I. Kamel

• Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park
• chairman at University of Sharjah

The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is fundamental to high-capacity data hiding schemes due to its ability to condense signals into a few significant coefficients while leaving many high-frequency coefficients relatively insignificant. These high-frequency coefficients are often replaced with secret data, allowing for the embedding of many secret b...

A vast amount of research has been conducted on path planning over recent decades, driven by the complexity of achieving optimal solutions. This paper reviews multi-robot path planning approaches and presents the path planning algorithms for various types of robots. Multi-robot path planning approaches have been classified as deterministic approach...

With the spread of GPS-equipped portable devices, Location-Based Services (LBSs) flourished. Some crucial LBSs require real-time processing of moving spatial-keyword queries over moving objects, such as an ambulance seeking for volunteers. The research community proposed solutions for scenarios assuming that either the queries or the queried object...

The use of reinforcement learning (RL) for dynamic obstacle avoidance (DOA) algorithms and path planning (PP) has become increasingly popular in recent years. Despite the importance of RL in this growing technological era, few studies have systematically reviewed this research concept. Therefore, this study provides a comprehensive review of the li...

With the emergence of GPS-equipped portable devices and Online Social Networks, geo-tagged textual data have been highly produced on a continuous basis, which can provide important information for various applications, such as marketing, disaster response, and so on. Therefore, processing continuous spatial-keyword queries over streaming data is a...

Cloud service providers can offer virtual servers, with powerful processors and massive storage capacity for nominal per-use charges. With the underlying resources, the cloud allows data owners to trade capital expense for the variable cost. The auto-scaling features of the cloud can control the consumption of computing resources and hence the asso...

We establish relations between several problems that are quite far from each other at first glance and formulate a number of open problems.

Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) are groups of UAVs connected in an Ad-Hoc manner to accomplish a common mission. The widespread acceptance of UAVs due to their low cost and high efficiency has attracted malicious security attacks against them. These attacks cannot be easily prevented due to UAVs’ limited computational power, short battery life, and...

Dealing with the trade-off challenge between computation speed and path quality has been a high-priority research area in the robotic path planning field during the last few years. Obtaining a shorter optimized path requires additional processing since iterative algorithms are adopted to keep enhancing the final optimized path. Therefore, it is a c...

The strong energy compaction property of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) has been widely proposed as a solution to the capacity-quality trade-off problem in steganography. However, several recent steganography schemes did not fully exploit the strong compaction property of the DCT and hide in the whole large region that contains the less signif...

In recent years, the number of online social networks users is dramatically increased. Cyberbullying is a serious threat in online social networks especially toward children and teenagers. Victims are harassed by perpetrators even with no physical attendance. Cyberbullying causes psychological damage to victims resulting in anxiety, depression, and...

With the increased demand for outsourcing databases, there is a demand to enable secure and efficient communications. The concern regarding outsourcing data is mainly providing confidentiality and integrity to the data. This paper proposes a novel solution to answering kNN queries at the cloud server over encrypted data. Data owners transform their...

Finding influential members in social networks received a lot of interest in recent literature. Several algorithms have been proposed that provide techniques for extracting a set of the most influential people in a certain social network. However, most of these algorithms find influential nodes based solely on the topological structure of the netwo...

Linear measurements of the maxillary sinus are useful for gender prediction. This variation could be used for forensic identification purposes in mass disasters. The study aims to evaluate the accuracy of the artificial intelligence-based technique in gender prediction using linear measurements of maxillary sinus from Cone Beam Computed Tomography...

The strong energy compaction property of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) has inspired DCT-based steganography techniques to embed secret data in large areas of the insignificant DCT coefficients. Since these coefficients are noncritical, conventional DCT-based steganography techniques replace these insignificant coefficients with the secret dat...

It has been proven that the strong energy compaction property of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) has a relation with the inter-pixel correlation level in the spatial domain of the cover image. Recent studies have proven that the higher the correlation between pixels in the spatial domain, the stronger the energy compaction property of the DCT....

Path quality and computational time have formed together a well-known trade-off problem for path planning techniques. Due to this trade-off, contributions were usually considering improving only one of the two aspects, either increasing the swiftness as in real-time robotic path planning algorithms or enhancing the path quality as in shortest path...

There has always been a trade-off between embedding capacity and stego quality, and due to this, current research in image steganography suffers either from low embedding capacity in order to preserve high stego image quality, or from sacrificing the stego quality for higher capacity. This paper proposes a steganography scheme that aims to achieve...

The increase in GPS-enabled devices and proliferation of location-based applications have resulted in an abundance of geotagged (spatial) data. As a consequence, numerous applications have emerged that utilize the spatial data to provide different types of location-based services. However, the huge amount of available spatial data presents a challe...

