Time series analysis and forecasting is of vital significance, owing to its widespread use in various practical domains. Time series data refers to an ordered sequence or a set of data points that a variable takes at equal time intervals. The stock market is considered to be one of the most highly complex financial systems which consist of various components or stocks, the price of which fluctuates greatly with respect to time. Stock market forecasting involves uncovering the market trends with respect to time. All the stock market investors aim to maximize the returns over their investments and minimize the risks associated. Stock markets being highly sensitive and susceptible to quick changes, the main aim of stock-trend prediction is to develop new innovative approaches to foresee the stocks that result in high profits. This research tries to analyze the time series data of the Indian stock market and build a statistical model that could efficiently predict the future stocks. INDEX TERMS ARIMA model, forecasting, stock market forecasts, time series analysis, Box-Jenkins method.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused substantial global disturbance by affecting more than 42 million people (as of the end of October 2020). Since there is no medication or vaccine available, the only way to combat it is to minimize transmission. Digital contact tracing is an effective technique that can be utilized for this purpose, as it eliminates the manual contact tracing process and could help in identifying and isolating affected people. However, users are reluctant to share their location and contact details due to concerns related to the privacy and security of their personal information, which affects its implementation and extensive adoption. Blockchain technology has been applied in various domains and has been proven to be an effective approach for handling data transactions securely, which makes it an ideal choice for digital contact tracing apps. The properties of blockchain such as time stamping and immutability of data may facilitate the retrieval of accurate information on the trail of the virus in a transparent manner, while data encryption assures the integrity of the information being provided. Furthermore, the anonymity of the user’s identity alleviates some of the risks related to privacy and confidentiality concerns. In this paper, we provide readers with a detailed discussion on the digital contact tracing mechanism and outline the apps developed so far to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, we present the possible risks, issues, and challenges associated with the available contact tracing apps and analyze how the adoption of a blockchain-based decentralized network for handling the app could provide users with privacy-preserving contact tracing without compromising performance and efficiency.

Blockchain technology plays a significant role in the industrial development. Many industries can potentially benefit from the innovations blockchain decentralization technology and privacy protocols offer with regard to securing, data access, auditing and managing transactions within digital platforms. Blockchain is based on distributed and secure decentralized protocols in which there is no single authority, and no single point of control; the data blocks are generated, added, and validated by the nodes of the network themselves. This article provides insights into the current developments within blockchain technology and explores its ability to revolutionize the multiple industrial application areas such as supply chain industry, Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, governance, finance and manufacturing. It investigates and provides insights into the security issues and threats related to the blockchain implementations by assessing the research through a systematic literature review. This article proposes possible solutions in detail for enhancing the security of the blockchain for industrial applications along with significant directions for future explorations. The study further suggests how in recent years the adoption of blockchain technology by multiple industrial sectors has gained momentum while in the finance sector it is touching new heights day by day.

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Lung cancer is the cellular fission of abnormal cells inside the lungs that leads to 72% of total deaths worldwide. Lung cancer are also recognized to be one of the leading causes of mortality, with a chance of survival of only 19%. Tumors can be diagnosed using a variety of procedures, including X-rays, CT scans, biopsies, and PET-CT scans. From the above techniques, Computer Tomography (CT) scan technique is considered to be one of the most powerful tools for an early diagnosis of lung cancers. Recently, machine and deep learning algorithms have picked up peak energy, and this aids in building a strong diagnosis and prediction system using CT scan images. But achieving the best performances in diagnosis still remains on the darker side of the research. To solve this problem, this paper proposes novel saliency-based capsule networks for better segmentation and employs the optimized pre-trained transfer learning for the better prediction of lung cancers from the input CT images. The integration of capsule-based saliency segmentation leads to the reduction and eventually reduces the risk of computational complexity and overfitting problem. Additionally, hyperparameters of pretrained networks are tuned by the whale optimization algorithm to improve the prediction accuracy by sacrificing the complexity. The extensive experimentation carried out using the LUNA-16 and LIDC Lung Image datasets and various performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score are evaluated and analyzed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework has achieved the peak performance of 98.5% accuracy, 99.0% precision, 98.8% recall, and 99.1% F1-score and outperformed the DenseNet, AlexNet, Resnets-50, Resnets-100, VGG-16, and Inception models.

Technology has impacted every field of life, and Education sector is no exception. It has seen seismic changes off-late. The traditional classroom teaching-learning process involved teachers and students using the black-board approach. But, the past years have seen a change in dynamics of this process. Technology has crept in and has profoundly changed it for better. On one hand, when traditional classrooms had teachers, students and books as players, the current classroom has teachers, students, robots, e-books, laptops and books as the players. Today’s classrooms have enabled the teaching-learning process cross boundaries in the form of e-lectures and tutorials. Massive amount of Information is readily available for the process. Also, a shift from “Teacher-centric” to “Student Centric” can be seen in the current scenario. Several technologies have been key-players in revolutionizing the education sector, but the focus of this paper is concentrated in exploiting the applications of Blockchain and IoT in the sector and identifying the areas where they prove to be beneficial. An extensive literature survey shall be done to understand, and identify how these technologies are a solution to major educational problems. The teaching learning process needs to be understood with respect to various parameters: change in process, change in players, change in outcomes derived, and others. The associated challenges shall also be identified. A detailed analysis of these enables us to conclude that these technologies, can revolutionize the education sector for better in future, particularly Blockchain is young, but, owing to the benefits derived from it, further research and adoption shall for surely change the teaching-learning process.

Connected vehicles are a vital part of smart cities, which connect over a wireless connection and bring mobile computation and communication abilities. As a mediator, fog computing resides between vehicles and the cloud and provides vehicles with processing, storage, and networking power through Vehicular Ad-hoc networks (VANET). VANET is a time-sensitive technology that requires less time to process a request received from a vehicle. Delay and latency are the notorious issues of VANET and fog computing. To deal with such problems, in this work, we developed a priority-based fog computing model for smart urban vehicle transportation that reduces the delay and latency of fog computing. To upgrade the fog computing infrastructure to meet the latency and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, 5G localized Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) servers have also been used, which resulted tremendously in reducing the delay and the latency. We decreased the data latency by 20% compared to the experiment carried using only cloud computing architecture. We also reduced the processing delay by 35% compared with the utilization of cloud computing architecture.

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