Stacked Denoising Autoencoders (SDA) are deep networks which have gained popularity owing to their superior performance in image classification applications, but they haven't been used much in healthcare applications. SDA can be efficiently retrained to adapt to large streams of data, and this property is used in this work to develop a technique for classification of arrhythmias in a patient-specific manner. This approach is particularly useful in continuous remote systems because they gather large amounts of data for longer periods of time. Blockchain is a decentralized distributed ledger which secures transactions with cryptography. It is proposed as an access control manager to securely store and access data required by the classifier during retraining in real-time from an external data storage. This work uses MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database and the results show an increased accuracy for Ventricular Ectopic Beats (VEB) (99.15%) and Supraventricular Ectopic Beats (SVEB) (98.55%), which is higher than the published results of deep networks that are not retrained.
Wireless network virtualization is regarded as an emerging paradigm to enhance RF spectrum utilization to support exponentially increasing demand caused by emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. To create virtual wireless networks (VWNs), there are no automated secure approaches for allocating RF spectrum to meet the dynamically changing quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the users. In wireless networks, RF spectrum is shared among many users and the given RF spectrum could be easily overcrowded because of the over commitment of limited resources by the service providers. There is a direct incentive in terms of revenue to service providers to have more number of users. In this paper, we propose to leverage a distributed Blockchain - also known as a public ledger - based scheme to create VWNs where primary wireless resource-owners (PWROs) sublease their wireless resources (e.g., slice of RF spectrum, infrastructure) to mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) using machine-to-machine communication based on the service level agreements (SLAs) between PWROs and MVNOs. The proposed distributed Blockchain-based scheme provides security to participating PWROs and MVNOs as well as prevents PWROs from over committing their resources (that stops double spending) and helps MVNOs to meet the QoS requirements of their users. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or similar regulatory bodies in other countries participate in this framework by providing the guidelines and regulations about maximum power levels, licensing and geographic coverages, etc. This essentially helps users to meet their desired QoS requirements while complying the government regulations. Performance is evaluated using numerical results.
In this paper, we aim to provide a power trade system that will promote a sustainable electrical energy transaction ecosystem between prosumers and consumers of smart homes. We suggest a blockchain-based peer-to-peer (P2P) energy transaction platform be implemented to enable efficient electrical energy transaction between prosumers. We suggest the platform be built on the blockchain, as this technology allows a decentralized and distributed trading system, and allows a more transparent, trustworthy and secure P2P trading environment. We believe that such characteristics of the blockchain are necessary in electrical energy transactions within the smart home environment because the smart home aims to enhance user comfort and security, along with energy conservation and cost-savings. First, we classify the two different types of P2P trade to identify which will best benefit from the use of the suggested blockchain-based P2P energy-transaction platform. Within the two types of P2P trade, that we classify (pure P2P trade and hybrid P2P trade), the hybrid P2P trade will benefit more from a blockchain-based P2P energy-transaction platform. In the blockchain-based P2P energy-transaction platform, a smart contract is embedded in the blockchain and called an energy tag. The energy tag will set conditions for making every future energy transaction more cost-efficient while maintaining the most ideal and high-quality energy selection. With the blockchain-based energy tag in the energy-transaction process, multiple energy resources and home appliances will be democratically connected in order to provide users with high-quality, low-cost energy at all times and locations. In this paper, we provide simulation results that compare the unit price of electrical energy on the suggested platform to the unit price of electrical energy set by currently existing conventional power-generation companies. Additionally, we present simulation results that calculate how long initial investments to create a smart home environment that enables P2P energy transactions will take to be paid back. Based on simulation results, we believe that, in the long run, the suggested blockchain-based P2P energy-transaction platform will create a sustainable energy-transaction environment between consumers and prosumers, and the expanding ecosystem will enable the development of a trusted, sustainable, secure and energy-efficient energy transaction environment.
