In this paper, we investigate an energy cost minimization problem for a smart home in the absence of a building thermal dynamics model with the consideration of a comfortable temperature range. Due to the existence of model uncertainty, parameter uncertainty (e.g., renewable generation output, non-shiftable power demand, outdoor temperature, and electricity price) and temporally-coupled operational constraints, it is very challenging to design an optimal energy management algorithm for scheduling Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems and energy storage systems in the smart home. To address the challenge, we first formulate the above problem as a Markov decision process, and then propose an energy management algorithm based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG). It is worth mentioning that the proposed algorithm does not require the prior knowledge of uncertain parameters and building thermal dynamics model. Simulation results based on real-world traces demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.

Blockchain is a point-to-point distributed ledger technology based on cryptographic algorithms. However, the open and transparent blockchain ledger supplemented by statistical methods such as sociological mining and data mining has caused users’ privacy to face major threats. Therefore, privacy protection has become a focus of current blockchain technology research. Ring signature technology is a commonly used encryption technology in the field of privacy protection. Therefore, this paper constructs a blockchain privacy protection scheme based on ring signature.This solution built a privacy data storage protocol based on the ring signature on the elliptic curve, and used the complete anonymity of the ring signature to ensure the security of data and user identity privacy in blockchain applications. The correctness and safety proof analysis of the proposed scheme were also carried out.

Multi-view deep neural network is perhaps the most successful approach in 3D shape classification. However, the fusion of multi-view features based on max or average pooling lacks a view selection mechanism, limiting its application in, e.g., multi-view active object recognition by a robot. This paper presents VERAM, a recurrent attention model capable of actively selecting a sequence of views for highly accurate 3D shape classification. VERAM addresses an important issue commonly found in existing attention-based models, i.e., the unbalanced training of the subnetworks corresponding to next view estimation and shape classification. The classification subnetwork is easily overfitted while the view estimation one is usually poorly trained, leading to a suboptimal classification performance. This is surmounted by three essential view-enhancement strategies: 1) enhancing the information flow of gradient backpropagation for the view estimation subnetwork, 2) devising a highly informative reward function for the reinforcement training of view estimation and 3) formulating a novel loss function that explicitly circumvents view duplication. Taking grayscale image as input and AlexNet as CNN architecture, VERAM with 9 views achieves instance-level and class-level accuracy of 95.5% and 95.3% on ModelNet10, 93.7% and 92.1% on ModelNet40, both are the state-of-the-art performance under the same number of views.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) centrally manages the network data layer to improve the programmability and flexibility of networks by the controller. Because of centralized control, SDN is vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In order to protect the security of SDN, a method based on K-means++ and Fast K-Nearest Neighbors (K-FKNN) is proposed for DDoS detection in SDN, and the modular detection system is presented in the controller. The detailed experiments are conducted to evaluate the system performance. The results of the experiments show that K-FKNN improves the detection accuracy and efficiency of K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and has high precision and stability of DDoS detection in SDN.

In order to trace the logistics information and make use of the characteristics of the Consortium Blockchain, a logistics information traceability model based on the Consortium chain is proposed. The research focuses on two key technologies in the model, namely Multi-center Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (MCPBFT) consensus algorithm and Information Matching mechanism. In MCPBFT algorithm, many nodes involved in logistics information are divided into multiple consensus sets, and the consistency protocol is improved into two phases based on PBFT algorithm. In the information matching mechanism, the authenticity of the recorded on-chain information is ensured by matching the updated logistics information with the information stored on the chain in advance. By analyzing the two key technologies, the feasibility and superiority of these two technologies are explained. Among them, MCPBFT algorithm can effectively improve the efficiency of consensus and ensure that the logistics information can be updated in time; the information matching mechanism can be safely applied to the traceability model and improve the practicability of the traceability model.