With the rapid development of informatization, a vast amount of data is continuously generated and accumulated, leading to the emergence of cloud storage services. However, data stored in the cloud is beyond the control of users, posing various security risks. Cloud data auditing technology enables the inspection of data integrity in the cloud without the necessity of data downloading. Among these, public auditing schemes have experienced rapid development due to their ability to avoid additional user auditing expenses. However, malicious third-party auditors can compromise data privacy. This paper proposes an improved identity-based cloud auditing scheme that can resist malicious auditors. This scheme is also constructed on an identity-based public auditing scheme using blockchain to prevent malicious auditing. We found the scheme is not secure because a malicious cloud server can forge authentication tags for outsourced data blocks, while our scheme has not these security flaws. Through security proofs and performance analysis, we further demonstrate that our scheme is secure and efficient. Additionally, our scheme has typical application scenarios.

In human microbiome studies, mediation analysis has recently been spotlighted as a practical and powerful analytic tool to survey the causal roles of the microbiome as a mediator to explain the observed relationships between a medical treatment/environmental exposure and a human disease. We also note that, in a clinical research, investigators often trace disease progression sequentially in time; as such, time-to-event (e.g., time-to-disease, time-to-cure) responses, known as survival responses, are prevalent as a surrogate variable for human health or disease. In this paper, we introduce a web cloud computing platform, named as microbiome mediation analysis with survival responses (MiMedSurv), for comprehensive microbiome mediation analysis with survival responses on user-friendly web environments. MiMedSurv is an extension of our prior web cloud computing platform, named as microbiome mediation analysis (MiMed), for survival responses. The two main features that are well-distinguished are as follows. First, MiMedSurv conducts some baseline exploratory non-mediational survival analysis, not involving microbiome, to survey the disparity in survival response between medical treatments/environmental exposures. Then, MiMedSurv identifies the mediating roles of the microbiome in various aspects: (i) as a microbial ecosystem using ecological indices (e.g., alpha and beta diversity indices) and (ii) as individual microbial taxa in various hierarchies (e.g., phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, species). To illustrate its use, we survey the mediating roles of the gut microbiome between antibiotic treatment and time-to-type 1 diabetes. MiMedSurv is freely available on our web server ( http://mimedsurv.micloud.kr ).

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The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) counts for much in advancing intelligent transportation by connecting people, vehicles, infrastructures, and cloud servers (CS). However, the open-access wireless channels within the IoV are susceptible to malicious attacks. Therefore, an authentication key agreement protocol becomes essential to ensure secure vehicular communications and protect vehicle privacy. Nevertheless, although the vehicles in the group are compromised, they can still update the group key and obtain the communication content in the existing group key agreement protocols. Therefore, it is still challenging to guarantee post-compromise forward security (PCFS). Dynamic key rotation is a common approach to realizing PCFS, which brings a heavy computation and communication burden. To address these issues, an efficient and robust continuous group key agreement (ER-CGKA) scheme with PCFS is designed for IoV. The propose-and-commit flow is employed to support asynchronous group key updates. Besides, the computation cost and communication overhead are significantly reduced based on the TreeKEM architecture. Furthermore, we adopt the threshold mechanism to resist the collusion attacks of malicious vehicles, which enhances the ER-CGKA scheme\'s robustness. Security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme satisfies all the fundamental security requirements of the IoV and achieves PCFS. The performance evaluation results show that our ER-CGKA scheme demonstrates a reduction in the computation cost of 18.82% (Client) and 33.18% (CS) approximately, and an increase in communication overhead of around 55.57% since pseudonyms are utilized to achieve conditional privacy-preserving. Therefore, our ER-CGKA scheme is secure and practical.

This paper outlines the protocol for the deployment of a cloud-based universal medical image repository system. The proposal aims not only at the deployment but also at the automatic expansion of the platform, incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the analysis of medical image examinations. The methodology encompasses efficient data management through a universal database, along with the deployment of various AI models designed to assist in diagnostic decision-making. By presenting this protocol, the goal is to overcome technical challenges and issues that impact all phases of the workflow, from data management to the deployment of AI models in the healthcare sector. These challenges include ethical considerations, compliance with legal regulations, establishing user trust, and ensuring data security. The system has been deployed, with a tested and validated proof of concept, possessing the capability to receive thousands of images daily and to sustain the ongoing deployment of new AI models to expedite the analysis process in medical image exams.

