Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger of transactions that are linked together cryptographically leading to immutability and tamper-resistance, thereby ensuring the integrity of data. Due to the ability of blockchain to guarantee the integrity of data, it has found wide-range adoption in electronic voting (e-voting) systems in recent years, this is in a bid to prevent manipulation of votes. However, due to the distributed nature of the blockchain, opportunities arise for privacy intrusion of the data being secured. The translation of this privacy flaw in blockchain to e-voting systems is the possibility of violation of the privacy of the electorates. Consequently, in a bid to achieve integrity and privacy of votes in e-voting, this study presents the use of an open-source blockchain system, coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem, towards addressing the privacy concerns of the blockchain. The performance of the system was evaluated and a transaction throughput of 1424 tps was obtained for ten thousand simulated ballot transactions. Further evaluation was carried out on the system, by increasing the number of system transactions. This showed that the mining time of the blockchain increased by an average factor of 0.18 s for every thousand increases in the number of transactions. Also, the response time of the system to a range of user actions was evaluated over an increasing number of voters. Results obtained showed that the response time of the system for vote casting operations increased by an average of 0.33 min per thousand voters while for vote tallying there was an increase in response time by an average of 0.848 min per thousand voters. The scientific value of this study is the development of an integrity and privacy-preserving e-voting system consisting of an open-source nodechain coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem following the security requirements of e-voting systems. The proposed system addresses the issue of integrity in e-voting while still maintaining the privacy of the electorates.

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The conventional voting scheme employs paper-based ballot to verify votes. This voting scheme is insecure due to the attributed shortcomings including ballot stuffing, ballot snatching and voter's impersonation. In this paper, we present the design and development of secure e-voting to ensure a free, fair and credible election where the preference of electorate counts. This proposed system solves the authentication, integrity and confidentiality security issues of e-voting in kiosk and poll site evoting scenarios using unimodal fingerprint biometrics and Advanced Encryption Standard based Wavelet based Crypto-watermarking Approach. The developed system solves: The possibility of blundering voter's authentication, integrity and confidentiality of vote stored in the server. The results after qualitative evaluation of the system with antiwatermarking detectors revealed that the developed secure e-voting system could serve as a platform for the delivery of credible e-election in developing countries with significant digital divides.

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<span>Agricultural sector is one of the economic pillars of developing nations, because it provides means of boosting gross domestic profit. However, weeds pose a threat to food crop by competing with it for nutrients and undermining the profit to be made from it. The treatment of these weeds is necessary, but at minimal impact on the actual food crop. Herbicide usage is one major means of weed control, owning to the expensive and labour-intensive nature of hand weeding. Recently, the need for site specific spraying has been on the rise because of health concerns which have been raised on the effect of herbicides on food crops and the effect on the environment. Most research on the field focuses on accurately identifying the weeds whilst neglecting the weed control. In this research, we apply fuzzy logic-based expert system to control how herbicide is sprayed on low-land rice in order to reduce excessive herbicide usage. The system supplies the control with weed density (Box size) and confidence level. The values of both are then passed to the fuzzy logic control for spray decision. The Sugeno as well as Mamdani models were tested using generated values for detected weed box size and confidence levels of the computer vision. The mean absolute error obtained was 0.9 for both, and 0.3 and 0.2 respectively, for the mean square error. The error shows how accurate the system can be and with low error value, it shows that the system implementation is capable of providing control for spraying of herbicides which in turn will yield more returns for low-land rice farmers.</span>

The application of precision agriculture in farming practices results in higher yield and productivity with lower costs. Several works have applied this concept to poultry farming in an attempt to reduce human involvement, stress, fatigue, wastage of poultry feed as well as provided a high return on investment. A number of these systems lack control techniques to improve the system performance. A few works exist that implemented control techniques to improve system response, but different systems were implemented and therefore, a comparison cannot be made. In this paper the performance comparison of the Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) and the PID Controller on the Poultry Feed Dispensing System was evaluated in a quest to determine the more efficient and effective controller. The system was modelled and simulated using MATLAB SIMULINK and the performance was evaluated based on the rise time, settling time, overshoot and Integrated Absolute Error (IAE). The results showed that the system implemented with the PID and FLC performed better than the system without a control technique. The PID gave a faster system response than the FLC in the solid feed subsystem with a difference in rise time, settling time and IAE of 9.72 seconds, 11.68 seconds and 4.74 respectively. The FLC performed better in the liquid feed subsystem with a difference in rise time, settling time, overshoot and IAE of 9.22 seconds, 33.07 seconds, 13.92% and 7.18 respectively. This shows that the PID controller is more suitable in the solid feed subsystem and the FLC is more effective in the liquid feed subsystem.

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