Automatic recognition of isolated spoken digits is one of the most challenging tasks in the area of Automatic Speech Recognition. In this paper, Database Development and Automatic Speech Recognition of Isolated Pashto Spoken Digits from Sefer (0) to Naha (9) has been presented. A number of 50 individual Pashto native speakers (25 male and 25 female) of different ages, ranging from 18 to 60 years, were involved to utter from Sefer (0) to Naha (9) digits separately. Sony PCM-M 10 linear recorder is used for recoding purpose in the office and home in noise free environment. Adobe audition version 1.0 is used to split the audio of digits into individual digits and result is saved in .wav format. Mel frequency cepstral coefficients is used to extract speech features. K nearest neighbor classifier is used for the first time up to author knowledge in Pashto language to classify the features of speech and compare its accuracy with linear discriminate analysis. The experimental results are evaluated, and the overall average recognition exactitude of 76.8 % is obtained.

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Precision agriculture is now essential in today’s world, especially for countries with limited water resources, fertile land, and enormous population. Smart irrigation systems can help countries efficiently utilize fresh water and use the excess water for barren lands. Smart water management platform (SWAMP) is an IoT-based smart irrigation project designed for efficient freshwater utilization in agriculture. The primary aim of SWAMP is to auto manage water reserves, distribution, and consumption of various levels, avoid over-irrigation and under-irrigation problems, and auto manage time to maximize production. This research proposed an energy-efficient water management platform (EEWMP), an improved version of SWAMP. EEWMP is an IoT-based smart irrigation system that uses field-deployed sensors, sinks, fusion centres, and open-source clouds. Both models’ performance is evaluated in energy consumption, network stability period, packet sent to destination, and packet delivery ratio. The experimental results show that EEWMP consumes 30% less energy and increases network stability twice than SWAMP. EEWMP can be used in different irrigation models such as drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation, surface irrigation, and lateral move irrigation with subtle alterations. Moreover, it can also be used in small farms of third-world countries with their existing communication infrastructures such as 2G or 3G.

Medical Image Analysis (MIA) is one of the active research areas in computer vision, where brain tumor detection is the most investigated domain among researchers due to its deadly nature. Brain tumor detection in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) assists radiologists for better analysis about the exact size and location of the tumor. However, the existing systems may not efficiently classify the human brain tumors with significantly higher accuracies. In addition, smart and easily implementable approaches are unavailable in 2D and 3D medical images, which is the main problem in detecting the tumor. In this paper, we investigate various deep learning models for the detection and localization of the tumor in MRI. A novel twotier framework is proposed where the first tire classifies normal and tumor MRI followed by tumor regions localization in the second tire. Furthermore, in this paper, we introduce a well-annotated dataset comprised of tumor and normal images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework by achieving 97% accuracy using GoogLeNet on the proposed dataset for classification and 83% for localization tasks after finetuning the pre-trained you only look once (YOLO) v3 model.

In this research, scalable framework for Smart Logistics based Cyber-Physical System (SLCPS) is emulated for stable coverage and connectivity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This work is modern manifestation of three laws of computing. Moore's and Koomey's laws recommend performance gain and energy efficiency whereas Metcalfe's law imply network scalability. Combination of these laws suggests the research proposition that development of scalable and performance efficient IoT networks is inevitable. Although IoT has improved specific logistics modules considerably, but incorporation of IoT in complete supply chain of food and random placement of IoT devices due to which unstable coverage and connectivity occurred are major challenges in logistics. The proposed SLCPS framework is designed firstly, to develop apt IoT protocol stack for logistics. Secondly, for bonded connectivity and coverage, mathematical models are proposed instead of random placement and coverage map is based on binary coverage model. Thirdly, for scalability supply chain of food for smart logistics process is designed in terms of container, storehouse and warehouse comprising of varying number of IoT devices. The architecture of SLCPS framework has three modules i.e. internal IoT network, border router and external network, emulated in Cooja simulator. The contikimac protocol is used for efficient traffic flow and power consumption. Single hop, multiple hops and random IoT devices placement scenarios are used for results comparison and validation. The performance evaluation results, i.e. throughput, network convergence time, packet delivery ratio, average latency, power consumption and timeline investigation validated utilization of proposed framework in terms of enhanced network performance. Significance of proposed SLCPS framework results in cost minimization, reducing communication and computation overhead, resilience to IoT device failures and an interference free network connectivity and coverage. Coverage and connectivity are measure of quality of service in IoT network. Therefore, this research provided bonded coverage and connectivity in smart logistics using mathematical models. In addition, a baseline framework is provided for extended research in CPS and IoT applications.

This paper presents the development of PHP and MySQL based online examination system with power failure handling and dropbox capability. To the best of author's knowledge these shortcomings were not properly addressed in the previous systems developed in PHP and MySQL. Power failure is an important factor that directly affects the efficiency of the online examination system in most of the developing countries of the world and made the systems unreliable. Therefore, the proposed system resumed from same status where it was stopped due to power failure. The second shortcoming that is addressed in this system is of rigidness of online examination system for students, by introducing dropbox capability, to put ambiguous questions to the dropbox and attempt these whenever student wants from dropbox. These capabilities make the proposed online examination system user-friendly, reliable and natural.

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Web search engine (WSE) is an inevitable software system used by people worldwide to retrieve data from the web by using keywords called queries. WSE stores search queries to build the user's profile and provide personalized results. User search queries often hold identifiable information that could compromise the user's privacy. Preserving privacy in web searches is the primary concern of users from various backgrounds. Many techniques have been proposed to preserve a person's web search privacy with time. Some techniques preserve an individual's privacy by obfuscating a user's profile by sending fictitious queries with the original ones. Others hide their identity and preserve privacy through unlinkability. However, a distributed technique preserves privacy by providing unlinkability and obfuscation. In distributed protocols, a group of users collaborate to forward each other queries to WSE, providing unlinkability and obfuscation. This work presents a survey of distributed privacy-preserving protocols. The benefits, limitations, and evaluation parameters are detailed in this work.