In developing countries, funding is a significant obstacle to receiving higher education. Brilliant but needy students cannot complete their studies since their parents are unemployed and their countries’ economies are poor. As a result, the students’ talents are not harnessed to their full potential. In order to help students obtain higher education and harness their full potential, governments provide student loans to students in higher education. The government provides loans to students through the ministry of education. The students pay back the loan with interest when they start working. Governments have been the sole funders of student loans. The emergence of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war have resulted in a global economic crisis. Because of the global economic crisis, the government’s spending has increased. In order to help reduce the burden of government and thereby reduce spending, we intend to revolutionize the student loan program through blockchain and crowdsourcing. This work presents a blockchain-based crowdsourcing decentralized loan platform where investors will be brought on board to provide funds for students in higher education. The platform will allow students to apply for loans from investors through registered financial institutions. The students will pay back the loans with interest when they enter the workforce. The proposed platform will allow students to fund their education, investors will get interest on the money they invest, and governments can channel the money they put into student loan programs into other avenues. We perform a thorough security analysis and back the efficiency of our work with numerical results.

Human pose estimation has long been a fundamental problem in computer vision and artificial intelligence. Prominent among the 2D human pose estimation (HPE) methods are the regression-based approaches, which have been proven to achieve excellent results. However, the ground-truth labels are usually inherently ambiguous in challenging cases such as motion blur, occlusions, and truncation, leading to poor performance measurement and lower levels of accuracy. In this paper, we propose Cofopose, which is a two-stage approach consisting of a person and keypoint detection transformers for 2D human pose estimation. Cofopose is composed of conditional cross-attention, a conditional DEtection TRansformer (conditional DETR), and an encoder-decoder in the transformer framework; this allows it to achieve person and keypoint detection. In a significant departure from other approaches, we use conditional cross-attention and fine-tune conditional DETR for our person detection, and encoder-decoders in the transformers for our keypoint detection. Cofopose was extensively evaluated using two benchmark datasets, MS COCO and MPII, achieving an improved performance with significant margins over the existing state-of-the-art frameworks.

The early detection of lung diseases, including cancer, is essential for improving patient outcomes. However, traditional diagnostic approaches and standard deep learning models often face challenges in effectively analyzing the complex spatial and temporal variations in medical imaging data, particularly in CT scans. To address these challenges, we propose DC-CAD, a novel hybrid framework that integrates Dilated Capsule Networks, Channel-wise Attention Mechanisms, and Distanced Long Short-Term Memory for precise and early diagnosis of lung diseases. DC-CAD is innovative in its ability to combine multi-scale feature extraction and temporal dynamic analysis, enabling the model to capture intricate spatial relationships and sequential changes in lung tissue. The model consists of three main contributions: (1) Dilated Capsule Networks for improved multi-scale context aggregation, which captures subtle textural variations, (2) a Channel-wise Attention Mechanism to focus on the most relevant regions of interest, minimizing the impact of irrelevant features, and (3) Distanced LSTM layers to model temporal dependencies across sequential CT scans, providing insights into disease progression. Through comprehensive experiments on the LC25000 dataset, DC-CAD achieves 99.52% accuracy, significantly outperforming baseline models such as standard Capsule Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks. The model also reduces the error rate to 0.48%, demonstrating substantial improvements in diagnostic performance, including increased accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. These results establish DC-CAD as a powerful and reliable tool for automated lung disease diagnosis, with significant potential to enhance clinical workflow by reducing radiologists’ workload through its interpretability and efficiency. Moving forward, we plan to extend the model to handle multi-modal data and investigate advanced attention mechanisms to further improve diagnostic accuracy and generalizability.