Computer Engineering Commons^™

Blocksim-Net: A Network-Based Blockchain Simulator, Prashanthi Ramachandran, Nandini Agrawal, Osman Bi̇çer, Alpteki̇n Küpçü

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Since its proposal by Eyal and Sirer (CACM '13), selfish mining attacks on proof-of-work blockchains have been studied extensively. The main body of this research aims at both studying the extent of its impact and defending against it. Yet, before any practical defense is deployed in a real world blockchain system, it needs to be tested for security and dependability. However, real blockchain systems are too complex to conduct any test on or benchmark the developed protocols. Instead, some simulation environments have been proposed recently, such as BlockSim (Maher et al., SIGMETRICS Perform. Eval. Rev. '19), which is a modular …

Block Size Optimization For Pow Consensus Algorithm Based Blockchainapplications By Using Whale Optimization Algorithm, Betül Aygün, Hi̇lal Arslan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Blockchain-based applications come up with cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, introducing a distributed ledger technologies for peer-to-peer networks and essentially records the transactions in blocks containing hash value of the previous blocks. Block generation constitutes the basis of this technology, and the optimization of such systems is among the most crucial concerns. Determining either the block size or the number of transactions in the block brings out a remarkable problem that has been solved by the miners in recent years. First, higher block size results in higher transaction time, on the other hand, smaller block size has many disadvantages such as security, …

Estonian Internet Voting With Anonymous Credentials, İsa Sertkaya, Peter Roenne, Peter Y. A. Ryan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The Estonian Internet voting (EIV) scheme is a unique example of a long-term nation-wide, legally binding electronic voting deployment. The EIV scheme is used in parallel with standard paper-based election day voting, of course invalidating an already cast i-vote. This necessarily requires careful authentication of the eligible voters and makes the Estonian identity card solution a crucial part of the scheme, however, note that Parsovs has recently drawn attention to the security flaws found in Estonian ID-cards. In this study, we propose an e-voting scheme EIV-AC that integrates the EIV scheme with anonymous credentials based on self-sovereign identity. In addition …

Forming A Decentralized Research Network: Ds4h, Eni̇s Karaarslan, Meli̇h Bi̇ri̇m, Hüseyi̇n Emre Ari

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

There is a trend toward decentralized systems, but these systems are developed without conducting enough software tests. Also, the performance, scalability, and sustainability of the decentralized systems are not taken into account. One of the reasons is the time-consuming testing process. The other is the hardware requirements and the complexity of the software installations of the testing environment. Developer communities need stable and secure research networks to test and develop prototypes before releasing the working versions. Cloud-based blockchain test networks are available, but it allows using a specific framework. Also, users are required to learn how to use each framework. …

Data Immutability And Event Management Via Blockchain In The Internet Of Things, Hakan Altaş, Gökhan Dalkiliç, Umut Can Çabuk

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The Internet of things (IoT) is the key enabler of the smart systems used in many areas, from agriculture to aviation, industrial automation to autonomous vehicles. Most IoT deployments employ cost-efficient lightweight devices with limited resources (e.g., bandwidth, energy, storage). Although an IoT network must be built in its simplest form, engineers include more sophisticated devices like gateways and servers to provide web-based services and benefit from cloud systems. So, although the nodes can be widely distributed geographically or topologically, the system becomes centralized, which causes bottlenecks and single-points-of-failure. Furthermore, providing data integrity, nonrepudiation, and event management becomes tricky. In …

Privacy In Blockchain Systems, Murat Osmanoğlu, Ali̇ Aydin Selçuk

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Privacy of blockchains has been a matter of discussion since the inception of Bitcoin. Various techniques with a varying degree of privacy protection and complexity have been proposed over the past decade. In this survey, we present a systematic analysis of these proposals in four categories: (i) identity, (ii) transaction, (iii) consensus, and (iv) smart contract privacy. Each of these categories have privacy requirements of its own, and various solutions have been proposed to meet these requirements. Almost every technique in the literature of privacy enhancing technologies have been applied to blockchains: mix networks, zero-knowledge proofs, blind signatures, ring signatures, …