The strong energy compaction property of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) has inspired researchers to utilize the DCT transform technique in steganography. The DCT transform can effectively represent a signal within a few significant coefficients leaving a large area with insignificant coefficients that can be safely replaced by a substantial am...

Social media bots (automated accounts) attacks are organized crimes that pose potential threats to public opinion, democracy, public health, stock market and other disciplines. While researchers are building many models to detect social media bot accounts, attackers, on the other hand, evolve their bots to evade detection. This everlasting cat and...

We proposes an energy-aware distributed scheme GPD (General Phenomena Detection) to detect phenomena in data gathered from mobile sensors. In the proposed algorithm, mobile sensors self-organize themselves into groups and elect group heads based on the location of the phenomena. To better share the extra battery power overhead, group heads and subs...

Customs administration oversees the important processes of facilitating trade and protecting local societies and economies: the former by minimising shipment processing times and the latter by ensuring the lawfulness of trade. One of the main processes that affect the facilitation and protection of trade is the risk of the shipment assessment proce...

As part of the international trade supply chain, Dubai Customs acts as the gatekeeper, protecting the society and the economy. During the exportation process, one of the primary responsibilities of the Customs Authority is to authenticate the documents submitted with the exportation declaration application, to ensure the legality of the trade. Due...

Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology to ensure trust between parties. By using this technology, we can establish a secure communication paradigm, where data integrity and immutability can be guaranteed. These inherited features underline blockchain as a suitable technology to optimise the adopted processing model in several domains, suc...

A digital watermark is a secret pattern of bits inserted in the data objects to verify the integrity of the contents or to identify ownership. It is an effective technique for protecting various databases against data copyright infringement, piracy, and data tampering in both relational and not‐only‐Structured Query Language (NoSQL) databases inclu...

Analyzing social networks has received a lot of reviews in the recent literature. Many papers have been proposed to provide new techniques for mining social networks to help further study this huge amount of data. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of them considered the semantic meaning of the nodes interests while clustering the network....

With the increased demand for outsourcing databases, there is a demand to enable secure and efficient communications. The concern regarding outsourcing data is mainly providing confidentiality and integrity to the data. This paper proposes a novel solution to answering kNN queries at the cloud server over encrypted data. Data owners transform their...

This paper proposes a distributed energy-efficient algorithm for environmental event detection and monitoring using a mobile wireless sensor network. The mobile sensors could be sensors mounted on vehicles that move in the monitored environment and the mounted sensors collect environmental data. The proposed technique collects the data from the mob...

With the increased demand for outsourcing databases, there is a demand to enable secure and efficient communications. The concern regarding outsourcing data is mainly providing confidentiality and integrity to the data. This paper proposes a novel solution to answering kNN queries at the cloud server over encrypted data. Data owners transform their...

The traditional trade-off between payload capacity and stego quality of steganographic information systems has kept hiding capacities at relatively low values due to the adverse effect on stego quality. This paper proposes a novel strategy that can raise the hiding capacity without negatively impacting stego quality. The proposed scheme exploits a...

This paper introduces a high capacity image hiding scheme with enhanced stego image quality. This new hiding scheme utilizes a multiscale Laplacian pyramid of the cover image in the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain. Previous work either enhanced capacity at the expense of stego quality or improved stego quality albeit at lower capacities. Th...

In distributed computing, data sharing is inevitable, however, moving local databases from one site to another should be avoided because of the computational overhead and privacy consideration. Most of the data mining algorithms are designed assuming that data repository is stored locally. This paper presents a scheme and algorithms for mining asso...

Achieving high embedding capacities for information hiding systems while maintaining high perceptual stego quality is a critical challenge in steganography. This quandary is attracting researchers to overcome the trade-off barrier between high capacities and enhanced levels of stego image quality. This work introduces a promising transform-domain h...

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), more and more static and mobile sensors are being deployed for sensing and tracking environmental phenomena, such as fire, oil spills and air pollution. As these sensors are usually battery-powered, energy-efficient algorithms are required to extend the sensors’ lifetime. Moreover, forwarding...

Database outsourcing is a common cloud computing paradigm that allows data owners to take advantage of its on-demand storage and computational resources. The main challenge is maintaining data confidentiality with respect to untrusted parties i.e., cloud service provider, as well as providing relevant query results in real-time to authenticated use...

An increasing number of spatial and frequency domain data hiding techniques have been proposed to address the relatively low embedding capacities of image-based steganography. These techniques have brought promise of higher embedding capacities, albeit at the expense of lower perceptibility. This work proposes a new discrete cosine transform (DCT)...

Embedding capacities of steganographic information security systems have remained relatively low due to the adverse effect on perceptibility, where researchers had to trade-off between higher capacities and reduced perceptual quality or choose higher perceptual quality albeit at the expense of lower capacities. This paper proposes a novel approach...

