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Abstract-Universities gather large volumes of data with reference to their students in electronic form. The advances in the data mining field make it possible to mine these educational data and find information that allow for innovative ways of supporting both teachers and students. This paper presents a case study on predicting performance of students at the end of a university degree at an early stage of the degree program, in order to help universities not only to focus more on bright students but also to initially identify students with low academic achievement and find ways to support them. The data of four academic cohorts comprising 347 undergraduate students have been mined with different classifiers. The results show that it is possible to predict the graduation performance in 4th year at university using only pre-university marks and marks of 1st and 2nd year courses, no socio-economic or demographic features, with a reasonable accuracy. Furthermore courses that are indicators of particularly good or poor performance have been identified.

While our conventional cryptography methods, such for AES (encryption), SHA-256 (hashing) and RSA/Elliptic Curve (signing), work well on systems which have reasonable processing power and memory capabilities, these do not scale well into a world with embedded systems and sensor networks. Thus, lightweight cryptography methods are proposed to overcome many of the problems of conventional cryptography. This includes constraints related to physical size, processing requirements, memory limitation and energy drain. This paper outlines many of the techniques that are defined as replacements for conventional cryptography within an Internet of things space and discuss some trends in the design of lightweight algorithms.

Space division multiplexing using multicore fibers is becoming a more and more promising technology. In space-division multiplexing fiber network, the reconfigurable switch is one of the most critical components in network nodes. In this paper we for the first time demonstrate reconfigurable space-division multiplexing switching using silicon photonic integrated circuit, which is fabricated on a novel silicon-on-insulator platform with buried Al mirror. The silicon photonic integrated circuit is composed of a 7 × 7 switch and low loss grating coupler array based multicore fiber couplers. Thanks to the Al mirror, grating couplers with ultra-low coupling loss with optical multicore fibers is achieved. The lowest total insertion loss of the silicon integrated circuit is as low as 4.5 dB, with low crosstalk lower than −30 dB. Excellent performances in terms of low insertion loss and low crosstalk are obtained for the whole C-band. 1 Tb/s/core transmission over a 2-km 7-core fiber and space-division multiplexing switching is demonstrated successfully. Bit error rate performance below 10−9 is obtained for all spatial channels with low power penalty. The proposed design can be easily upgraded to reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer capable of switching several multicore fibers.

The use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology is growing exponentially as more consumers and businesses acknowledge the benefits offered by the intelligent and smart devices. Drone technology is a rapidly emerging sector within the IoT and the risk of hacking could not only cause a data breach, it could also pose a major risk to the public safety. Thanks to their versatile applications and access to real-time data, commercial drones are used across a wide variety of smart city applications. However, as with many IoT devices, security is often an afterthought, leaving many drones vulnerable to hackers. This paper investigates the current state of drone security and demonstrates a set of WiFi enabled drone vulnerabilities. Five different types of attacks, together with the potential of automation of attacks, was identified and applied to two different types of commercially available drones. The communication links are investigated for the attacks, i.e. Denial of Service, Deauthentication Methods, Man-in-the-Middle, Unauthorised Root Access and Packet Spoofing. Lastly, the unauthorised root access was automated through the use of a Raspberry-Pi 3 and WiFi Pineapple. Furthermore, we outlined the methodology for each attack, and the experimental part outlines the findings and processes of the attacks. Finally, the paper addresses the current state of drone security, management, control, resilience, security, and privacy concerns.

Abstract-Near field imaging using microwaves in medical applications is of great current interest for its capability and accuracy in identifying features of interest, in comparison with other known screening tools. This paper documents microwave imaging experiments on breast cancer detection, using active antenna tuning to obtain matching over a wide bandwidth. A simple phantom consisting of a plastic container with a low dielectric material emulating fatty tissue and a high dielectric constant object emulating a tumor is scanned between 4 to 8 GHz with a UWB microstrip antenna. Measurements indicate that this prototype microwave sensor is a good candidate for such imaging applications.

The parametric optimization of Digital Backward Propagation (DBP) algorithm for mitigating fiber transmission impairments is proposed and numerically demonstrated for phase modulated signals in mixed-optical fiber transmission link. The optimization of parameters i.e. dispersion (D) and non-linear coefficient (γ) offer improved eye-opening (EO). We investigate the optimization of iterative and non-iterative symmetric split-step Fourier method (S-SSFM) for solving the inverse non-linear Schrödinger equation (NLSE). Optimized DBP algorithm, with step-size equal to fiber module length i.e. one calculation step per fiber span for obtaining higher computational efficiency, is implemented at the receiver as a digital signal processing (DSP) module. The system performance is evaluated by EO-improvement for diverse in-line compensation schemes. Using computationally efficient non-iterative symmetric split-step Fourier method (NIS-SSFM) upto 3.6 dB referenced EO-improvement can be obtained at 6 dBm signal launch power by optimizing and modifying DBP algorithm parameters, based on the characterization of the individual fiber types, in mixed-optical fiber transmission link.

High/ultra-high speed data connections are currently being developed, and by the year 2020, it is expected that the 5th generation networking (5GN) should be much smarter. It would provide great quality of service (QoS) due to low latency, less implementation cost and high efficiency in data processing. These networks could be either a pointto-point (P2P) communication link or a point-to-multipoint (P2M) communication link, which, P2M is also known as multicasting that addresses multiple subscribers. The P2M systems usually have diverse nodes (also called as 'Things') according to services and levels of security required. These nodes need an uninterrupted network inter-connectivity as well as a cloud platform to manage data sharing and storage. However, the Internet of Things (IoT), with real-time applications like in smart cities, wearable gadgets, medical, military, connected driver-less cars, etc., includes massive data processing and transmission. Nevertheless, integrated circuits (ICs) deployed in IoT based infrastructures have strong constraints in terms of size, cost, power consumption and security. Concerning the last aspect, the main challenges identified so far are resilience of the deployed infrastructure, confidentiality, integrity of exchanged data, user privacy and authenticity. Therefore, well secured and effective cryptographic algorithms are needed that cause small hardware footprints, i.e. Lightweight Cryptography (LWC), also with the provision of robustness, long range transfer of encrypted data and acceptable level of security.In this paper, the implementation, challenges and futuristic applications of LWC algorithms for smart IoT devices have been discussed, especially the performance of Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) which is an open standard that defines the communication protocol for Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology.