The tremendous growth of computational clouds has attracted and enabled intensive computation on resource-constrained client devices. Predominantly, smart mobiles are enabled to deploy data and computational intensive applications by leveraging on the demand service model of remote data centres. However, outsourcing personal and confidential data to the remote data servers is challenging for the reason of new issues involved in data privacy and security. Therefore, the traditional advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm needs to be enhanced in order to cope with the emerging security threats in the cloud environment. This research presents a framework with key features including enhanced security and owner’s data privacy. It modifies the 128 AES algorithm to increase the speed of the encryption process, 1000 blocks per second, by the double round key feature. However, traditionally, there is a single round key with 800 blocks per second. The proposed algorithm involves less power consumption, better load balancing, and enhanced trust and resource management on the network. The proposed framework includes deployment of AES with 16, 32, 64, and 128 plain text bytes. Simulation results are visualized in a way that depicts suitability of the algorithm while achieving particular quality attributes. Results show that the proposed framework minimizes energy consumption by 14.43%, network usage by 11.53%, and delay by 15.67%. Hence, the proposed framework enhances security, minimizes resource utilization, and reduces delay while deploying services of computational clouds.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, and pressure, and to cooperatively forward the collected information to the destination through the network infrastructure. As sensor nodes are energy constraint devices, therefore, the importance of energy efficient routing protocols has been increased. In order to minimize energy consumption, recently, a number of hierarchical routing protocols are proposed. For instance, LEACH is an elementary hierarchical routing protocol that employs clustering technique to achieve energy efficiency. A lot of research work has been performed to remove shortcomings and to improve the performance of hierarchical routing protocols. Therefore, a comprehensive review is required which can review state‐of‐the‐art technologies, analyze functional and performance aspects, and highlight hierarchical routing protocol issues and challenges in WSNs. This paper proposes a taxonomy for the classification of existing hierarchical routing protocols for WSNs and analyzes the functionality and performance of existing hierarchical routing protocols. Moreover, it compares existing routing protocols to highlight key technological differences and provides performance comparison for the selected LEACH based routing protocols. Finally, the paper spotlights issues and challenges in existing routing protocols of WSNs, which can assist in future research for the selection of appropriate research domain and provide guidance in selection of energy efficient techniques in the design of energy efficient of routing protocols for WSNs.

The main purpose of educational institutions is to provide quality education to their students. However, it is difficult to analyze large data manually. Educational data mining is more effective as compared to statistical methods used to explore data in educational settings to analyze students’ performance. The objective of the study is to use different data mining techniques and find their performance and impact of different features on students’ academic performance. The dataset was collected from the Kaggle repository. To analyze the dataset, different classification algorithms were applied like decision tree, random forest, SVM classifier, SGD classifier, AdaBoost classifier, and LR classifier. This research revealed that random forest achieved a higher score (98%). The score of decision tree, AdaBoost, logistic regression, SVM, and SGD is 90%, 89%, 88%, 86%, and 84%, respectively. Results show that technology greatly influences student performance. The students who use social media throughout the week showed low performance as compared to the students who use it only at weekends. Furthermore, the impact of other features on the performance of students is also measured.

Depression is a serious mental state that negatively impacts thoughts, feelings, and actions. Social media use is rapidly growing, with people expressing themselves in their regional languages. In Pakistan and India, many people use Roman Urdu on social media. This makes Roman Urdu important for predicting depression in these regions. However, previous studies show no significant contribution in predicting depression through Roman Urdu or in combination with structured languages like English. The study aims to create a Roman Urdu dataset to predict depression risk in dual languages [Roman Urdu (non‐structural language) + English (structural language)]. Two datasets were used: Roman Urdu data manually converted from English on Facebook, and English comments from Kaggle. These datasets were merged for the research experiments. Machine learning models, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Support Vector Machine Radial Basis Function (SVM‐RBF), Random Forest (RF), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), were tested. Depression risk was classified into not depressed, moderate, and severe. Experimental studies show that the SVM achieved the best result with anaccuracy of 0.84% compared to existing models. The presented study refines thearea of depression to predict the depression in Asian countries.

Machine Learning based anomaly detection ap- proaches have long training and validation cycles. With IoT devices rapidly proliferating, training anomaly models on a per device basis is impractical. This work explores the “transfer- ability” of a pre-trained autoencoder model across devices of similar and different nature. We hypothesized that devices of similar nature would have similar high level feature character- istics represented by the initial layers of the autoencoder, while the more distinct features are captured by the innermost layer of the neural network. In our experiments, the centre-most layers of autoencoder models were re-trained with limited new data belonging to a different device. Datasets of seven Mirai infected and nine Bashlite infected IoT devices were used; each dataset also included benign records representing un-infected behaviour. We observed that the model’s detection accuracy improved by an average of 9.52% for Mirai and 44.59% for Bashlite. The highest performance improvement of 26.68% and 73.00% was observed when the anomaly model of Ecobee thermostat was tested on other devices before and after transfer learning for Mirai and Bashlite respectively. Additionally, transfer learning took 47.31% and 58.27% less time for Mirai and Bashlite respectively. We further trialed the efficacy of the autoencoder based anomaly model on flow based records of network traffic using the CIC- IDS2017 dataset. It was observed that the model performed best when distinct outliers in the dataset were present, whereas the model failed to perform decently in cases where the malicious activity did not cause significant deviation in network traffic’s footprint.