PRISM: Perinuclear Ring-based Image Segmentation Method for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Classification

Automated analysis of peripheral blood smears for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is hindered by low contrast and substantial variability in cytoplasmic appearance, which complicate conventional membrane-based segmentation. We found that many recent approaches rely on heavy neural architectures and extensive training, but still struggle to generalize across staining and acquisition variability. To address these limitations, we propose the Perinuclear Ring-based Image Segmentation Method (PRISM), which replaces explicit cytoplasmic delineation with adaptive concentric zones constructed around the nucleus. These perinuclear regions enable the extraction of robust cytoplasmic descriptors by integrating color information with texture statistics derived from grey-level co-occurrence patterns, without requiring accurate cell-boundary detection. A calibrated stacking ensemble of traditional classifiers leverages these descriptors to achieve a high performance, with an accuracy of 98.46% and a precision-recall AUC of 0.9937.

Asynchronous Probability Ensembling for Federated Disaster Detection

Quick and accurate emergency handling in Disaster Decision Support Systems (DDSS) is often hampered by network latency and suboptimal application accuracy. While Federated Learning (FL) addresses some of these issues, it is constrained by high communication costs and rigid synchronization requirements across heterogeneous convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a decentralized ensembling framework based on asynchronous probability aggregation and feedback distillation. By shifting the exchange unit from model weights to class-probability vectors, our method maintains data privacy, reduces communication requirements by orders of magnitude, and improves overall accuracy. This approach enables diverse CNN designs to collaborate asynchronously, enhancing disaster image identification performance even in resource-constrained settings. Experimental tests demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms traditional individual backbones and standard federated approaches, establishing a scalable and resource-aware solution for real-time disaster response.

AGORA: Agentic Green Orchestration Architecture for Beyond 5G Networks

Effective management and operational decision-making for complex mobile network systems present significant challenges, particularly when addressing conflicting requirements such as efficiency, user satisfaction, and energy-efficient traffic steering. The literature presents various approaches aimed at enhancing network management, including the Zero-Touch Network (ZTN) and Self-Organizing Network (SON); however, these approaches often lack a practical and scalable mechanism to consider human sustainability goals as input, translate them into energy-aware operational policies, and enforce them at runtime. In this study, we address this gap by proposing the AGORA: Agentic Green Orchestration Architecture for Beyond 5G Networks. AGORA embeds a local tool-augmented Large Language Model (LLM) agent in the mobile network control loop to translate natural-language sustainability goals into telemetry-grounded actions, actuating the User Plane Function (UPF) to perform energy-aware traffic steering. The findings indicate a strong latency-energy coupling in tool-driven control loops and demonstrate that compact models can achieve a low energy footprint while still facilitating correct policy execution, including non-zero migration behavior under stressed Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) conditions. Our approach paves the way for sustainability-first, intent-driven network operations that align human objectives with executable orchestration in Beyond-5G infrastructures.

Generalizable Hyperparameter Optimization for Federated Learning on Non-IID Cancer Images

Deep learning for cancer histopathology training conflicts with privacy constraints in clinical settings. Federated Learning (FL) mitigates this by keeping data local; however, its performance depends on hyperparameter choices under non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) client datasets. This paper examined whether hyperparameters optimized on one cancer imaging dataset generalized across non-IID federated scenarios. We considered binary histopathology tasks for ovarian and colorectal cancers. We perform centralized Bayesian hyperparameter optimization and transfer dataset-specific optima to the non-IID FL setup. The main contribution of this study is the introduction of a simple cross-dataset aggregation heuristic by combining configurations by averaging the learning rates and considering the modal optimizers and batch sizes. This combined configuration achieves a competitive classification performance.

Exploiting Test-Time Augmentation in Federated Learning for Brain Tumor MRI Classification

Efficient brain tumor diagnosis is crucial for early treatment; however, it is challenging because of lesion variability and image complexity. We evaluated convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in a federated learning (FL) setting, comparing models trained on original versus preprocessed MRI images (resizing, grayscale conversion, normalization, filtering, and histogram equalization). Preprocessing alone yielded negligible gains; combined with test-time augmentation (TTA), it delivered consistent, statistically significant improvements in federated MRI classification (p<0.001). In practice, TTA should be the default inference strategy in FL-based medical imaging; when the computational budget permits, pairing TTA with light preprocessing provides additional reliable gains.