Task scheduling is a critical challenge in cloud computing systems, greatly impacting their performance. Task scheduling is a nondeterministic polynomial time hard (NP-Hard) problem that complicates the search for nearly optimal solutions. Five major uncertainty parameters, i.e., security, traffic, workload, availability, and price, influence task scheduling decisions. The primary rationale for selecting these uncertainty parameters lies in the challenge of accurately measuring their values, as empirical estimations often diverge from the actual values. The integral-valued Pythagorean fuzzy set (IVPFS) is a promising mathematical framework to deal with parametric uncertainties. The Dyna Q+ algorithm is the updated form of the Dyna Q agent designed specifically for dynamic computing environments by providing bonus rewards to non-exploited states. In this paper, the Dyna Q+ agent is enriched with the IVPFS mathematical framework to make intelligent task scheduling decisions. The performance of the proposed IVPFS Dyna Q+ task scheduler is tested using the CloudSim 3.3 simulator. The execution time is reduced by 90%, the makespan time is also reduced by 90%, the operation cost is below 50%, and the resource utilization rate is improved by 95%, all of these parameters meeting the desired standards or expectations. The results are also further validated using an expected value analysis methodology that confirms the good performance of the task scheduler. A better balance between exploration and exploitation through rigorous action-based learning is achieved by the Dyna Q+ agent.

Recent years, edge-cloud computing has attracted more and more attention due to benefits from the combination of edge and cloud computing. Task scheduling is still one of the major challenges for improving service quality and resource efficiency of edge-clouds. Though several researches have studied on the scheduling problem, there remains issues needed to be addressed for their applications, e.g., ignoring resource heterogeneity, focusing on only one kind of requests. Therefore, in this paper, we aim at providing a heterogeneity aware task scheduling algorithm to improve task completion rate and resource utilization for edge-clouds with deadline constraints. Due to NP-hardness of the scheduling problem, we exploit genetic algorithm (GA), one of the most representative and widely used meta-heuristic algorithms, to solve the problem considering task completion rate and resource utilization as major and minor optimization objectives, respectively. In our GA-based scheduling algorithm, a gene indicates which resource that its corresponding task is processed by. To improve the performance of GA, we propose to exploit a skew mutation operator where genes are associated to resource heterogeneity during the population evolution. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our algorithm, and results verify the performance superiority of our algorithm in task completion rate, compared with other thirteen classical and up-to-date scheduling algorithms.

The importance of incorporating an agile approach into creating sustainable products has been widely discussed. This approach can enhance innovation integration, improve adaptability to changing development circumstances, and increase the efficiency and quality of the product development process. While many agile methods have originated in the software development context and have been formulated based on successful software projects, they often fail due to incorrect procedures and a lack of acceptance, preventing deep integration into the process. Additionally, decision-making for market evaluation is often hindered by unclear and subjective information. Therefore, this study introduces an extended TOPSIS (Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method for sustainable product development. This method leverages the benefits of cloud model theory to address randomness and uncertainty (intrapersonal uncertainty) and the advantages of rough set theory to flexibly handle market demand uncertainty without requiring extra information. The study proposes an integrated weighting method that considers both subjective and objective weights to determine comprehensive criteria weights. It also presents a new framework, named Sustainable Agility of Product Development (SAPD), which aims to evaluate criteria for assessing sustainable product development. To validate the effectiveness of this proposed method, a case study is conducted on small and medium enterprises in China. The obtained results show that the company needs to conduct product structure research and development to realize new product functions.

The definition of service has evolved from a focus on material value in manufacturing before the 2000s to a customer-centric value based on the significant growth of the service industry. Digital transformation has become essential for companies in the service industry due to the incorporation of digital technology through the Fourth Industrial Revolution and COVID-19. This study utilised Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) to analyse 3029 international patents related to the customer service industry and digital transformation registered between 2000 and 2022. Through topic modelling, this study identified 10 major topics in the customer service industry and analysed their yearly trends. Our findings show that as of 2022, the trend with the highest frequency is user-centric network service design, while cloud computing has experienced the steepest increase in the last five years. User-centric network services have been steadily developing since the inception of the Internet. Cloud computing is one of the key technologies being developed intensively in 2023 for the digital transformation of customer service. This study identifies time series trends of customer service industry patents and suggests the effectiveness of using BERTopic to predict future trends in technology.

Cloud computing is a popular, flexible, scalable, and cost-effective technology in the modern world that provides on-demand services dynamically. The dynamic execution of user requests and resource-sharing facilities require proper task scheduling among the available virtual machines, which is a significant issue and plays a crucial role in developing an optimal cloud computing environment. Round Robin is a prevalent scheduling algorithm for fair distribution of resources with a balanced contribution in minimized response time and turnaround time. This paper introduced a new enhanced round-robin approach for task scheduling in cloud computing systems. The proposed algorithm generates and keeps updating a dynamic quantum time for process execution, considering the available number of process in the system and their burst length. Since our method dynamically runs processes, it is appropriate for a real-time environment like cloud computing. The notable part of this approach is the capability of scheduling tasks with asymmetric distribution of burst time, avoiding the convoy effect. The experimental result indicates that the proposed algorithm has outperformed the existing improved round-robin task scheduling approaches in terms of minimized average waiting time, average turnaround time, and number of context switches. Comparing the method against five other enhanced round robin approaches, it reduced average waiting times by 15.77% and context switching by 20.68% on average. After executing the experiment and comparative study, it can be concluded that the proposed enhanced round-robin scheduling algorithm is optimal, acceptable, and relatively better suited for cloud computing environments.