The concept of smart city evolved with the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in various sub-systems and processes in urban environment. The development of the smart cities is the best possible solution to major urban issues. It contributes towards economic and social development of the residents. It aims to provide the cordial environment in the domains of healthcare, education, transportation, power generation and dissipation, security, living, industry, etc., to the inhabitants to make their lives comfortable. Sustainability of these services is another major objective in a smart city framework. Along with the true realization of the idea of a smart city, advanced computational and communication technologies are contributing hugely towards its sustainable development. Communication technologies act as backbone to ensure connectivity at the various levels in a smart city framework. Novel smart city solutions for different application domains are designed and deployed by the industry using advanced computational technologies like IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Big Data and Cloud Computing. In this work, authors discuss the concept of smart city, its architecture and sustainability. Different operational domains in a smart city ecosystem are elaborated. The cyber physical aspect of the smart cities is discussed in brief. The role of various computational and communication technologies in the sustainable development of smart cities is presented. Limiting factors in the deployment of various advanced technologies in different smart city domains are highlighted. Security issues associated with the technological sustainable development of different smart city services along with existing solutions are discussed. The article is concluded by highlighting the future research directions.

Discovering oral cavity cancer (OCC) at an early stage is an effective way to increase patient survival rate. However, current initial screening process is done manually and is expensive for the average individual, especially in developing countries worldwide. This problem is further compounded due to the lack of specialists in such areas. Automating the initial screening process using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect pre-cancerous lesions can prove to be an effective and inexpensive technique that would allow patients to be triaged accordingly to receive appropriate clinical management. In this study, we have applied and evaluated the efficacy of six deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) models using transfer learning, for identifying pre-cancerous tongue lesions directly using a small dataset of clinically annotated photographic images to diagnose early signs of OCC. DCNN models were able to differentiate between benign and pre-cancerous tongue lesions and were also able to distinguish between five types of tongue lesions, i.e. hairy tongue, fissured tongue, geographic tongue, strawberry tongue and oral hairy leukoplakia with high classification performances. Preliminary results using an (AI + Physician) ensemble model demonstrate that an automated pre-screening process of oral tongue lesions using DCNNs can achieve ‘near-human’ level classification performance for diagnosing early signs of OCC in patients.

One of the most difficult challenges in medicine is predicting heart disease at an early stage. In this study, six machine learning (ML) algorithms, viz., logistic regression, K-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, decision tree, random forest classifier, and extreme gradient boosting, were used to analyze two heart disease datasets. One dataset was UCI Kaggle Cleveland and the other was the comprehensive UCI Kaggle Cleveland, Hungary, Switzerland, and Long Beach V. The performance results of the machine learning techniques were obtained. The support vector machine with tuned hyperparameters achieved the highest testing accuracy of 87.91% for dataset-I and the extreme gradient boosting classifier with tuned hyperparameters achieved the highest testing accuracy of 99.03% for the comprehensive dataset-II. The novelty of this work was the use of grid search cross-validation to enhance the performance in the form of training and testing. The ideal parameters for predicting heart disease were identified through experimental results. Comparative studies were also carried out with the existing studies focusing on the prediction of heart disease, where the approach used in this work significantly outperformed their results.

Considering Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have limited power resources (low bandwidth, long propagation delays, and non-rechargeable batteries), it is critical that they develop solutions to reduce power usage. Clustering is one solution because it not only saves energy consumption but also improves scalability and data integrity. The design of UWSNs is vital to the development of clustering algorithms. The limited energy of sensor nodes, narrow transmission bandwidth, and unpredictable topology of mobile Underwater Acoustic Wireless Sensor Networks (UAWSNs) make it challenging to build an effective and dependable underwater communication network. Despite its success in data dependability, the acoustic underwater communication channel consumes the greatest energy at a node. Recharging and replacing a submerged node’s battery could be prohibitively expensive. We propose a network architecture called Member Nodes Supported Cluster-Based Routing Protocol (MNS-CBRP) to achieve consistent information transfer speeds by using the network’s member nodes. As a result, we use clusters, which are produced by dividing the network’s space into many minute circular sections. Following that, a Cluster Head (CH) node is chosen for each circle. Despite the fact that the source nodes are randomly spread, all of the cluster heads are linked to the circle’s focal point. It is the responsibility of the MNS-CBRP source nodes to communicate the discovered information to the CH. The discovered data will then be sent to the CH that follows it, and so on, until all data packets have been transferred to the surface sinks. We tested our techniques thoroughly using QualNet Simulator to determine their viability.

A brain tumor can have an impact on the symmetry of a person’s face or head, depending on its location and size. If a brain tumor is located in an area that affects the muscles responsible for facial symmetry, it can cause asymmetry. However, not all brain tumors cause asymmetry. Some tumors may be located in areas that do not affect facial symmetry or head shape. Additionally, the asymmetry caused by a brain tumor may be subtle and not easily noticeable, especially in the early stages of the condition. Brain tumor classification using deep learning involves using artificial neural networks to analyze medical images of the brain and classify them as either benign (not cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). In the field of medical imaging, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been used for tasks such as the classification of brain tumors. These models can then be used to assist in the diagnosis of brain tumors in new cases. Brain tissues can be analyzed using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). By misdiagnosing forms of brain tumors, patients’ chances of survival will be significantly lowered. Checking the patient’s MRI scans is a common way to detect existing brain tumors. This approach takes a long time and is prone to human mistakes when dealing with large amounts of data and various kinds of brain tumors. In our proposed research, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models were trained to detect the three most prevalent forms of brain tumors, i.e., Glioma, Meningioma, and Pituitary; they were optimized using Aquila Optimizer (AQO), which was used for the initial population generation and modification for the selected dataset, dividing it into 80% for the training set and 20% for the testing set. We used the VGG-16, VGG-19, and Inception-V3 architectures with AQO optimizer for the training and validation of the brain tumor dataset and to obtain the best accuracy of 98.95% for the VGG-19 model.

The integration of Micro Electronic Mechanical Systems (MEMS) sensor technology in smartphones has greatly improved the capability for Human Activity Recognition (HAR). By utilizing Machine Learning (ML) techniques and data from these sensors, various human motion activities can be classified. This study performed experiments and compiled a large dataset of nine daily activities, including Laying Down, Stationary, Walking, Brisk Walking, Running, Stairs-Up, Stairs-Down, Squatting, and Cycling. Several ML models, such as Decision Tree Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, K Neighbors Classifier, Multinomial Logistic Regression, Gaussian Naive Bayes, and Support Vector Machine, were trained on sensor data collected from accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer embedded in smartphones and wearable devices. The highest test accuracy of 95% was achieved using the random forest algorithm. Additionally, a custom-built Bidirectional Long-Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) model, a type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), was proposed and yielded an improved test accuracy of 98.1%. This approach differs from traditional algorithmic-based human activity detection used in current wearable technologies, resulting in improved accuracy.