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Human genomic information can yield more effective healthcare by guiding medical decisions. Therefore, genomics research is gaining popularity as it can identify potential correlations between a disease and a certain gene, which improves the safety and efficacy of drug treatment and can also develop more effective prevention strategies [1]. To reduce the sampling error and to increase the statistical accuracy of this type of research projects, data from different sources need to be brought together since a single organization does not necessarily possess required amount of data. In this case, data sharing among multiple organizations must satisfy strict policies (for instance, HIPAA and PIPEDA) that have been enforced to regulate privacy-sensitive data sharing. Storage and computation on the shared data can be outsourced to a third party cloud service provider, equipped with enormous storage and computation resources. However, outsourcing data to a third party is associated with a potential risk of privacy violation of the participants, whose genomic sequence or clinical profile is used in these studies. In this article, we propose a method for secure sharing and computation on genomic data in a semi-honest cloud server. In particular, there are two main contributions. Firstly, the proposed method can handle biomedical data containing both genotype and phenotype. Secondly, our proposed index tree scheme reduces the computational overhead significantly for executing secure count query operation. In our proposed method, the confidentiality of shared data is ensured through encryption, while making the entire computation process efficient and scalable for cutting-edge biomedical applications. We evaluated our proposed method in terms of efficiency on a database of Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) sequences, and experimental results demonstrate that the execution time for a query of 50 SNPs in a database of 50,000 records is approximately 5 s, where each record contains 500 SNPs. And, it requires 69.7 s to execute the query on the same database that also includes phenotypes.

In this study, an artificial neural network is employed to predict the concentration of ambient respirable particulate matter (PM 10 ) and toxic metals observed in the city of Jaipur, India. A feed-forward network with a back-propagation learning algorithm is used to train the neural network the behavior of the data patterns. The meteorological variables of wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, temperature, and time are taken as input to the network. The results indicate that the network is able to predict concentrations of PM 10 and toxic metals quite accurately. INTRODUCTIONRecently, artificial-neural-network-based prediction techniques have become more popular because of their ability to generalize the nonlinear patterns in data sets. Their most important advantage is that they can solve problems that are too complex for conventional technologies such as statistical methods. These problems include pattern recognition and forecasting. Their applicability is increasing in airquality predictions because of their ability to handle uncertainties and complex relationships in the data.

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An approach to assess and represent air quality status through an Air Quality Index (AQI), in major metropolitan cities, where different types of activities, viz. industrial, commercial and residential are in progress, on a short and a long term basis is presented. To make the index more informative, air quality status is classified into five different categories, viz. Clean, Moderate, Poor, Bad and Dangerous. Long term air quality indices are then calculated for four metropolitan cities and one city, which is fast developing each representing the different climatological features in India viz. Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai and Nagpur. The air quality index is calculated according to national standards stipulated for different pollutants and zones.

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