Permissioned Blockchain Based Remote Electronic Examination, Öznur Kalkar, İsa Sertkaya

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Recent coronavirus pandemic transformed almost all aspects of daily life including educational institutions and learning environments. As a result, this transformation brought remote electronic examination (shortly e-exam) concepts back into consideration. In this study, we revisit secure and privacy preserving e-exam protocol proposals and propose an e-exam protocol that utilizes decentralized identity-based verifiable credentials for proof of authentication and public-permissioned blockchain for immutably storing records. In regard to the previously proposed e-exam schemes, our scheme offers both privacy enhancement and better efficiency. More concretely, the proposed solution satisfies test answer authentication, examiner authentication, anonymous marking, anonymous examiner, question secrecy, question …

Representation Learning For Chemical Activity Predictions, Mohamed S. Ayed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Computational prediction of a phenotypic response upon the chemical perturbation on a biological system plays an important role in drug discovery and many other applications. Chemical fingerprints derived from chemical structures are a widely used feature to build machine learning models. However, the fingerprints ignore the biological context, thus, they suffer from several problems such as the activity cliff and curse of dimensionality. Fundamentally, the chemical modulation of biological activities is a multi-scale process. It is the genome-wide chemical-target interactions that modulate chemical phenotypic responses. Thus, the genome-scale chemical-target interaction profile will more directly correlate with in vitro and in …

Data Types Structure And Data Preparation Process, Leila Halawi, Amal Clarke, Kelly George

Publications

Learning Objectives

• Identify the different data types and measurements

• Identify the need for data and data sources

• Explain data partitioning and honest assessment

• Identify the necessity of data preparation and curation

• Identify the data preparation process

• Explore SAS VIYA platform and import data

Adding Temporal Information To Lidar Semantic Segmentation For Autonomous Vehicles, Mohammed Anany

Theses and Dissertations

Semantic segmentation is an essential technique to achieve scene understanding for various domains and applications. Particularly, it is of crucial importance in autonomous driving applications. Autonomous vehicles usually rely on cameras and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors to gain contextual information from the environment. Semantic segmentation has been employed to process images and point clouds that were captured from cameras and LiDAR sensors respectively. One important research direction to consider is investigating the impact of utilizing temporal information in the domain of semantic segmentation. Many contributions exist in the field with regards to utilizing temporal information for semantic segmentation …

Extractive Text Summarization On Single Documents Using Deep Learning, Shehab Mostafa Abdel-Salam Mohamed

Theses and Dissertations

The task of summarization can be categorized into two methods, extractive and abstractive summarization. Extractive approach selects highly meaningful sentences to form a summary while the abstractive approach interprets the original document and generates the summary in its own words. The task of generating a summary, whether extractive or abstractive, has been studied with different approaches such as statistical-based, graph-based, and deep-learning based approaches. Deep learning has achieved promising performance in comparison with the classical approaches and with the evolution of neural networks such as the attention network or commonly known as the Transformer architecture, there are potential areas for …

Camera And Lidar Fusion For Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation, Ali Abdelkader

Theses and Dissertations

Perception is a fundamental component of any autonomous driving system. Semantic segmentation is the perception task of assigning semantic class labels to sensor inputs. While autonomous driving systems are currently equipped with a suite of sensors, much focus in the literature has been on semantic segmentation of camera images only. Research in the fusion of different sensor modalities for semantic segmentation has not been investigated as much. Deep learning models based on transformer architectures have proven successful in many tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. This work explores the use of deep learning transformers to fuse information from …

Interpretable And Anti-Bias Machine Learning Models For Human Event Sequence Data, Zihan Zhou

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Growing volumes and varieties of human event sequence data are available in many applications such as recommender systems, social network, medical diagnosis, and predictive policing. Human event sequence data is usually clustered and exhibits self-exciting properties. Machine learning models especially deep neural network models have shown great potential in improving the prediction accuracy of future events. However, current approaches still suffer from several drawbacks such as model transparency, unfair prediction and the poor prediction accuracy due to data sparsity and bias. Another issue in modeling human event data is that data collected from real word is usually incomplete, and even …

Preface To Topic “Build And Strengthen China’S Information Tech-System”, Guojie Li, Ninghui Sun