Data owners with large volumes of data can outsource spatial databases by taking advantage of the cost-effective cloud computing model with attractive on-demand features such as scalability and high computing power. Data confidentiality in outsourced databases is a key requirement and therefore, untrusted third-party service providers in the cloud...

Nowadays, social network sites; such as Facebook and Twitter, have tremendous number of users in their repositories. Having this huge amount of data requires analyzing them to get statistics about the users and their interests. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that clusters the nodes in social networks into communities based on their geode...

Social networks have gained a lot of interest in recent literature due to the huge amount of data that can be extracted from them. With this ever growing data, emerged the need for techniques to handle it and analyze it. Several papers have proposed many techniques to analyze a given social network from several aspects. Communities are a crucial pr...

Cloud computing allows data owners to outsource their databases, eliminating the need for costly storage and computational resources. The key is to maintain data confidentiality with respect to third-party service providers along with providing query results in real-time to authorized users. In this paper, a transformation and encryption approach i...

Organizations have come to realize that storing their databases in the Cloud rather than in-house data centers is cheaper and more flexible. However, companies are still concerned about the privacy and the security of their data. Encrypting the whole database before uploading it to the Cloud solves the security issue. But querying the database requ...

Unauthorised changes to databases may result in significant losses for organisations. Digital watermarking can be used for protecting the integrity of relational databases. Prior techniques introduce distortions to the watermarked attributes and thus limit their application. This paper, on the other hand, proposes a distortion-free watermarking mec...

This paper presents a realistic team formation algorithm that navigates through a social network graph to select a team of experts to work in a target project. The project is represented with a set of skills that are required for the project implementation. Each node in the graph represents an individual who has one or more skills. Individuals (nod...

This paper presents a realistic team formation algorithm that navigates through a social network graph to select a team of experts to work in a target project. The project is represented with a set of skills that are required for the project implementation. Each node in the graph represents an individual who has one or more skills. Individuals (nod...

This paper proposes a new technique for hiding secret messages in ordinary English text. The proposed technique exploits the redundancies existing in some English language constructs. Redundancies result from the flexibility in maneuvering certain statement constituents without altering the statement meaning or correctness. For example, one can say...

This paper investigates the embedding capacity limits of high-capacity data hiding in color images based on a locally Adaptive-Region Discrete Cosine Transform (AR-DCT) frequency domain data hiding scheme, and explores the relationship between hiding capacity and image quality. It also compares the embedding capacities of various steganography sche...

Environmental phenomena, such as fires, poisonous gases, and oil spills, can be detected by wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that cover the geographical area of the phenomena. These sensors collaboratively monitor the area to detect the sensors’ readings that deviate from normal reading patterns after which a phenomena is declared. This research pro...

This paper proposes an algorithm for selecting a team of experts from a social network, which is represented by a weighted undirected graph. Each node in the graph represents an individual who has one or more skills. We introduce the concept of realistic team formation and its associated constraints and assumptions. The main constraint is a local v...

An important application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is to detect phenomena from the data gathered from the sensors. Traditional phenomena detection techniques are not directly applicable to WSN due to the nature of sensor data and specific requirements and limitations of the WSNs. The most critical requirement in WSN applications is extendin...

Databases most often contain critical information. Unauthorized changes to databases can have serious consequences and may result in significant losses for the organization. This paper presents a viable solution for protecting the integrity of the data stored in relational databases using fragile watermarking. Prior techniques introduce distortions...

Detection of an environmental phenomenon, e.g. air pollution and oil spills, occurs when a group of sensors continuously produces similar readings i.e. data streams over a period of time. Thus, detection of environmental phenomena is basically a process of clustering the sensors' data streams, which commonly involves the processing of hundreds and...

Word order is usually crucial for maintaining meaning and syntax integrity of English text. However, there are some cases where certain words and phrases can be relocated, while still preserving the syntax and meaning of the sentence. In this paper, we present a syntactic transformation scheme for hiding information (secret message) in plain Englis...

Data streams and their applications appear in several fields such as physics, finance, medicine, environmental science, etc. As sensor technology improves, sensor data rates continue to increase. Consequently, analyzing data streams becomes ever more challenging. Fast online response is a must for applications that involve multiple data streams, es...

This paper proposes FWC- a hash-based fragile watermarking technique to protect the integrity of sensor data. Sensor data are organized into groups before calculating the hash digest and storing them in the least significant bits. The watermark is chained across the groups to mitigate group insertion and deletion attacks. Detailed security analysis...

Recently, many applications have used Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems to overcome the current problems with client/server systems such as non-scalability, high bandwidth requirement and single point of failure. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme to support efficient range query processing over structured P2P systems, while balancing both the...

Limited energy is the most critical constraint that limits the capabilities of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most sensors operate on batteries with limited power. Battery recharging or replacement may be impossible. Security mechanisms that are based on public key cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and digital signatures are prohibitively expe...