normalization process on the gene expression data to ensure that we can infer the expression level from it correctly and avoid biases in the expression measures. Finally, filtering is applied on the data. Model selection or a parameters search strategy is conducted to choose the values of the CNN hyper-parameters that give optimal performance. Our experiments show that our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 98.76%, which is the highest compared to other competing methods.

Outcome-based education (OBE) is a well-proven teaching strategy based upon a predefined set of expected outcomes. The components of OBE are Program Educational Objectives (PEOs), Program Outcomes (POs), and Course Outcomes (COs). These latter are assessed at the end of each course and several recommended actions can be proposed by faculty members’ to enhance the quality of courses and therefore the overall educational program. Considering a large number of courses and the faculty members’ devotion, bad actions could be recommended and therefore undesirable and inappropriate decisions may occur. In this paper, a recommender system, using different machine learning algorithms, is proposed for predicting suitable actions based on course specifications, academic records, and course learning outcomes’ assessments. We formulated the problem as a multi-label multi-class binary classification problem and the dataset was translated into different problem transformation and adaptive methods such as one-vs.-all, binary relevance, label powerset, classifier chain, and ML-KNN adaptive classifier. As a case study, the proposed recommender system is applied to the college of Computer and Information Sciences, Jouf University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for helping academic staff improving the quality of teaching strategies. The obtained results showed that the proposed recommender system presents more recommended actions for improving students’ learning experiences.

A cerebral stroke is a medical problem that occurs when the blood flowing to a section of the brain is suddenly cut off, causing damage to the brain. Brain cells gradually die because of interruptions in blood supply and other nutrients to the brain, resulting in disabilities, depending on the affected region. Early recognition and detection of symptoms can aid in the rapid treatment of strokes and result in better health by reducing the severity of a stroke episode. In this paper, the Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and light gradient-boosting machine (LightGBM) were used as machine learning (ML) algorithms for predicting the likelihood of a cerebral stroke by applying an open-access stroke prediction dataset. The stroke prediction dataset was pre-processed by handling missing values using the KNN imputer technique, eliminating outliers, applying the one-hot encoding method, and normalizing the features with different ranges of values. After data splitting, synthetic minority oversampling (SMO) was applied to balance the stroke samples and no-stroke classes. Furthermore, to fine-tune the hyper-parameters of the ML algorithm, we employed a random search technique that could achieve the best parameter values. After applying the tuning process, we stacked the parameters to a tuning ensemble RXLM that was analyzed and compared with traditional classifiers. The performance metrics after tuning the hyper-parameters achieved promising results with all ML algorithms.

One of the most prevalent diseases affecting women in recent years is breast cancer. Early breast cancer detection can help in the treatment, lower the infection risk, and worsen the results. This paper presents a hybrid approach for augmentation and segmenting breast cancer. The framework contains two main stages: augmentation and segmentation of ultrasound images. The augmentation of the ultrasounds is applied using generative adversarial networks (GAN) with nonlinear identity block, label smoothing, and a new loss function. The segmentation of the ultrasounds applied a modified U-Net 3+. The hybrid approach achieves efficient results in the segmentation and augmentation steps compared with the other available methods for the same task. The modified version of the GAN with the nonlinear identity block overcomes different types of modified GAN in the ultrasound augmentation process, such as speckle GAN, UltraGAN, and deep convolutional GAN. The modified U-Net 3+ also overcomes the different architectures of U-Nets in the segmentation process. The GAN with nonlinear identity blocks achieved an inception score of 14.32 and a Fréchet inception distance of 41.86 in the augmenting process. The GAN with identity achieves a smaller value in Fréchet inception distance (FID) and a bigger value in inception score; these results prove the model’s efficiency compared with other versions of GAN in the augmentation process. The modified U-Net 3+ architecture achieved a Dice Score of 95.49% and an Accuracy of 95.67%.