The Covid‐19 pandemic has emerged as one of the most disquieting worldwide public health emergencies of the 21st century and has thrown into sharp relief, among other factors, the dire need for robust forecasting techniques for disease detection, alleviation as well as prevention. Forecasting has been one of the most powerful statistical methods employed the world over in various disciplines for detecting and analyzing trends and predicting future outcomes based on which timely and mitigating actions can be undertaken. To that end, several statistical methods and machine learning techniques have been harnessed depending upon the analysis desired and the availability of data. Historically speaking, most predictions thus arrived at have been short term and country‐specific in nature. In this work, multimodel machine learning technique is called EAMA for forecasting Covid‐19 related parameters in the long‐term both within India and on a global scale have been proposed. This proposed EAMA hybrid model is well‐suited to predictions based on past and present data. For this study, two datasets from the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare of India and Worldometers, respectively, have been exploited. Using these two datasets, long‐term data predictions for both India and the world have been outlined, and observed that predicted data being very similar to real‐time values. The experiment also conducted for statewise predictions of India and the countrywise predictions across the world and it has been included in the Appendix.

Federated learning is a multiple device collaboration setup designed to solve machine learning problems under framework for aggregation and knowledge transfer in distributed local data. This distributed model ensures the privacy of data at each local node. Owing to its relevance, there has been extensive research activities and outcomes in federated learning with expanded applicability to different areas by the research community. As such, there is a vast research archive made available by the community with research work and articles related to the various aspects of federated learning such as applications, challenges, privacy, functionalities, and design. With respect to the function and design of federated learning, client selection, aggregation, knowledge transfer, management of distributed data (Non-IID), Incentive of data and communication cost are of paramount importance. Any effective design of federated learning requires these aspects to be well considered. There are numerous survey articles found among the available literature that focus on its application and challenges, opportunities, data privacy and protection, as well as on federated learning on internet of things, federated learning on edge computing, etc. In this paper, a review of the available literature on the various elements of design and functionalities in federated learning has been carried out with an aim to lay emphasis on the important challenges and research opportunities. More specifically, this work has endeavored to understand and summarize the various functional methods available, along with their techniques and goals. Additionally, it has strived to get a bird’s eye view of how various functions and designs of federated learning have been used in applications, and how it has helped uncover challenges and promising research directions for the future.

In the traditional approach to a digital asset management system, the data processing mechanism is not transparent or visible to the data owners since the data is managed solely by the service provider. With the rapid development of blockchain technology, the above issues can be resolved by leveraging the tamper-resistance and decentralization characteristics of blockchain. However, post the implementation of the EU General Data Protection Rules (GDPR) in 2018, the protection of data owners has taken center stage. This has led to several principles of personal data deletion, such as Storage Limit and the Right to Be Forgotten to conflict with the blockchain. It is also observed that, out of the various smart contracts deployed to manage digital assets, often only specific smart contracts are invoked, while the rest of the deployed smart contracts are rarely invoked, leading to smart contract designs exhibiting similar patterns with very little creativity. This current scenario has motivated us to propose SPChain, a smarter and private GDPR-compliant digital asset management framework enabled by blockchain. In this approach, a decentralized InterPlanetary File System has been adopted to solve the problem of SPOF. In addition, the combination of digital assets with artificial intelligence models has been proposed so as to make digital assets accessible to a larger number of applications and to enable better creativity. In this design, artificial intelligence models have been run in independent, virtualized containers and invoked through smart contracts. The proposed SPChain can be applied to the field of digital art management to provide a complete implementation based on the Hyperledger Fabric. Using this proposed framework, model developers, digital art creators, collectors, service providers, as well as third parties can not only benefit from securely managing digital assets and combining them with AI models, but also from simultaneously complying with the rights stipulated in the GDPR. During the course of the experiments conducted, the latency, throughput, and resource consumption of different functions in the smart contracts have been measured. After adjusting the batch timeout of the block and the maximum number of transactions in a block, the throughputs were observed to be about 500 TPS, with 10 to 15 TPS for reading and writing operations, respectively. The latency ranges were found to range from 0 to 7 seconds, with 2.5 to 5 seconds for reading and writing operations, respectively.