The proliferation of fake news on social media platforms poses significant challenges to society and individuals, leading to negative impacts. As the tactics employed by purveyors of fake news continue to evolve, there is an urgent need for automatic fake news detection (FND) to mitigate its adverse social consequences. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques have emerged as promising approaches for characterising and identifying fake news content. This paper presents an extensive review of previous studies aiming to understand and combat the dissemination of fake news. The review begins by exploring the definitions of fake news proposed in the literature and delves into related terms and psychological and scientific theories that shed light on why people believe and disseminate fake news. Subsequently, advanced ML and DL techniques for FND are dicussed in detail, focusing on three main feature categories: content-based, context-based, and hybrid-based features. Additionally, the review summarises the characteristics of fake news, commonly used datasets, and the methodologies employed in existing studies. Furthermore, the review identifies the challenges current FND studies encounter and highlights areas that require further investigation in future research. By offering a comprehensive overview of the field, this survey aims to serve as a guide for researchers working on FND, providing valuable insights for developing effective FND mechanisms in the era of technological advancements.

Efforts have been dedicated by researchers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) to detecting and combating fake news using an assortment of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. In this paper, a review of the existing studies is conducted to understand and curtail the dissemination of fake news. Specifically, we conducted a benchmark study using a wide range of (1) classical ML algorithms such as logistic regression (LR), support vector machines (SVM), decision tree (DT), naive Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), XGBoost (XGB) and an ensemble learning method of such algorithms, (2) advanced ML algorithms such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), bidirectional gated recurrent units (BiGRU), CNN-BiLSTM, CNN-BiGRU and a hybrid approach of such techniques and (3) DL transformer-based models such as BERT${}_{base}$ and RoBERTa${}_{base}$. The experiments are carried out using different pretrained word embedding methods across four well-known real-world fake news datasets—LIAR, PolitiFact, GossipCop and COVID-19—to examine the performance of different techniques across various datasets. Furthermore, a comparison is made between context-independent embedding methods (e.g., GloVe) and the effectiveness of BERT${}_{base}$—contextualised representations in detecting fake news. Compared with the state of the art’s results across the used datasets, we achieve better results by solely relying on news text. We hope this study can provide useful insights for researchers working on fake news detection.

Source code plagiarism is a long-standing issue in tertiary computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to aid in the detection of source code plagiarism. However, existing detection tools are not robust to pervasive plagiarism-hiding transformations and can be inaccurate in the detection of plagiarised source code. This article presents BPlag, a behavioural approach to source code plagiarism detection. BPlag is designed to be both robust to pervasive plagiarism-hiding transformations and accurate in the detection of plagiarised source code. Greater robustness and accuracy is afforded by analyzing the behavior of a program, as behavior is perceived to be the least susceptible aspect of a program impacted upon by plagiarism-hiding transformations. BPlag applies symbolic execution to analyses execution behavior and represents a program in a novel graph-based format. Plagiarism is then detected by comparing these graphs and evaluating similarity scores. BPlag is evaluated for robustness, accuracy and efficiency against five commonly used source code plagiarism detection tools. It is then shown that BPlag is more robust to plagiarism-hiding transformations and more accurate in the detection of plagiarised source code, but is less efficient than the compared tools.

Workflow application can be executed in cloud computing environments in utility-based fashion. In our paper, we first give a survey of cloud workflow application and present the cloud-based workflow architecture for Smart City. Then a variety of workflow scheduling algorithms are reviewed. The purpose of this paper is to making taxonomy for workflow management and scheduling in cloud environment, and also applying this cloud-based workflow architecture to Smart City environments, further presenting several research challenges in this area.