Pranav M. Pawar

Kanishkha Jaisankar, Pranav M. Pawar, Diana Susane Joseph et al.

Deep learning and computer vision techniques have become increasingly important in the development of self-driving cars. These techniques play a crucial role in enabling self-driving cars to perceive and understand their surroundings, allowing them to safely navigate and make decisions in real-time. Using Neural Networks self-driving cars can accurately identify and classify objects such as pedestrians, other vehicles, and traffic signals. Using deep learning and analyzing data from sensors such as cameras and radar, self-driving cars can predict the likely movement of other objects and plan their own actions accordingly. In this study, a novel approach to enhance the performance of selfdriving cars by using pre-trained and custom-made neural networks for key tasks, including traffic sign classification, vehicle detection, lane detection, and behavioral cloning is provided. The methodology integrates several innovative techniques, such as geometric and color transformations for data augmentation, image normalization, and transfer learning for feature extraction. These techniques are applied to diverse datasets,including the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB), road and lane segmentation datasets, vehicle detection datasets, and data collected using the Udacity selfdriving car simulator to evaluate the model efficacy. The primary objective of the work is to review the state-of-the-art in deep learning and computer vision for self-driving cars. The findings of the work are effective in solving various challenges related to self-driving cars like traffic sign classification, lane prediction, vehicle detection, and behavioral cloning, and provide valuable insights into improving the robustness and reliability of autonomous systems, paving the way for future research and deployment of safer and more efficient self-driving technologies.

Shini Girija, Pranav M. Pawar, Raja Muthalagu et al.

Privacy has always been a critical issue in the digital era, particularly with the increasing use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. As the IoT continues to transform industries such as healthcare, smart cities, and home automation, it has also introduced serious challenges regarding the security of sensitive and private data. This paper examines the complex landscape of digital privacy in IoT ecosystems, highlighting the need to protect personally identifiable information (PII) of individuals and uphold their rights to digital independence. Global events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have accelerated the adoption of IoT, raising concerns about privacy and data protection. This paper provides an in-depth examination of digital privacy risks in the IoT domain and introduces a clear taxonomy for evaluating them using the IEEE Digital Privacy Model. The proposed framework categorizes privacy risks into five types: identity-oriented, behavioral, inference, data manipulation, and regulatory risks. We review existing digital privacy solutions, including encryption technologies, blockchain, federated learning, differential privacy, reinforcement learning, AI, and dynamic consent mechanisms, to mitigate these risks. We also highlight how these privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) help with data confidentiality, access control, and trust management. Additionally, this study presents AURA-IoT, a futuristic framework that tackles AI-driven privacy risks through a multi-layered structure. AURA-IoT integrates adversarial robustness, explainability, transparency, fairness, compliance, dynamic consent, and policy enforcement mechanisms to ensure digital privacy, security, and accountable IoT operations. Finally, we discuss ongoing challenges and potential research directions for integrating AI and encryption-based privacy solutions to achieve comprehensive digital privacy in future IoT systems.

Pranav M. Pawar, Amir Leshem

Spectrum sharing among users is a fundamental problem in the management of any wireless network. In this paper, we discuss the problem of distributed spectrum collaboration without central management under general unknown channels. Since the cost of communication, coordination and control is rapidly increasing with the number of devices and the expanding bandwidth used there is an obvious need to develop distributed techniques for spectrum collaboration where no explicit signaling is used. In this paper, we combine game-theoretic insights with deep Q-learning to provide a novel asymptotically optimal solution to the spectrum collaboration problem. We propose a deterministic distributed deep reinforcement learning(D3RL) mechanism using a deep Q-network (DQN). It chooses the channels using the Q-values and the channel loads while limiting the options available to the user to a few channels with the highest Q-values and among those, it selects the least loaded channel. Using insights from both game theory and combinatorial optimization we show that this technique is asymptotically optimal for large overloaded networks. The selected channel and the outcome of the successful transmission are fed back into the learning of the deep Q-network to incorporate it into the learning of the Q-values. We also analyzed performance to understand the behavior of D3RL in differ