Wenbing Zhao

Cleveland State University · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Lost productivity from lower back injuries in workplaces costs billions of U.S. dollars per year. A significant fraction of such workplace injuries are the result of workers not following best practices. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel computer-vision-based system that aims to increase the workers’ co...

In this article, we report the design and implementation of a Kinect-based system for providing automated realtime assessment, feedback and guidance to user who are practicing rehabilitation exercises at home without the supervision of physical therapists. The foundation for the system is a rule-based framework that can be used to assess in realtim...

In this paper, we formulate the consensus problem and its solutions as seen in public blockchains and contrast them to those of the traditional distributed consensus. The Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm introduced in Bitcoin provides the first elegant and practical solution for reaching distributed consensus in a large-scale untrusted environment. Du...

The rapid development of computer and sensing technologies enables e-coaching systems for individuals with various physical health and mental health challenges. In this article, we review recent research efforts on using virtual avatar-based computer technologies to improve social and communication skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (...

In this article, we provide a concise but systematic review on blockchain-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPS). We dissect various blockchain-enabled CPS as reported in the literature in terms of their operations and the features of blockchain that have been used. We identify key common CPS operations that can be enabled by blockchain, and classify...

The sensor signals with multiple measuring points and data types not only bring sufficient information, but also put forward more stringent requirements for multi-sensor fusion efficiency and fault feature extraction capability. The redundancy and conflicts in the information of multi-sensor signals often hinder the accurate extraction of crucial f...

This article presents an umbrella review of blockchain-based smart grid applications. By umbrella review, we mean that our review is based on systematic reviews of this topic. We aim to synthesize the findings from these systematic reviews and gain deeper insights into this discipline. After studying the systematic reviews, we find it imperative to...

This article presents a systematic review on autism care, diagnosis, and intervention based on mobile apps running on smartphones and tablets. Here, the term “intervention” means a carefully planned set of activities with the objective of improving autism symptoms. We guide our review on related studies using five research questions. First, who ben...

Recent developments in the field of Internet of things (IoT) have aroused growing attention to the security of smart devices. Specifically, there is an increasing number of malicious software (Malware) on IoT systems. Nowadays, researchers have made many efforts concerning supervised machine learning methods to identify malicious attacks. High‐qual...

Route planning for automated guided vehicles (AGVs) is one of the key factors that affects work efficiency of automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RSes). Route planning plays an important role in the operation of AGVs. Since the characteristic of AS/RSes is chessboard‐like, the environment is more complex than traditional route planning envi...

In this paper, we present a secure datastore based on an Ethereum smart contract. Our research is guided by three research questions. First, we will explore to what extend a smart-contract-based datastore should resemble a traditional database system. Second, we will investigate how to store the data in a smart-contract-based datastore for maximum...

In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a secure sensing data processing and logging system. The system is inspired and enabled by blockchain. In this system, a public blockchain is used as immutable data store to store the most critical data needed to secure the system. Furthermore, several innovative blockchain-ins...

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) as a new pneumonia which is extremely infectious, the classification of this coronavirus is essential to effectively control the development of the epidemic. Pathological changes in the chest computed tomography (CT) scans are often used as one of the diagnostic criteria of COVID-19. Meanwhile, deep learning-base...

Nowadays short texts can be widely found in various social data in relation to 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT). Short text classification is a challenging task due to its sparsity and the lack of context. Previous studies mainly tackle these problems by enhancing the semantic information or the statistical information individually. However, the...

Blockchain has become one of the hottest research areas in recent years. The technology could potentially lead to a new generation of decentralized applications and decentralized autonomous organizations. Unfortunately, there is simply too much misinformation regarding blockchain. Most notably, blockchain has been used as a buzzword synonymous with...

With the rapid development of communication technologies, the quality of our daily life has been improved with the applications of smart communications and networking, such as intelligent transportation and mobile service computing. However, high user demands for quality of service (QoS) are forcing intelligent transportation to continuously improv...

