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The United States is predicted to experience an annual decline in milk production due to heat stress of 1.4 and 1.9 kg/day by the 2050s and 2080s, with economic losses of USD 1.7 billion and USD 2.2 billion, respectively, despite current cooling efforts implemented by the dairy industry. The ability of cattle to withstand heat (i.e., thermotolerance) can be influenced by physiological and behavioral factors, even though the factors contributing to thermoregulation are heritable, and cows vary in their behavioral repertoire. The current methods to gauge cow behaviors are lacking in precision and scalability. This paper presents an approach leveraging various machine learning (ML) (e.g., CNN and YOLOv8) and computer vision (e.g., Video Processing and Annotation) techniques aimed at quantifying key behavioral indicators, specifically drinking frequency and brush use- behaviors. These behaviors, while challenging to quantify using traditional methods, offer profound insights into the autonomic nervous system function and an individual cow’s coping mechanisms under heat stress. The developed approach provides an opportunity to quantify these difficult-to-measure drinking and brush use behaviors of dairy cows milked in a robotic milking system. This approach will open up a better opportunity for ranchers to make informed decisions that could mitigate the adverse effects of heat stress. It will also expedite data collection regarding dairy cow behavioral phenotypes. Finally, the developed system is evaluated using different performance metrics, including classification accuracy. It is found that the YoloV8 and CNN models achieved a classification accuracy of 93% and 96% for object detection and classification, respectively. 

The United States has had more mass shooting incidents than any other country. It is reported that more than 1800 incidents occurred in the US during the past three years. Mass shooters often display warning signs before committing crimes, such as childhood traumas, domestic violence, firearms access, and aggressive social media posts. With the advancement of machine learning (ML), it is more possible than ever to predict mass shootings before they occur by studying the behavior of prospective mass shooters. This paper presents an ML-based system that uses various unsupervised ML models to warn about a balanced progressive tendency of a person to commit a mass shooting. Our system used two models, namely local outlier factor and K-means clustering, to learn both the psychological factors and social media activities of previous shooters to provide a probabilistic similarity of a new observation to an existing shooter. The developed system can show the similarity between a new record for a prospective shooter and one or more records from our dataset via a GUI-friendly interface. It enables users to select some social and criminal observations about the prospective shooter. Then, the webpage creates a new record, classifies it, and displays the similarity results. Furthermore, we developed a feed-in module, which allows new observations to be added to our dataset and retrains the ML models. Finally, we evaluated our system using various performance metrics. 

With sensors becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there is tremendous potential for innovative Internet of Things (IoT) applications across a wide variety of domains, including healthcare, agriculture, entertainment, environmental monitoring, and transportation. The rapid growth of IoT applications has increased the demand for experienced professionals with strong IoT hands-on skills. However, undergraduate students in STEM education still lack experience in how to use IoT technologies to develop such innovative applications. This is in part because the current computing curricula do not adequately cover the fundamental concepts of IoT. This paper presents a case study from integrating innovative IoT technologies into the Computer Science (CS) curriculum at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU). This paper presents a set of IoT learning modules that can be easily integrated into existing courses of CS curriculum to engage students in smart-IoT. The modules developed have been used to introduce a new project-based course in the CS department at PVAMU that focuses on intelligent IoT technologies. Findings from external evaluation of the curricular change are also presented. These note positive impacts on student interest in and learning about IoT across multiple courses and semesters. 

With sensors becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there is tremendous potential for Internet of Things (IoT) services that can take advantage of the data collected by these sensors. Although there are a growing number of technologies focused on IoT services, there is relatively limited foundational work on them. This is partly because of the lack of precise understanding, specification, and analysis of such services, and, consequently, there is limited platform support for programming them. In this paper, we present a formal model for understanding and enabling reasoning about distributed IoT services. The paper first studies the key properties of the IoT services profoundly, and then develops an approach for fine-grained resource coordination and control for such services. The resource model identifies the core mechanisms underlying IoT services, informing design and implementation decisions about them if implemented over a middleware or a platform. We took a multi-agent systems approach to represent IoT services, broadly founded in the actors model of concurrency. Actor-based services can be built by composing simpler services. Furthermore, we created a proximity model to represent an appropriate notion of IoT proximity. This model represents the dynamically evolving relationship between the service’s sensing and acting capabilities and the environments in which these capabilities are exercised. The paper also presents the design of a runtime environment to support the implementation of IoT services. Key mechanisms required by such services will be implemented in a distributed middleware. 

Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and heterogeneous, adding extra layers of complexity to secure communication and resource allocation. IoT computing resources are often located at the network edge and distributed across many heterogeneous sensors, actuators, and controller devices. This makes it challenging to provide the proper security mechanisms to IoT ecosystems in terms of manageability and maintainability. In an IoT ecosystem, computational resources are naturally distributed and shareable among their constituency, which creates an opportunity to distribute heavy tasks to them. However, resource allocation in IoT requires secure and complex communication and coordination mechanisms, which existing ones do not adequately support. In this paper, we present Secure Actor-based Model for IoT Communication (SecIoTComm), a model for representing secure IoT communication. SecIoTComm aims to represent secure IoT communication properties and design and implement novel mechanisms to improve their programmability and performance. SecIoTComm separates the communication and computation concerns, achieving design modularity in building IoT ecosystems. First, this paper presents the syntax and operational semantics of SecIoTComm. Then, we present an IoT framework implementing the key concepts of the model. Finally, we evaluate the developed framework using various performance and scalability metrics. 

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) has been widely used in different domains, such as car park management, traffic management, tolling, and intelligent transport systems. Despite this technology’s importance, the existing ANPR approaches suffer from the accurate identification of number plats due to its different size, orientation, and shapes across different regions worldwide. In this paper, we are studying these challenges by implementing a case study for smart car towing management using Machine Learning (ML) models. The developed mobile-based system uses different approaches and techniques to enhance the accuracy of recognizing number plates in real-time. First, we developed an algorithm to accurately detect the number plate’s location on the car body. Then, the bounding box of the plat is extracted and converted into a grayscale image. Second, we applied a series of filters to detect the alphanumeric characters’ contours within the grayscale image. Third, the detected the alphanumeric characters’ contours are fed into a K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) model to detect the actual number plat. Our model achieves an overall classification accuracy of 95% in recognizing number plates across different regions worldwide. The user interface is developed as an Android mobile app, allowing law-enforcement personnel to capture a photo of the towed car, which is then recorded in the car towing management system automatically in real-time. The app also allows owners to search for their cars, check the case status, and pay fines. Finally, we evaluated our system using various performance metrics such as classification accuracy, processing time, etc. We found that our model outperforms some state-of-the-art ANPR approaches in terms of the overall processing time.