Review of different classes of RFID authentication protocols

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an up-and-coming technology. The major limitations of RFID technology are security and privacy concerns. Many methods, including encryption, authentication and hardware techniques, have been presented to overcome security and privacy problems. This paper focuses on authentication protocols. The combination of RFID technology being popular but unsecure has led to an influx of mutual authentication protocols. Authentication protocols are classified as being fully fledged, simple, lightweight or ultra-lightweight. Since 2002, much important research and many protocols have been presented, with some of the protocols requiring further development. The present paper reviews in detail recently proposed RFID mutual authentication protocols, according to the classes of the authentication protocols. The protocols were compared mainly in terms of security, the technique that they are based on, protocols that the presented protocol has been compared with, and finally, the method of verifying the protocol. Important points of the comparisons were collected in two tables.

     

Structural,physical, and optical characterization of (Nd3+/Eu3+)-doped zinc-rich silica–borate glasses

In this study, zinc–silica–borate glass structures doped with rare earth (RE) oxides Eu₂O₃ and Nd₂O₃ were synthesized with classical melting–quenching technique. 60ZnO–10SiO₂–(30 – x)B₂O₃:xRE (x?=?0, 0.5, 1, 1.5 mol%) composition was chosen as the structure. The doping effect of two different rare earth oxides (individually) at different ratios was investigated according to the structural, physical, and optical properties of the glass structure. Structural properties of the synthesized glasses were determined with Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) device, and densities (ρ) and molar volumes (V_m) of the glasses were measured with Archimedes method, and optical properties were determined with UV–Visible (UV–Vis-NIR) device. FTIR results show that BO₃ units increased in all RE-doped glasses. While densities of the synthesized glasses varied between 3.755 and 3.941 g cm^??3, indirect bandgaps varied between 3.219 and 3.645 eV. The glass with the highest transmittance was the 1% Eu₂O₃-doped glass with a transmittance of 84%. While band edges shifted slightly toward short wavelengths in glasses doped with Nd₂O₃, they shifted to longer wavelengths in glasses doped with Eu₂O₃.

     

Detection of mitotic cells in breast cancer histopathological images using deep versus handcrafted features

One of the most important processes in the diagnosis of breast cancer, which is the leading mortality rate in women, is the detection of the mitosis stage at the cellular level. In literature, many studies have been proposed on the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for detecting mitotic cells in breast cancer histopathological images. In this study, comparative evaluation of conventional and deep learning based feature extraction methods for automatic detection of mitosis in histopathological images are focused. While various handcrafted features are extracted with textural/spatial, statistical and shape-based methods in conventional approach, the convolutional neural network structure proposed on the deep learning approach aims to create an architecture that extracts the features of small cellular structures such as mitotic cells. Mitosis detection/counting is an important process that helps us assess how aggressive or malignant the cancer’s spread is. In the proposed study, approximately 180,000 non-mitotic and 748 mitotic cells are extracted for the evaluations. It is obvious that the classification stage cannot be performed properly due to the imbalanced numbers of mitotic and non-mitotic cells extracted from histopathological images. Hence, the random under-sampling boosting (RUSBoost) method is exploited to overcome this problem. The proposed framework is tested on mitosis detection in breast cancer histopathological images dataset provided from the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2014 contest. In the results obtained with the deep learning approach, 79.42% recall, 96.78% precision and 86.97% F-measure values are achieved more successfully than handcrafted methods. A client/server-based framework has also been developed as a secondary decision support system for use by pathologists in hospitals. Thus, it is aimed that pathologists will be able to detect mitotic cells in various histopathological images more easily through necessary interfaces.