In this paper, we present a simulation study of a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm used in a public blockchain called Nxt. We first provide an overview of Nxt and its PoS consensus algorithm design, and introduce a concise mathematical analysis of the Nxt PoS algorithm. We then present an experimental study on the Nxt PoS behavior in a simu...

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an avatar-based interactive system that facilitates rehabilitation for people who have received total knee replacement surgeries. The system empowers patients to carry out exercises prescribed by a clinician at the home settings more effectively. Our system helps improve accountability for...

Nowadays many large cities often suffer from road congestion. Then, it is necessary to improve the working efficiency of urban road network with the help of computational intelligence technologies, within the Internet of vehicles (IoV) environment. We are committed to designing traffic flow prediction methods through the use of machine learning mod...

The papers in this special section focus on multi-modal computing in biomedical applications. n recent years, the development of biomedical imaging techniques, integrative sensors, and machine learning, brings many benefits to the diagnosis of various diseases. We can collect, measure, and analyze vast volumes of health-related data using the techn...

Distributed consensus is the most fundamental issue in distributed computing. In blockchain, the consensus is established probabilistically by converting the consensus problem into a stochastic process similar to winning a lottery. This chapter first introduces a set of requirements for blockchain consensus algorithms. In blockchain, the need for a...

The horizon on distributed consensus research has completely changed since Lamport published the now well‐known Paxos algorithm. This chapter introduces the original Paxos algorithm and its derivative algorithms. It also incorporates recent work on Paxos‐based fault tolerant systems. An immediate application of the Paxos algorithm is to enable stat...

Early generations of algorithms for reaching Byzantine agreement and Byzantine fault tolerance are very expensive in that they incur prohibitively high runtime overhead. The Oral Message Algorithms solve the Byzantine consensus problem. The practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) algorithm tolerates Byzantine faults with certain restrictions and...

The blockchain technology has attained huge interest in the last several years. This chapter first introduces the insight on the value of the blockchain technology in terms of different levels of benefits it can bring to applications. Second, it reviews the existing proposals on various blockchain applications for cyber‐physical systems. Third, the...

Recovery‐oriented computing was pioneered by a joint research project of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkerly in early and mid 2000. An important step in failure recovery is to reconstruct the state of the recovering component or process so that it is consistent with other parts of the system and ready to provide services...

Different from checkpointing/logging and recovery‐oriented computing, which focus on the recovery of an application should a fault occur, the replication technique offers another way of achieving high availability of a distributed service by masking various hardware and software faults. This chapter introduces the basic approaches for service and d...

Checkpointing and logging are the most essential techniques to achieve dependability in distributed systems. This chapter defines the system model used in the checkpointing and logging algorithms. A tradeoff is that the distributed systems that choose to use checkpoint‐based protocols must be willing to tolerate loss of execution unless a checkpoin...

This chapter focuses on several group communication systems that are elegantly designed and are representatives of the respective approaches. A group communication system must define two protocols, one for normal operation when all nodes in the current membership can communicate with each other in a timely fashion, and the other for membership chan...

This chapter provides an overview of cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology. A cryptocurrency that is powered by decentralized computer technology has long been a dream for some pioneers such as Nick Szabo. In January 2009, Bitcoin was launched as the first ever practical cryptocurrency in human history. The chapter first introduces the histo...

Proof of Stake (PoS) has been talked about extensively as an alternative way of reaching consensus in blockchain systems. However, there are few publications on how PoS can be used to create new blocks in detail. The undisputed lead proponent for PoS is Ethereum. However, virtually all discussions regarding PoS for Ethereum are centered on selectin...

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, the detection and analysis of malware have become a matter of concern in the industrial application of Cyber-Physical System (CPS) that provides various services using the IoT paradigm. Currently, many advanced machine learning methods such as deep learning are popular in the rese...

Blockchain is a disruptive technology for building consensus and trust in a peer-to-peer network without centralized control. It was first used in bitcoin, the very first cryptocurrency released at the beginning of 2009, to implement a secure ledger of transactions. This secure ledger ensures that once a transaction is placed in the ledger, it cann...

