Farkhund Iqbal

In an urban and uncontrolled environment, the presence of mixed traffic of autonomous vehicles, classical vehicles, vulnerable road users, e.g., pedestrians, and unprecedented dynamic events makes it challenging for the classical autonomous vehicle to navigate the traffic safely. Therefore, the realization of collaborative autonomous driving has the potential to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. However, an obvious challenge in this regard is how to define, model, and simulate the environment that captures the dynamics of a complex and urban environment. Therefore, in this research, we first define the dynamics of the envisioned environment, where we capture the dynamics relevant to the complex urban environment, specifically, highlighting the challenges that are unaddressed and are within the scope of collaborative autonomous driving. To this end, we model the dynamic urban environment leveraging a probabilistic graphical model (PGM). To develop the proposed solution, a realistic simulation environment is required. There are a number of simulators—CARLA (Car Learning to Act), one of the prominent ones, provides rich features and environment; however, it still fails on a few fronts, for example, it cannot fully capture the complexity of an urban environment. Moreover, the classical CARLA mainly relies on manual code and multiple conditional statements, and it provides no pre-defined way to do things automatically based on the dynamic simulation environment. Hence, there is an urgent need to extend the off-the-shelf CARLA with more sophisticated settings that can model the required dynamics. In this regard, we comprehensively design, develop, and implement an extension of a classical CARLA referred to as CARLA+ for the complex environment by integrating the PGM framework. It provides a unified framework to automate the behavior of different actors leveraging PGMs. Instead of manually catering to each condition, CARLA+ enables the user to automate the modeling of different dynamics of the environment. Therefore, to validate the proposed CARLA+, experiments with different settings are designed and conducted. The experimental results demonstrate that CARLA+ is flexible enough to allow users to model various scenarios, ranging from simple controlled models to complex models learned directly from real-world data. In the future, we plan to extend CARLA+ by allowing for more configurable parameters and more flexibility on the type of probabilistic networks and models one can choose. The open-source code of CARLA+ is made publicly available for researchers.

With the increasing adoption of digital health platforms through mobile apps and online services, people have greater flexibility connecting with medical practitioners, pharmacists, and laboratories and accessing resources to manage their own health-related concerns. Many healthcare institutions are connecting with each other to facilitate the exchange of healthcare data, with the goal of effective healthcare data management. The contents generated over these platforms are often shared with third parties for a variety of purposes. However, sharing healthcare data comes with the potential risk of exposing patients’ sensitive information to privacy threats. In this article, we address the challenge of sharing healthcare data while protecting patients’ privacy. We first model a complex healthcare dataset using a heterogeneous information network that consists of multi-type entities and their relationships. We then propose DiffHetNet , an edge-based differentially private algorithm, to protect the sensitive links of patients from inbound and outbound attacks in the heterogeneous health network. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method in terms of information utility and efficiency on different types of real-life datasets that can be modeled as networks. Experimental results suggest that DiffHetNet generally yields less information loss and is significantly more efficient in terms of runtime in comparison with existing network anonymization methods. Furthermore, DiffHetNet is scalable to large network datasets.

The fast industrial revolution all over the world has increased emission of carbon dioxide (CO2), which has badly affected the atmosphere. Main sources of CO2 emission include vehicles and factories, which use oil, gas, and coal. Similarly, due to the increased mobility of automobiles, CO2 emission increases day-by-day. Roughly, 40% of the world’s total CO2 emission is due to the use of personal cars on busy and congested roads, which burn more fuel. In addition to this, the unavailability of parking in all parts of the cities and the use of conventional methods for searching parking areas have added more to this problem. To solve the problem of reducing CO2 emission, a novel cloud-based smart parking methodology is proposed. This methodology enables drivers to automatically search for nearest parking(s) and recommend the most preferred ones that have empty lots. For determining preferences, the methodology uses the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) of multicriteria decision-making methods. For aggregating the decisions, the weighted sum model (WSM) is adopted. The methods of sorting, multilevel multifeatures filtering, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and weighted sum model (WSM) are used for ranking parking areas and recommending top-k parking to the drivers for parking their cars. To implement the methodology, a scenario comprising cars, smart parkings are considered. To use EDA, a freely available dataset “2020testcar-2020-03-03” is used for the estimation of CO2 emitted by cars. For evaluation purpose, the results obtained are compared with the results of traditional approach. The comparison results show that the proposed methodology outperforms the traditional approach.