While the rapid development of IoT devices is changing our daily lives, some particular issues hinder the massive deployment of IoT devices. For example, current network ID management system cannot handle so many new terminals; there is no agreed security standards for IoT manufacturers to follow when designing their products. The whole IoT industry is expecting the breakthrough in network infrastructure and the development of novel security mechanisms that can enable the flexible, secure and reliable access and management of IoT devices. Bitcoin, first released in 2009, breeds the decentralized Blockchain technology. The decentralization, anonymity and proof of security characteristics of Blockchain can prevent collusion and single point failure of a centralized server. We believe that the application of Blockchain into the IoT system can clear the obstacles facing the development of IoT architecture and security. To this end, we propose an out-of-band two-factor authentication scheme for IoT devices based on Blockchain infrastructure. We implemented the IoT and Blockchain integrated system with Eris Blockchain and equivalent computing devices to emulate IoT devices. The overheads to run Blockchain and smart contract services on the emulator devices are measured. The BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi 3 nodes have an average memory usage of 29.5M, and the CPU usage of 29.55% and 13.35%, respectively.
Stjepan Begušić, Zvonko Kostanjčar, H. Eugene Stanley, Boris Podobnik
Detection of power-law behavior and studies of scaling exponents uncover the characteristics of complexity in many real world phenomena. The complexity of financial markets has always presented challenging issues and provided interesting findings, such as the inverse cubic law in the tails of stock price fluctuation distributions. Motivated by the rise of novel digital assets based on blockchain technology, we study the distributions of cryptocurrency price fluctuations. We consider Bitcoin returns over various time intervals and from multiple digital exchanges, in order to investigate the existence of universal scaling behavior in the tails, and ascertain whether the scaling exponent supports the presence of a finite second moment. We provide empirical evidence on slowly decaying tails in the distributions of returns over multiple time intervals and different exchanges, corresponding to a power-law. We estimate the scaling exponent and find an asymptotic power-law behavior with 2 < α < 2.5 suggesting that Bitcoin returns, in addition to being more volatile, also exhibit heavier tails than stocks, which are known to be around 3. Our results also imply the existence of a finite second moment, thus providing a fundamental basis for the usage of standard financial theories and covariance-based techniques in risk management and portfolio optimization scenarios.
The goal of this paper is to ascertain with what accuracy the direction of Bitcoin price in USD can be predicted. The price data is sourced from the Bitcoin Price Index. The task is achieved with varying degrees of success through the implementation of a Bayesian optimised recurrent neural network (RNN) and a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. The LSTM achieves the highest classification accuracy of 52% and a RMSE of 8%. The popular ARIMA model for time series forecasting is implemented as a comparison to the deep learning models. As expected, the non-linear deep learning methods outperform the ARIMA forecast which performs poorly. Finally, both deep learning models are benchmarked on both a GPU and a CPU with the training time on the GPU outperforming the CPU implementation by 67.7%.
Emre Yavuz, Ali Kaan Koc, Umut Can Çabuk, Gökhan Dalkılıç
There is no doubt that the revolutionary concept of the blockchain, which is the underlying technology behind the famous cryptocurrency Bitcoin and its successors, is triggering the start of a new era in the Internet and the online services. While most people focus only at cryptocurrencies; in fact, many administrative operations, fintech procedures, and everyday services that can only be done offline and/or in person, can now safely be moved to the Internet as online services. What makes it a powerful tool for digitalizing everyday services is the introduction of smart contracts, as in the Ethereum platform. Smart contracts are meaningful pieces of codes, to be integrated in the blockchain and executed as scheduled in every step of blockchain updates. E-voting on the other hand, is another trending, yet critical, topic related to the online services. The blockchain with the smart contracts, emerges as a good candidate to use in developments of safer, cheaper, more secure, more transparent, and easier-to-use e-voting systems. Ethereum and its network is one of the most suitable ones, due to its consistency, widespread use, and provision of smart contracts logic. An e-voting system must be secure, as it should not allow duplicated votes and be fully transparent, while protecting the privacy of the attendees. In this work, we have implemented and tested a sample e-voting application as a smart contract for the Ethereum network using the Ethereum wallets and the Solidity language. Android platform is also considered to allow voting for people who do not have an Ethereum wallet. After an election is held, eventually, the Ethereum blockchain will hold the records of ballots and votes. Users can submit their votes via an Android device or directly from their Ethereum wallets, and these transaction requests are handled with the consensus of every single Ethereum node. This consensus creates a transparent environment for e-voting. In addition to a broad discussion about reliability and efficiency of the blockchain-based e-voting systems, our application and its test results are presented in this paper, too.