In the last decade, we have seen rapid development of electronic technologies that are transforming our daily lives [...]

As the application of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) becomes more widespread, the IIoT is being combined with social networks. Nodes in the network can be users, machines, which can communicate with each other and make ratings. These ratings can be modeled as directed weighted edges and form directed weighted networks (DWNs). The edge wei...

The second IEEE International Conference on Knowledge Innovation and Invention 2019 (IEEE ICKII 2019) was held in Seoul, South Korea, 12–15 July 2019. This special issue “Intelligent Electronic Devices” selects 13 excellent papers form 260 papers presented in IEEE ICKII 2019 conference about the topics of Intelligent Electronic Devices. The main go...

The detection of recorded epileptic seizure activity in electroencephalogram (EEG) segments is crucial for the classification of seizures. Manual recognition is a time-consuming and laborious process that places a heavy burden on neurologists, and hence, the automatic identification of epilepsy has become an important issue. Traditional EEG recogni...

Magnetic resonance (MR) images are often contaminated by Gaussian noise, an electronic noise caused by the random thermal motion of electronic components, which reduces the quality and reliability of the images. This paper puts forward a hybrid denoising algorithm for MR images based on two sparsely represented morphological components and one resi...

This Special Issue on “Selected papers from IEEE ICKII 2019” selected 13 excellent papers from 260 papers presented in IEEE ICKII 2019 on topics in energies. The fields include: energy fundamentals, energy sources and energy carriers, energy exploration, intermediate and final energy use, energy conversion systems, and energy research and developme...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which most commonly occurs in the elder, is a chronic neurodegenerative disease with no agreed drugs or treatment protocols at present. Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), earlier than AD onset and later than subjective cognitive decline (SCD) onset, has a serious probability of converting into AD. The SCD, which ca...

Recently, the extraction of valid information from big data has witnessed a growing interest. Nowadays, in social networks, large parts of websites collect user profiles to provide some valuable information through personalized recommendation. Among the available recommendation algorithms, collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most popular alg...

More recently, extreme learning machine (ELM) has emerged as a novel computing paradigm that enables the neural network (NN) based learning to be achieved with fast training speed and good generalization performance. However, the single hidden layer NN using ELM may be not effective in addressing some large-scale problems with more computational ef...

In this chapter, we describe a system that provides continuous localization and behavioral analysis of a person’s motion pattern over an indoor living space using multiple Kinect sensors. The skeleton data from all sensors is transferred to the host computer via TCP sockets into a program where the data is integrated into a single world coordinate...

The past decade has witnessed the rapid advancements of geological data analysis techniques, which facilitates the development of modern agricultural systems. However, there remains some technical challenges that should be addressed to fully exploit the potential of those geological big data, while gathering massive amounts of data in this applicat...

In this paper, we report our work on baseball pitch type recognition based on broadcast videos using two-stream inflated 3D convolutional neural network (I3D). To improve the state-of-the-art of research, we developed our own high-quality dataset, trained and tuned the I3D model extensively, primarily combating the problem of overfitting while stil...

In this paper, we report our work on developing a new dataset for baseball pitch type recognition based on youtube videos of the US Major League Baseball games. The core innovation is a largely automated procedure to extract relevant clips from the full game, and automatically label the clips by aligning the infographic information included in the...

With the rapid development of CPS technology, the identification and detection of malware has become a matter of concern in the industrial application of CPS. Currently, advanced machine learning methods such as deep learning are popular in the research of malware identification and detection, and some progress has been made so far. However, there...

Kernel adaptive filtering (KAF) is an effective nonlinear learning algorithm, which has been widely used in time series prediction. The traditional KAF is based on the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, which has slow convergence speed and low filtering accuracy. Hence, a kernel conjugate gradient (KCG) algorithm has been proposed with low c...

IoT (Internet of Things) involves a wide range of fields, and its application scenarios are complex and diverse. Failure of security defense in any link of IoT may lead to huge information leakage and immeasurable losses. IoT security problem is affecting and restricting its application prospect, and has become one of the hotspots in the field of I...