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Self-reliance and self-strengthening at high level does not depend on a single technique, but on the formation of an advantageous national tech-system, so called "country-as-a-platform". Information tech-system refers to the whole one that closely connects devices, components, complete machine, system software, middleware, and application software with a series of technical standards and intellectual property rights. We are entering the IT 3.0 era characterized by integration of human-cyber-physical world. The IT 3.0 era will certainly produce a new tech-system different from the IT 1.0 and IT 2.0 eras, which is a rare opportunity for China to build a self-reliance and self-strengthening …

Opportunities And Challenges Of Building Cpu Ecosystem With Open-Source Mode, Yungang Bao, Ninghui Sun

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

RISC-Ⅴ has been obtained huge attentions and extensively invested over the past decade due to its exciting slogan that "Instruction Sets Want to be Free". Based on RISC-Ⅴ, we are able to build a "human community with a shared future" in the CPU chip area, although there are still many challenges. China should explore its capability to make more contributions in building the open-source chip ecosystem.

Ubiquitous Operating System: Toward The Blue Ocean Of Human-Cyber-Physical Ternary Ubiquitous Computing Mei, Hong Mei, Donggang Cao, Tao Xie

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

In response to the new patterns and scenarios of future human-cyber-physical ternary ubiquitous computing, a new kind of operating system named Ubiquitous Operating System (UOS) is emerging and under exploration for further development. The human-cyberphysical ternary ubiquitous computing has many new features, such as open and dynamic environment, diverse requirements, and complex application scenarios. New ubiquitous applications pose special demands on ubiquitous sensing and connection, lightweight computing and artificial intelligence, dynamic adaptation, feedback and control, natural human-computer-interaction, etc. To support these new requirements, a software definition mechanism is in need to flexibly control hardware, data resources, platforms, and applications. This …

Thoughts On Innovation Of Future Network Architecture, Yunjie Liu, Tao Huang, Shou Wang

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Currently, network technology is deeply integrated with the physical world. Traditional network architectures cannot support the differentiated, customizable, and deterministic needs of industrial Internet and other services. Exploring new network architecture and core technology has officially become the strategic commanding heights of the global Internet competition. To this end, the paper reviews the evolution and trends of the network, analyzes how to achieve high-performance, low-cost, intelligent network development strategies for establishing an autonomous and controllable future network. Two conclusions are drawn as follows. (1) Through the exploration of network construction in recent decades, integration, openness, intelligence, customization and integration of …

Information Superbahn: Towards New Type Of Cyberinfrastructure, Zhiwei Xu, Guojie Li, Ninghui Sun

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

The world is entering a new era of human-cyber-physical ternary computing with diverse intelligent applications over trillions of devices. This calls for a new type of cyberinfrastructure characterized by a planet-scale, high-goodput, low-entropy computing network, colloquially named Information Superbahn. This article highlights the vision of Information Superbahn, including fundamental requirements, key scientific problems, and a candidate system architecture. The goal of building the Information Superbahn is to natively support humancyber-physical systems and low-entropy computing modes, to reduce the effects of systems disorder. Compared with existing network computing systems, such as Internet, cloud computing, big data and Internet of Things, Information …

Improving Cyberspace Security Situation From Perspective Of “Talent, Finance And Infrastructure”, Binxing Fang

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Cyberspace security has been an important part in ensuring economic development and supporting the progress of modern science and technology. As more and more applications are relying on information technology (IT), it becomes very important to improve the security situation of cyberspace. How to take effective measures to practically improve the cyberspace security situation has become the core problem disscussed in this paper. This paper addresses it from the perspectives of "talent, finance and infrastructure". First, on the premise of insufficient supply of cyberspace security talents, this paper proposes to establish the ability certification of talents transferred from other IT …

Thoughts On New It Technique System, Ninghui Sun

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

The world is entering a new period of information society dominated by digital economy. To adapt to the requirements of the new development stage of China, and to achieve the key technologies development, it is necessary to accelerate the construction of a new selfreliance and self-improvement IT technique system. The article gives some thoughts on the demand, principle, and key method on above issues, and the new paradigm of research at Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.