The world of industrial automation technology is at the outset of a new era of innovation with the hype of Industry 4.0. Global modern industrial system converges the power of machines, computing, analytics, connectivity, cyber-physical systems, Internet of things, automation, cloud system and data exchange. Industry 4.0 is a revolution towards the digital world of digital factories and smart products. Big data is an integration of multi-disciplinary technologies and facilitates customer by bringing incredible services to a click. Internet of things connected the world of machines by adding communication capability in every device to connect to other devices or access the Internet. Big Data inflict a new horizon of opportunities in these systems. In this paper, challenges and opportunities of industrial big data are revealed in the context of Industry 4.0 with a different perspective. The current study helps the researchers to threshold these modern systems of Industry 4.0 in designing big data algorithms and techniques.

CT vertebral segmentation plays an essential role in various clinical applications, such as computer‐assisted surgical interventions, assessment of spinal abnormalities, and vertebral compression fractures. Automatic CT vertebral segmentation is challenging due to the overlapping shadows of thoracoabdominal structures such as the lungs, bony structures such as the ribs, and other issues such as ambiguous object borders, complicated spine architecture, patient variability, and fluctuations in image contrast. Deep learning is an emerging technique for disease diagnosis in the medical field. This study proposes a patch‐based deep learning approach to extract the discriminative features from unlabeled data using a stacked sparse autoencoder (SSAE). 2D slices from a CT volume are divided into overlapping patches fed into the model for training. A random under sampling (RUS)‐module is applied to balance the training data by selecting a subset of the majority class. SSAE uses pixel intensities alone to learn high‐level features to recognize distinctive features from image patches. Each image is subjected to a sliding window operation to express image patches using autoencoder high‐level features, which are then fed into a sigmoid layer to classify whether each patch is a vertebra or not. We validate our approach on three diverse publicly available datasets: VerSe, CSI‐Seg, and the Lumbar CT dataset. Our proposed method outperformed other models after configuration optimization by achieving 89.9% in precision, 90.2% in recall, 98.9% in accuracy, 90.4% in F‐score, 82.6% in intersection over union (IoU), and 90.2% in Dice coefficient (DC). The results of this study demonstrate that our model’s performance consistency using a variety of validation strategies is flexible, fast, and generalizable, making it suited for clinical application.

Numerous studies have examined the role of social media as an open-learning (OL) tool in the field of education, but the empirical evidence necessary to validate such OL tools is scant, specifically in terms of student academic performance (AP). In today’s digital age, social media platforms are most popular among the student community, and they provide opportunities for OL where they can easily communicate, interact, and collaborate with each other. The authors of this study aimed to minimize the literature gap among student communities who adopt social media for OL, which has positive impacts on their AP in Chinese higher education. We adopted social constructivism theory (SCT) and the technology acceptance model (TAM) to formulate a conceptual framework. Primary data containing 233 questionnaires of international medical students in China were collected in January 2021 through the survey method. The gathered data were analyzed through structural equation modeling techniques with SmartPLS 3. The results revealed that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and interactions with peers have positive and significant influence on OL. In addition, OL was found to have positive and significant influence on students’ AP and engagement. Lastly, engagement showed a positive impact on students’ AP. Thus, this study shows that social media serves as a dynamic tool to expedite the development of OL settings by encouraging collaboration, group discussion, and the exchange of ideas between students that reinforce their learning behavior and performance.

Privacy preservation is one of the greatest concerns in big data. As one of extensive applications in big data, privacy preserving data publication (PPDP) has been an important research field. One of the fundamental challenges in PPDP is the trade-off problem between privacy and utility of the single and independent data set. However, recent research has shown that the advanced privacy mechanism, i.e., differential privacy, is vulnerable when multiple data sets are correlated. In this case, the trade-off problem between privacy and utility is evolved into a game problem, in which payoff of each player is dependent on his and his neighbors’ privacy parameters. In this paper, we firstly present the definition of correlated differential privacy to evaluate the real privacy level of a single data set influenced by the other data sets. Then, we construct a game model of multiple players, in which each publishes data set sanitized by differential privacy. Next, we analyze the existence and uniqueness of the pure Nash Equilibrium. We refer to a notion, i.e., the price of anarchy, to evaluate efficiency of the pure Nash Equilibrium. Finally, we show the correctness of our game analysis via simulation experiments.

With various consumer electronics deployed in Internet of Vehicles (IoV), human-centric consumer in-vehicle applications (e.g., driver assistance, path planning, and healthcare system) can supply high-quality driving experience and enhance travel safety within a short time. In addition, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are expected to be critical to assist terrestrial vehicular networks in delivering delay-sensitive contents of services. However, due to the mutual coupling of trajectory planning of UAVs, serving the same task requests repeatedly in the same area results in wasted resources. Hence, it is challenging to supply high-quality services while ensuring energy-efficient content caching. To solve this dilemma, a content Caching scheme with Trajectory design through differential evolution and Deep Reinforcement learning (CTDR) is introduced. Specifically, a content caching scheme based on differential evolution (DE) is first proposed. Next, a trajectory design optimization based on multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) is designed to minimize system energy consumption. Eventually, the superiority of CTDR is demonstrated through various simulated experiments.