A large proportion of the population in the developing world can benefit from blockchain. In this article, the authors discuss key concerns that have been raised regarding institutions in the developing world and evaluate the potential role of blockchain to address them.
Blockchain has been considered a breakthrough technology-but does your company need it? In this article, the authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain technology using examples from the insurance sector, which can be generalized and applied to other sectors.
The blockchain technology is a relatively new approach in the field of information technologies. As one of its first implementations, bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has gained a lot of attention. Together with Ethereum, blockchain implementation with focus on smart contracts, they represent the very core of modern cryptocurrency development. This paper is meant to give a brief introduction to these topics.
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Nathaniel Popper leaves in DIGITAL GOLD the following passage. But the week in Austin could not help fueling suspicion that perhaps, as in the old way of doing things, the economic benefits of all the new technology were, at least so far, accruing only a small elite, while the 99 percent that Occupy Wall Street had worried about were left reading about it at home on Twitter. Bitcoin itself faced the same concerns. Years earlier, Bitcoin had promised that it would spread its benefits to all its users, but by 2014 large chunks of Bitcoin economy were owned by a few people who had been wealthy enough before Bitcoin came along to invest in this new system. Most of the new coins being released each day were collected by a few large mining syndicates. If this was the new world, it did not seem all that different from the old one－at least not yet. This is reality of Bitcoin. It does not have stability of supply. It does not have ability of credit creation. It does not have stability of value. It does not have wide agreement as a means of settlements. It exposes itself to speculation. So in conclusion, Bitcoin could not be money at least in the near future.
After the publication in the September/October 2017 issue of our DYNA Journal about BLOCKCHAIN: Challenges and Opportunities Beyond Bitcoin, some of our readers asked us several questions that we have addressed to the authors and that they kindly answered us in an accessible way, even for non-specialists. Given the actuality and diverse points of view generated around the topic, we abstain from any judgment of value with respect to the aforementioned products.
This report explains the technologies which underpin blockchain digital financial ledgers, how blockchain works, potential applications for blockchain, concerns with it, and potential considerations for Congress.
The surge of savvy advancements in all spaces of human action opens new opportunities for the improvement of business forms. Things that appeared to be inconceivable 15-20 years back, for example, swift online payments, e-banking and virtual cash, have turned into a piece of our regular day to day existence. Rising and creating cryptographic forms of money give us significantly more potential outcomes. One of them is Blockchain advancement, which authorizes clients towards profit related trades without commission charges. We are toward the begin of enterprise resource planning (ERP) computerized change with the presentation of blockchain innovation, best known as a digital ledger (distributed database) behind digital money. The fundamental distinctive component of the innovation is the absence of a single centralized base for data storage. All the data is distributed between interconnected blocks, which are joined into a chain utilizing complicated algorithms. Each block stores its own snippet of data. New blocks can be added to the complete of this chain, yet they can
... The financial industry has been witnessing an exponential rise in the number of innovative start-ups. Waves of digital innovation (widely known as financial technology or FinTech) have reached the world of banking and finance, and the distributed ledger technology (DLT) is one of the leading ‘surfers’. The DLT might have been created for the main purpose of serving digital cash. Today, both the public and private sectors are actively studying the concept and seeking possible ways to extend its application to a variety of other activities and problems. The trend is growing and different DLT designs are under test. Being at a very early stage of development, there are still numerous issues to tackle before this technology eventually realizes its full potential.1 That being said, the more the DLT develops and expands, the more experts would be able to evaluate its intrinsic as well as practical risks and rewards. In other words, the concern is not only about whether the DLT is inherently good or bad; stakeholders are also looking at the purposes for which and ways in which it would eventually be implemented.
In an economy with asymmetric information, the smart contract in the blockchain protocol mitigates uncertainty. Since, as a new trading platform, the blockchain triggers segmentation of market and differentiation of agents in both the sell and buy sides of the market, it recomposes the asymmetric information and generates spreads in asset price and quality between itself and a traditional platform. We show that marginal innovation and sophistication of the smart contract have non-monotonic effects on the trading value in the blockchain platform, its fundamental value, the price of cryptocurrency, and consumers' welfare. Moreover, a blockchain manager who controls the level of the innovation of the smart contract has an incentive to keep it lower than the first best when the underlying information asymmetry is not severe, leading to welfare loss for consumers.
Emmanuelle Anceaume, Antonella Del Pozzo, Romaric Ludinard, Maria Potop-Butucaru · 5 authors
The presented work continues the line of recent distributed computing community efforts dedicated to the theoretical aspects of blockchains. This paper is the first to specify blockchains as a composition of abstract data types all together with a hierarchy of consistency criteria that formally characterizes the histories admissible for distributed programs that use them. Our work is based on an original oracle-based construction that, along with new consistency definitions, captures the eventual convergence process in blockchain systems. The paper presents as well some results on implementability of the presented abstractions and a mapping of representative existing blockchains from both academia and industry in our framework.
With the rapid growth of China's economy, people's living standard has been increased continuously, which changed the consuming habit of consumers, and more and more attention is paid to food safety and quality. However, in recent years, a series of serious food safety incidents occurred, such as "Sudan red", "clenbuterol", "Sanlu toxic milk powder" and "trench oi". It is worth noting that not only in China, but even in Europe these kinds of scandals have broken out during the past 20 years, including Escherichia coliin hamburgers, Salmonella in eggs, poultry and pork, Listeria in pates and cheeses, and the "horse meat scandal" in 2013. These food safety problems not only harm people's health, but also undermine their trust in food markets. <br/> The main purpose of this cumulative dissertation is trying to guarantee the food quality and safety from a supply chain management perspective, and the key issue is building a decentralized information system which is not dependent on the trust of a central authority or organization for the whole food supply chain. By using the internet of things and blockchain technologies, this new decentralized information system could become a disruptive innovation which could provide an information platform for all supply chain members (including government departments and third-party regulators) based on openness, transparency, neutrality, reliability and security. We want to establish a food supply chain traceability system for real-time food tracing, build a safety control system for food supply chain by integrating it with general supply chain risk management methods, and significantly improve the performance of the food logistics company. All of these will ultimately enhance the safety assurance of a food supply chain.
In this work, we propose a novel approach, called Conflicts Check Protocol (CCP), which enables preventing potential attacks on bitcoin system. Based on the observation and discovery of a common symptom that many attacks may generate, an arbitration mechanism is proposed to determine the approval or abandon of certain transactions involved in confliction. Experimental results verified our statistical assumption and proved that the CCP is robust in handling many transactions in confliction scenarios and can significantly enhance the security of the current bitcoin systems. Unlike many of the existing efforts, this work examines the security issue of bitcoin from a new perspective, which can be extended further to a much larger scope of attack analysis and prevention.
The development of quantum information platforms such as quantum computers and quantum simulators that will rival classical Turing computations are typically viewed as a threat to secure data transmissions and therefore to crypto-systems and financial markets in general. We propose to use such platforms as a proof-of-work protocol for blockchain technology, which underlies cryptocurrencies providing a way to document the transactions in a permanent decentralised public record and to be further securely and transparently monitored. We reconsider the basis of blockchain encryption and suggest to move from currently used proof-of-work schemes to the proof-of-work performed by analog Hamiltonian optimisers. This approach has a potential to significantly increase decentralisation of the existing blockchains and to help achieve faster transaction times, therefore, removing the main obstacles for blockchain implementation. We discuss the proof-of-work protocols for a few most promising optimiser platforms: quantum annealing hardware based on D-wave simulators and a new class of gain-dissipative simulators.