     

In situ image processing capabilities of ARM-based micro-controllers

Dealing with visual data is the key for environmental monitoring tasks in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Tasks such as object detection, recognition, and/or tracking do require extracting and using the right information from the inherently large amount of visual data. The widely accepted solution of legacy WSNs, transmitting the acquired data to a central base station for further processing, would render a WMSN totally useless because of the unacceptable use of bandwidth and energy. Therefore, we consider the in situ processing as a viable solution for WMSNs. However, processing power and memory capacity restrictions of existing multimedia sensor nodes along with their power consumption are the limiting factors for wide-spread use of in situ processing. Nevertheless, recent technological improvements and introduction of the new ARM cores encourage us to evaluate the image processing capabilities of ARM7/ARM9/ARM11 based micro-controllers for in situ processing in WMSNs. In this work, we first discussed the architectural design differences among the various ARM cores. Then we classified image processing algorithms into three categories. Then, we evaluated the performance of each microcontroller by running a set of basic image processing algorithms necessary for object detection, recognition, and/or tracking. The test results show that ARM11 runs up to 6–30 times faster than ARM9 and ARM7, respectively. Besides, ARM11 consumes up to 5–7 times less energy than ARM9 and ARM7 for the same type of operations.     

Mesoscopic structure and swelling properties of crosslinked polyethylene glycol in water

In this paper, we present our efforts in modeling and simulation of polyethylene glycol crosslinked with an isocyanate tHDI. The polymer, by its nature, is hydrophilic and has strong hydrogen bond interactions with water. The simulations are performed at coarse-grained scale by using a dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulation method. The effect of hydrogen bond between water and polymer beads on the structure of the crosslinked hydrophilic polymer structure is studied. The polymer is observed to phase separate with water in the absence of hydrogen bonds in DPD simulations. In the reverse case, where hydrogen bonds are explicitly included in DPD simulations, polymer mixes with water. This behavior is investigated by plotting the density profiles. Moreover, the volumetric swelling behavior in mixtures with different water contents is estimated from simulations and extrapolated by a polynomial fit to compare with experiments. It is observed that the predicted swelling ratio is in good agreement with the experimental measurements.     

Phenolic composition and functional properties of wild mint (Mentha longifolia var. calliantha (Stapf) Briq.)

Mints (Mentha species) are widely used as food, medicine, spice, and flavoring agents. At the present work, phenolics profile of infusion and ethanol extract of Mentha longifolia was determined using an RP–HPLC–DAD system. Total bioactive contents, radical scavenging, reducing power, metal chelating, and enzyme inhibitory activities relevant to Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes mellitus, and skin disorders were evaluated. Sixteen phenolic compounds (ten phenolic acids and six flavonoids) were identified in the extracts in which sinapic acid (7132 µg/g extract) and rosmarinic acid (6260 µg/g extract) were the most abundant compounds. Strong antioxidant effects were observed in 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl radical, 2,2?-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid), cupric ion reducing activity, ferric reducing antioxidant power, phosphomolybdenum, and metal chelating assays. Results indicated selective acetylcholinesterase inhibitory activity and high α-amylase and α-glucosidase inhibitory potential. Findings showed that M. longifolia has promising health benefits due to its high concentration of useful phenolic compounds and has great potential for possible applications in the preparation of functional ingredients.     

Experimental Investigation of the Effect of Fire Protection Lobby on Stair Pressurization System in a High-Rise Building

In this study, the stair pressurization system in a 40-storey high office building in Istanbul is investigated through field tests, in order to understand the effect of the presence of a non-pressurized vestibule (fire protection lobby, FPL) before entering the stair at each floor. The building without FPL is simulated by keeping only one of the two doors (of the stair and FPL) open at each floor. This method gave an opportunity to fix other parameters affecting the stair pressurization system and check solely the effect of FPL. Two different cases are taken into account, where the first one (all doors closed) analyses the condition that all stair doors are kept closed and the second one (critical doors are open) is conducted when the stairwell is opened to the floor on a given level (fire floor) and the stair termination door at the discharge floor is kept open. For both cases, the availability of the FPL is investigated by using the aforementioned arrangement. Under the conditions with approximately the same pressurized air flow rate at all doors closed condition, it is found that the availability of FPL increases the pressure difference between the stairwell and the corridor by a factor of approximately 2.2. This is also justified by using empirical formulations available in literature, where this ratio is calculated as 2.0. The results of this study showed that the FPL arrangement improves the effectiveness of pressurization system in a very high-rise building, despite some tolerable drawbacks.