Facial expression recognition has been well studied for its great importance in the areas of human–computer interaction and social sciences. With the evolution of deep learning, there have been significant advances in this area that also surpass human-level accuracy. Although these methods have achieved good accuracy, they are still suffering from two constraints (high computational power and memory), which are incredibly critical for small hardware-constrained devices. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture eXnet (Expression Net) based on parallel feature extraction which surpasses current methods in accuracy and contains a much smaller number of parameters (eXnet: 4.57 million, VGG19: 14.72 million), making it more efficient and lightweight for real-time systems. Several modern data augmentation techniques are applied for generalization of eXnet; these techniques improve the accuracy of the network by overcoming the problem of overfitting while containing the same size. We provide an extensive evaluation of our network against key methods on Facial Expression Recognition 2013 (FER-2013), Extended Cohn-Kanade Dataset (CK+), and Real-world Affective Faces Database (RAF-DB) benchmark datasets. We also perform ablation evaluation to show the importance of different components of our architecture. To evaluate the efficiency of eXnet on embedded systems, we deploy it on Raspberry Pi 4B. All these evaluations show the superiority of eXnet for emotion recognition in the wild in terms of accuracy, the number of parameters, and size on disk.

The ongoing development of audio datasets for numerous languages has spurred research activities towards designing smart speech recognition systems. A typical speech recognition system can be applied in many emerging applications, such as smartphone dialing, airline reservations, and automatic wheelchairs, among others. Urdu is a national language of Pakistan and is also widely spoken in many other South Asian countries (e.g., India, Afghanistan). Therefore, we present a comprehensive dataset of spoken Urdu digits ranging from 0 to 9. Our dataset has 25,518 sound samples that are collected from 740 participants. To test the proposed dataset, we apply different existing classification algorithms on the datasets including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and flavors of the EfficientNet. These algorithms serve as a baseline. Furthermore, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) for audio digit classification. We conduct the experiment using these networks, and the results show that the proposed CNN is efficient and outperforms the baseline algorithms in terms of classification accuracy.

Virtualization is an important feature for cloud computing which has recently attracted considerable attention. In this work, we de-sign an energy efficient approach which aims to minimize the energy consumption without reducing the Quality of Service (QoS) for user's deadline requirements in cloud data centers. We also propose a VM re-placement algorithm for QoS and energy-awareness in cloud data cen-ters. We experimentally compare the performance of our algorithm with other the state-of-the-art algorithms (i.e., the random algorithm and the first fit algorithm). The experimental results show that our solution im-proves first fit and random algorithms by twice and four times respec-tively, and is also very energy efficient with reliable QoS.

With the rapid technological growth in the last decades, the number of devices and users has drastically increased. Software-defined networking (SDN) with machine learning (ML) has become an emerging solution for network scheduling, quality of service (QoS), resource allocations, and security. This paper focuses on the implementation of a network traffic classifier using a novel Docker-based SDN network. ML offers good performance to real-time traffic solutions without depending on well-known TCP or UDP port numbers, IP addresses, or encrypted payloads. In this paper, using three ML techniques, we first classify network flows with 3, 5, and 7 parameters giving up to 97.14% accuracy. Additionally, we present a new performance accelerator algorithm (PAA), which incorporates these three ML classifiers and accelerates the overall performance significantly. We then propose a dynamic network classifier (DNC) generated from PAA over a novel Docker-based SDN network. Finally, we propose a new controller algorithm for Ryu platforms, which integrates the DNC and classifies both TCP and UDP flows in real-time. Based on the evaluations, an improvement in latency performance has been demonstrated, where analysing a packet, controller processing time takes on an average of 10 µs. This study will certainly serve to further research on optimising SDN and QoS.