Elias Kougianos

Jayakrishna Amathi, Venkata Prasanth Yanambaka, Saraju P. Mohanty et al.

Despite the success of deep neural networks in vision, medical diagnosis, and IoT scenarios, their deployment on resource-limited platforms poses serious challenges due to their high storage requirements, computational complexity, and large footprint. In particular, fully connected layers require a large number of weights, making it difficult for edge devices to accommodate them. To overcome these challenges associated with limited platforms, this paper proposes the Two-Valued Symmetric Circulant Matrix (TVSCM), a very sparse architecture that employs just two weights per layer to keep it circulant and symmetric. The extreme form of structured sparse architecture provides negligible storage costs compared to traditional full-weight storage. Instead of hardware and additional stages of other traditional sparse learning techniques, such as low-rank approximation and pruning approaches, this architecture provides an extreme form of sparsity, achieving very minimal storage requirements. The simulation study demonstrates more than 80$\times$ reduction in model parameters, reducing parameters from 623,290 to 7,852 on MNIST and from 24,709 to 942 on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset, while maintaining comparable accuracy from 97.6% to 93.5% on MNIST and from 97.6% to 93.1% on MIT-BIH. Due to its minimal architectural requirements and very low power consumption, this architecture would be ideal for edge computing platforms, tiny-ML platforms, IoMT systems, and battery-powered systems.

Alakananda Mitra, Saraju P. Mohanty, Elias Kougianos

We live in the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Deepfakes and Large Language Models (LLMs) are two examples of GenAI. Deepfakes, in particular, pose an alarming threat to society as they are capable of spreading misinformation and changing the truth. LLMs are powerful language models that generate general-purpose language. However due to its generative aspect, it can also be a risk for people if used with ill intentions. The ethical use of these technologies is a big concern. This short article tries to find out the interrelationship between them.

Abdulrahman Alkinani, Alakananda Mitra, Saraju P. Mohanty et al.

Fruits are rich sources of essential vitamins and nutrients that are vital for human health. This study introduces two fully automated devices, FruitPAL and its updated version, FruitPAL 2.0, which aim to promote safe fruit consumption while reducing health risks. Both devices leverage a high-quality dataset of fifteen fruit types and use advanced models- YOLOv8 and YOLOv5 V6.0- to enhance detection accuracy. The original FruitPAL device can identify various fruit types and notify caregivers if an allergic reaction is detected, thanks to YOLOv8's improved accuracy and rapid response time. Notifications are transmitted via the cloud to mobile devices, ensuring real-time updates and immediate accessibility. FruitPAL 2.0 builds upon this by not only detecting fruit but also estimating its nutritional value, thereby encouraging healthy consumption. Trained on the YOLOv5 V6.0 model, FruitPAL 2.0 analyzes fruit intake to provide users with valuable dietary insights. This study aims to promote fruit consumption by helping individuals make informed choices, balancing health benefits with allergy awareness. By alerting users to potential allergens while encouraging the consumption of nutrient-rich fruits, these devices support both health maintenance and dietary awareness.

Anand K. Bapatla, Saraju P. Mohanty, Elias Kougianos

Access to essential medication is a primary right of every individual in all developed, developing and underdeveloped countries. This can be fulfilled by pharmaceutical supply chains (PSC) in place which will eliminate the boundaries between different organizations and will equip them to work collectively to make medicines reach even the remote corners of the globe. Due to multiple entities, which are geographically widespread, being involved and very complex goods and economic flows, PSC is very difficult to audit and resolve any issues involved. This has given rise to many issues, including increased threats of counterfeiting, inaccurate information propagation throughout the network because of data fragmentation, lack of customer confidence and delays in distribution of medication to the place in need. Hence, there is a strong need for robust PSC which is transparent to all parties involved and in which the whole journey of medicine from manufacturer to consumer can be tracked and traced easily. This will not only build safety for the consumers, but will also help manufacturers to build confidence among consumers and increase sales. In this article, a novel Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based transparent supply chain architecture is proposed and a proof-of-concept is implemented. Efficiency and scalability of the proposed architecture is evaluated and compared with existing solutions.

Deepak Puthal, Saraju P. Mohanty, Venkata P. Yanambaka et al.

In today's connected world, resource constrained devices are deployed for sensing and decision making applications, ranging from smart cities to environmental monitoring. Those recourse constrained devices are connected to create real-time distributed networks popularly known as the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing and edge computing. The blockchain is gaining a lot of interest in these domains to secure the system by ignoring centralized dependencies, where proof-of-work (PoW) plays a vital role to make the whole security solution decentralized. Due to the resource limitations of the devices, PoW is not suitable for blockchain-based security solutions. This paper presents a novel consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh), which introduces a cryptographic authentication mechanism to replace PoW for resource constrained devices, and to make the blockchain application-specific. PoAh is thus suitable for private as well as permissioned blockchains. Further, PoAh not only secures the systems, but also maintains system sustainability and scalability. The proposed consensus algorithm is evaluated theoretically in simulation scenarios, and in real-time hardware testbeds to validate its performance. Finally, PoAh and its integration with the blockchain in the IoT and edge computing scenarios is discussed. The proposed PoAh, while running in limited computer resources (e.g. single-board computing devices like the Raspberry Pi) has a latency in the order of 3 secs.

Saraju P. Mohanty, Venkata P. Yanambaka, Elias Kougianos et al.

This article presents the first-ever blockchain which can simultaneously handle device and data security, which is important for the emerging Internet-of-Everything (IoE). This article presents a unique concept of blockchain that integrates hardware security primitives called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to solve scalability, latency, and energy requirement challenges and is called PUFchain. Data management and security (and privacy) of data, devices, and individuals, are some of the issues in the IoE architectures that need to be resolved. Integrating the blockchain into the IoE environment can help solve these issues and helps in the aspects of data storage and security. This article introduces a new blockchain architecture called PUFchain and introduces a new consensus algorithm called "Proof of PUF-Enabled Authentication" (PoP) for deployment in PUFchain. The proposed PoP is the PUF integration into our previously proposed Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh) consensus algorithm and can be called "Hardware-Assisted Proof-of-Authentication (HA-PoAh)". However, PUF integration is possible in the existing and new consensus algorithms. PoP utilizes PUFs which are responsible for generating a unique key that cannot be cloned and hence provide the highest level of security. A PUF uses the nanoelectronic manufacturing variations that are introduced during the fabrication of an integrated circuit to generate the keys. Hence, once generated from a PUF module, the keys cannot be cloned or generated from any other module. PUFchain uses a PUF and Hashing module which performs the necessary cryptographic functions. Hence the mining process is offloaded to the hardware module which reduces the processing times. PoP is approximately 1,000X faster than the well-established Proof-of-Work (PoW) and 5X faster than Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh).