STOPPAGE: Spatio-temporal data driven cloud-fog-edge computing framework for pandemic monitoring and management

Several global health incidents and evidences show the increasing likelihood of pandemics (large-scale outbreaks of infectious disease), which has adversely affected all aspects of human lives. It is essential to develop an analytics framework by extracting and incorporating the knowledge of heterogeneous data-sources to deliver insights for enhancing preparedness to combat the pandemic. Specifically, human mobility, travel history, and other transport statistics have significantly impact on the spread of any infectious disease. This article proposes a spatio-temporal knowledge mining framework, named STOPPAGE, to model the impact of human mobility and other contextual information over the large geographic areas in different temporal scales. The framework has two key modules: (i) spatio-temporal data and computing infrastructure using fog/edge based architecture;and (ii) spatio-temporal data analytics module to efficiently extract knowledge from heterogeneous data sources. We created a pandemic-knowledge graph to discover correlations among mobility information and disease spread, a deep learning architecture to predict the next hotspot zones. Further, we provide necessary support in home-health monitoring utilizing Femtolet and fog/edge based solutions. The experimental evaluations on real-life datasets related to COVID-19 in India illustrate the efficacy of the proposed methods. STOPPAGE outperforms the existing works and baseline methods in terms of accuracy by (Formula presented.) (18–21)% in predicting hotspots and reduces the power consumption of the smartphone significantly. The scalability study yields that the STOPPAGE framework is flexible enough to analyze a huge amount of spatio-temporal datasets and reduces the delay in predicting health status compared to the existing studies. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

iFaaSBus: A Security- and Privacy-Based Lightweight Framework for Serverless Computing Using IoT and Machine Learning

As data of COVID-19 patients is increasing, the new framework is required to secure the data collected from various Internet of Things (IoT) devices and predict the trend of disease to reduce its spreading. This article proposes security- and privacy-based lightweight framework called iFaaSBus, which uses the concept of IoT, machine learning (ML), and function as a service (FaaS) or serverless computing to diagnose the COVID-19 disease and manages resources automatically to enable dynamic scalability. iFaaSBus offers OAuth-2.0 Authorization protocol-based privacy and JSON Web Token & Transport Layer Socket protocol-based security to secure the patient's health data. iFaaSBus outperforms response time compared to nonserverless computing while responding to up to 1100 concurrent requests. Further, the performance of various ML models is evaluated based on accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, and area under the curve (AUC) values, and the K-nearest neighbor model gives the highest accuracy rate of 97.51%.

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Resource Management in Hybrid Clouds Harnessing Renewable Energy and Task Scheduling

The use of cloud computing for delivering application services over the Internet has gained rapid traction. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the work from home scheme and increased business presence online have created more demand for computing resources. Many enterprises and organizations are expanding their private data centres and utilizing hybrid or multi-cloud environments for their IT infrastructure. Because of the ever-increasing demand for computing resources, energy consumption and carbon emission have become a pressing issue. Renewable energy sources have been recognized as clean and sustainable alternatives to fossil-fuel based brown energy. However, due to the intermittent nature of availability of renewable energy sources, it brings many challenges to automatically and efficiently schedule tasks under renewable energy constraints and deadlines. Task scheduling with traditional heuristic algorithms are not able to adapt quickly with changing energy availability and stochastic task arrival. In this regard, this work aims at building a novel scheduling policy with deep reinforcement learning, which automatically applies scheduling techniques like workload shifting and cloud-bursting in a geographically distributed hybrid multi-cloud environment consists of multiple private and public clouds. Our primary goals are maximizing renewable energy utilization and avoiding deadline constraint violations. We also introduce user configurable hyper-parameters to enable multi-objective scheduling on cloud cost, makespan and utilization. Our experiment results show that the proposed scheduling approach can achieve the aforementioned objectives dynamically to varying renewable energy availability. © 2021 IEEE.

High-Performance Mining of COVID-19 Open Research Datasets for Text Classification and Insights in Cloud Computing Environments

The COVID-19 global pandemic is an unprecedented health crisis. Many researchers around the world have produced an extensive collection of literature since the outbreak. Analysing this information to extract knowledge and provide meaningful insights in a timely manner requires a considerable amount of computational power. Cloud platforms are designed to provide this computational power in an on-demand and elastic manner. Specifically, hybrid clouds, composed of private and public data centers, are particularly well suited to deploy computationally intensive workloads in a cost-efficient, yet scalable manner. In this paper, we developed a system utilising the Aneka Platform as a Service middleware with parallel processing and multi-cloud capability to accelerate the data process pipeline and article categorising process using machine learning on a hybrid cloud. The results are then persisted for further referencing, searching and visualising. The performance evaluation shows that the system can help with reducing processing time and achieving linear scalability. Beyond COVID-19, the application might be used directly in broader scholarly article indexing and analysing.