Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) have been regarded as the leading cause of death with 32% of the total deaths around the world. Owing to the large number of symptoms related to age, gender, demographics, and ethnicity, diagnosing CVDs is a challenging and complex task. Furthermore, the lack of experienced staff and medical experts, and the non-availability of appropriate testing equipment put the lives of millions of people at risk, especially in under-developed and developing countries. Electronic health records (EHRs) have been utilized for diagnosing several diseases recently and show the potential for CVDs diagnosis as well. However, the accuracy and efficacy of EHRs-based CVD diagnosis are limited by the lack of an appropriate feature set. Often, the feature set is very small and unable to provide enough features for machine learning models to obtain a good fit. This study solves this problem by proposing the novel use of feature extraction from a convolutional neural network (CNN). An ensemble model is designed where a CNN model is used to enlarge the feature set to train linear models including stochastic gradient descent classifier, logistic regression, and support vector machine that comprise the soft-voting based ensemble model. Extensive experiments are performed to analyze the performance of different ratios of feature sets to the training dataset. Performance analysis is carried out using four different datasets and results are compared with recent approaches used for CVDs. Results show the superior performance of the proposed model with 0.93 accuracy, and 0.92 scores each for precision, recall, and F1 score. Results indicate both the superiority of the proposed approach, as well as the generalization of the ensemble model using multiple datasets.

With rapid urbanization, high rates of industrialization, and inappropriate waste disposal, water quality has been substantially degraded during the past decade. So, water quality prediction, an essential element for a healthy society, has become a task of great significance to protecting the water environment. Existing approaches focus predominantly on either water quality or water consumption prediction, utilizing complex algorithms that reduce the accuracy of imbalanced datasets and increase computational complexity. This study proposes a simple architecture of neural networks which is more efficient and accurate and can work for predicting both water quality and water consumption. An artificial neural network (ANN) consisting of one hidden layer and a couple of dropout and activation layers is utilized in this regard. The approach is tested using two datasets for predicting water quality and water consumption. Results show a 0.96 accuracy for water quality prediction which is better than existing studies. A 0.99 $R^2$ score is obtained for water consumption prediction which is superior to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Rapid expansion of the world’s population has negatively impacted the environment, notably water quality. As a result, water-quality prediction has arisen as a hot issue during the last decade. Existing techniques fall short in terms of good accuracy. Furthermore, presently, the dataset available for analysis contains missing values; these missing values have a significant effect on the performance of the classifiers. An automated system for water-quality prediction that deals with the missing values efficiently and achieves good accuracy for water-quality prediction is proposed in this study. To handle the accuracy problem, this study makes use of the stacked ensemble H${}_2$O AutoML model; to handle the missing values, this study makes use of the KNN imputer. Moreover, the performance of the proposed system is compared to that of seven machine learning algorithms. Experiments are performed in two scenarios: removing missing values and using the KNN imputer. The contribution of each feature regarding prediction is explained using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). Results reveal that the proposed stacked model outperforms other models with 97% accuracy, 96% precision, 99% recall, and 98% F1-score for water-quality prediction.

Brain tumors and other nervous system cancers are among the top ten leading fatal diseases. The effective treatment of brain tumors depends on their early detection. This research work makes use of 13 features with a voting classifier that combines logistic regression with stochastic gradient descent using features extracted by deep convolutional layers for the efficient classification of tumorous victims from the normal. From the first and second-order brain tumor features, deep convolutional features are extracted for model training. Using deep convolutional features helps to increase the precision of tumor and non-tumor patient classification. The proposed voting classifier along with convoluted features produces results that show the highest accuracy of 99.9%. Compared to cutting-edge methods, the proposed approach has demonstrated improved accuracy.

With the advancement in information technology, digital data stealing and duplication have become easier. Over a trillion bytes of data are generated and shared on social media through the internet in a single day, and the authenticity of digital data is currently a major problem. Cryptography and image watermarking are domains that provide multiple security services, such as authenticity, integrity, and privacy. In this paper, a digital image watermarking technique is proposed that employs the least significant bit (LSB) and canny edge detection method. The proposed method provides better security services and it is computationally less expensive, which is the demand of today’s world. The major contribution of this method is to find suitable places for watermarking embedding and provides additional watermark security by scrambling the watermark image. A digital image is divided into non-overlapping blocks, and the gradient is calculated for each block. Then convolution masks are applied to find the gradient direction and magnitude, and non-maximum suppression is applied. Finally, LSB is used to embed the watermark in the hysteresis step. Furthermore, additional security is provided by scrambling the watermark signal using our chaotic substitution box. The proposed technique is more secure because of LSB’s high payload and watermark embedding feature after a canny edge detection filter. The canny edge gradient direction and magnitude find how many bits will be embedded. To test the performance of the proposed technique, several image processing, and geometrical attacks are performed. The proposed method shows high robustness to image processing and geometrical attacks.

The small-drone technology domain is the outcome of a breakthrough in technological advancement for drones. The Internet of Things (IoT) is used by drones to provide inter-location services for navigation. But, due to issues related to their architecture and design, drones are not immune to threats related to security and privacy. Establishing a secure and reliable network is essential to obtaining optimal performance from drones. While small drones offer promising avenues for growth in civil and defense industries, they are prone to attacks on safety, security, and privacy. The current architecture of small drones necessitates modifications to their data transformation and privacy mechanisms to align with domain requirements. This research paper investigates the latest trends in safety, security, and privacy related to drones, and the Internet of Drones (IoD), highlighting the importance of secure drone networks that are impervious to interceptions and intrusions. To mitigate cyber-security threats, the proposed framework incorporates intelligent machine learning models into the design and structure of IoT-aided drones, rendering adaptable and secure technology. Furthermore, in this work, a new dataset is constructed, a merged dataset comprising a drone dataset and two benchmark datasets. The proposed strategy outperforms the previous algorithms and achieves 99.89% accuracy on the drone dataset and 91.64% on the merged dataset. Overall, this intelligent framework gives a potential approach to improving the security and resilience of cyber–physical satellite systems, and IoT-aided aerial vehicle systems, addressing the rising security challenges in an interconnected world.