Electronic Engineering and Design Innovations are both academic and practical engineering fields that involve systematic technological materialization through scientific principles and engineering designs [...]

Neural network system, a portion of artificial intelligence, is increasingly becoming prevalent nowadays. This paper presents a pedagogical study applied in a neural network field. The application of neural network models to function approximation is one of the latest developments in electrical engineering including robotics motion planning and nav...

Electroporation is an important pathway to transport material such as drugs, genes and ions into biological cells. Here we perform simulations to predict the pore density and transmembrane potential due to high-intensity, ultra-short duration electrical pulses. Explicit account is taken of the strain energy. Our continuum model results demonstrate...

In recent years, more and more wearable senors have been employed in smart health applications. Wearable sensors not only can be used to collect valuable health-related data of their users, they can be also used in conjunction with other infrastructure-bound sensors, such as Microsoft Kinect sensor, to facilitate privacy-aware fine-grained activity...

The aim of this article is to show that the absolute measurement difference between the Kinect-based system and the marker-based system for the sit-to-stand exercise is less important provided that the difference is caused by systematic errors in the Kinect measurement. Three healthy individuals participated in this study. Marker trajectories and K...

In the past several years, we have seen dramatic advancements in many sectors enabled by the use of computing and networking technologies. This development has resulted in many emerging, highly multi-disciplinary research areas typically termed as smart- technologies, including smart-healthcare, smart-home, smart-grid, as well as smart vehicles and...

Microsoft Kinect is one of the most popular inexpensive gadgets released in recent years. Kinect is equipped with a color camera, a depth camera, and a microphone array. The device allows users to interact with a computer via a natural user interface in terms of gestures or voice commands. The authors believe that the research and development on us...

In this chapter, the authors present the justification and a feasibility study of applying the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) technology to electric power grid health monitoring. They propose a set of BFT mechanisms needed to handle the PMU data reporting and control commands issuing to the IEDs. They report an empirical study to assess the feasib...

In this chapter, the authors present an overview of recent works on enhancing the trustworthiness of web services coordination for business activities and transactions. The approach is based on what they call application-aware Byzantine fault tolerance. They argue that it is impractical to apply general-purpose Byzantine fault tolerance algorithms...

In this chapter, the authors present their work on a validation study of using Microsoft Kinect to monitor rehabilitation exercises. Differing from other validation efforts, the authors focus on a system-level assessment instead of the joint-level comparison with reference motion capture systems. They assess the feasibility of using Kinect by exami...

The use of good random numbers is crucial to the security of many mission-critical systems. However, when such systems are replicated for Byzantine fault tolerance, a serious issue arises (i.e., how do we preserve the integrity of the systems while ensuring strong replica consistency?). Despite the fact that there exists a large body of work on how...

The authors believe that the research and development of intrusion tolerant systems will gain more momentum as more and more services are offered online. The expectation of such services is high, considering their essential roles in everyday operations of businesses and individuals as well. The impact of service unavailability and security breaches...

In this chapter, the authors point out the threats to online gaming applications and present two strategies that can be used to build secure and dependable online gaming applications. These strategies not only seek the solution for gathering entropy to seed the PRNG used in such applications but also intend to eliminate malicious intrusions to prot...

One of the current and biggest problems in the system of emergency care for the drug overdose epidemic is the failure of information delivery on nearby treatment facilities. Even though some initiatives have tried to solve this issue, they either failed in delivering the information or in providing good usability. This paper presents the design and...

More recently, wind speed forecasting as an effective computing technique currently plays an important role in advancing industry informatics, while dealing with those issues of control and operation for renewable power systems. However, it is facing some increasing difficulties to handle the large-scale dataset generated in these forecasting appli...

Currently, there is a growing demand for the use of communication network bandwidth for the Internet of Things (IoT) within the cyber-physical-social system (CPSS), while needing progressively more powerful technologies for using scarce spectrum resources. Then, cognitive radio networks (CRNs) as one of those important solutions mentioned above, ar...