Energy-Aware Ensemble Learning for Coffee Leaf Disease Classification

Coffee yields are contingent on the timely and accurate diagnosis of diseases; however, assessing leaf diseases in the field presents significant challenges. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) vision models achieve high accuracy, their adoption is hindered by the limitations of constrained devices and intermittent connectivity. This study aims to facilitate sustainable on-device diagnosis through knowledge distillation: high-capacity Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained in data centers transfer knowledge to compact CNNs through Ensemble Learning (EL). Furthermore, dense tiny pairs were integrated through simple and optimized ensembling to enhance accuracy while adhering to strict computational and energy constraints. On a curated coffee leaf dataset, distilled tiny ensembles achieved competitive with prior work with significantly reduced energy consumption and carbon footprint. This indicates that lightweight models, when properly distilled and ensembled, can provide practical diagnostic solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

Performance Evaluation and Threat Mitigation in Large-scale 5G Core Deployment

The deployment of large-scale software-based 5G core functions presents significant challenges due to their reliance on optimized and intelligent resource provisioning for their services. Many studies have focused on analyzing the impact of resource allocation for complex deployments using mathematical models, queue theories, or even Artificial Intelligence (AI). This paper elucidates the effects of chaotic workloads, generated by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) on different Network Functions (NFs) on User Equipment registration performance. Our findings highlight the necessity of diverse resource profiles to ensure Service-Level Agreement (SLA) compliance in large-scale 5G core deployments. Additionally, our analysis of packet capture approaches demonstrates the potential of kernel-based monitoring for scalable security threat defense. Finally, our empirical evaluation provides insights into the effective deployment of 5G NFs in complex scenarios.

Towards Sustainability in 6G Network Slicing with Energy-Saving and Optimization Methods

The 6G mobile network is the next evolutionary step after 5G, with a prediction of an explosive surge in mobile traffic. It provides ultra-low latency, higher data rates, high device density, and ubiquitous coverage, positively impacting services in various areas. Energy saving is a major concern for new systems in the telecommunications sector because all players are expected to reduce their carbon footprints to contribute to mitigating climate change. Network slicing is a fundamental enabler for 6G/5G mobile networks and various other new systems, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and Industrial IoT (IIoT). However, energy-saving methods embedded in network slicing architectures are still a research gap. This paper discusses how to embed energy-saving methods in network-slicing architectures that are a fundamental enabler for nearly all new innovative systems being deployed worldwide. This paper's main contribution is a proposal to save energy in network slicing. That is achieved by deploying ML-native agents in NS architectures to dynamically orchestrate and optimize resources based on user demands. The SFI2 network slicing reference architecture is the concrete use case scenario in which contrastive learning improves energy saving for resource allocation.

VINEVI: A Virtualized Network Vision Architecture for Smart Monitoring of Heterogeneous Applications and Infrastructures

Monitoring heterogeneous infrastructures and applications is essential to cope with user requirements properly, but it still lacks enhancements. The well-known state-of-the-art methods and tools do not support seamless monitoring of bare-metal, low-cost infrastructures, neither hosted nor virtualized services with fine-grained details. This work proposes VIrtualized NEtwork VIsion architecture (VINEVI), an intelligent method for seamless monitoring heterogeneous infrastructures and applications. The VINEVI architecture advances state of the art with a node-embedded traffic classification agent placing physical and virtualized infrastructures enabling real-time traffic classification. VINEVI combines this real-time traffic classification with well-known tools such as Prometheus and Victoria Metrics to monitor the entire stack from the hardware to the virtualized applications. Experimental results showcased that VINEVI architecture allowed seamless heterogeneous infrastructure monitoring with a higher level of detail beyond literature. Also, our node-embedded real-time Internet traffic classifier evolved with flexibility the methods with monitoring heterogeneous infrastructures seamlessly.

Improving the network traffic classification using the Packet Vision approach

The network traffic classification allows improving the management, and the network services offer taking into account the kind of application. The future network architectures, mainly mobile networks, foresee intelligent mechanisms in their architectural frameworks to deliver application-aware network requirements. The potential of convolutional neural networks capabilities, widely exploited in several contexts, can be used in network traffic classification. Thus, it is necessary to develop methods based on the content of packets transforming it into a suitable input for CNN technologies. Hence, we implemented and evaluated the Packet Vision, a method capable of building images from packets raw-data, considering both header and payload. Our approach excels those found in state-of-the-art by delivering security and privacy by transforming the raw-data packet into images. Therefore, we built a dataset with four traffic classes evaluating the performance of three CNNs architectures: AlexNet, ResNet-18, and SqueezeNet. Experiments showcase the Packet Vision combined with CNNs applicability and suitability as a promising approach to deliver outstanding performance in classifying network traffic.