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Public cloud serverless platforms have attracted a large user base due to their high scalability, plug-and-play deployment model, and pay-per-use billing. However, compared to virtual machines and container hosting services, modern serverless offerings typically impose higher per-unit time and resource charges. Additionally, billing practices such as wall-clock time allocation-based billing, invocation fees, and usage rounding up can further increase costs. This work, for the first time, holistically demystifies these costs by conducting an in-depth, top-down characterization and analysis from user-facing billing models, through request serving architectures, and down to operating system scheduling on major public serverless platforms. We quantify, for the first time, how current billing practices inflate billable resources up to 4.35x beyond actual consumption. Also, our analysis reveals previously unreported cost drivers, such as operational patterns of serving architectures that create overheads, details of resource allocation during keep-alive periods, and OS scheduling granularity effects that directly impact both performance and billing. By tracing the sources of costs from b

Background: Healthcare has many manual processes that can benefit from automation and augmentation with Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), the medical billing and coding process. However, current foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) perform poorly when tasked with generating accurate International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) and Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes. Additionally, there are many security and financial challenges in the application of generative AI to healthcare. We present a strategy for developing generative AI tools in healthcare, specifically for medical billing and coding, that balances accuracy, accessibility, and patient privacy. Methods: We fine tune the PHI-3 Mini and PHI-3 Medium LLMs using institutional data and compare the results against the PHI-3 base model, a PHI-3 RAG application, and GPT-4o. We use the post operative surgical report as input and the patients billing claim the associated ICD-10, CPT, and Modifier codes as the target result. Performance is measured by accuracy of code generation, proportion of invalid codes, and the fidelity of the billing claim format. Results: Both fine

The complexity of mental healthcare billing enables anomalies, including fraud. While machine learning methods have been applied to anomaly detection, they often struggle with class imbalance, label scarcity, and complex sequential patterns. This study explores a hybrid deep learning approach combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Transformers, with pseudo-labeling via Isolation Forests (iForest) and Autoencoders (AE). Prior work has not evaluated such hybrid models trained on pseudo-labeled data in the context of healthcare billing. The approach is evaluated on two real-world billing datasets related to mental healthcare. The iForest LSTM baseline achieves the highest recall (0.963) on declaration-level data. On the operation-level data, the hybrid iForest-based model achieves the highest recall (0.744), though at the cost of lower precision. These findings highlight the potential of combining pseudo-labeling with hybrid deep learning in complex, imbalanced anomaly detection settings.

Distribution utilities are now expected to deliver bills that customers can actually read attach a defensible carbon number to every kWh sold and schedule load against grid stress and emissions constraints We propose an end-to-end framework that unifies four production-grade capabilities under one architectural roof a generative-AI agent that drafts each customers natural-language billing statement from structured numeric inputs under a constrained decoding policy a transformer-based forecaster that supplies the day-ahead consumption estimate with calibrated quantile bands

This paper presents a comprehensive approach to automated energy billing that leverages IoT-based smart meters, blockchain technology, and the Prophet time series forecasting model. The proposed system facilitates real-time power consumption monitoring via Wi-Fi-enabled ESP32 modules and a mobile application interface. It integrates Firebase and blockchain for secure, transparent billing processes and employs smart contracts for automated payments. The Prophet model is used for energy demand forecasting, with careful data preprocessing, transformation, and parameter tuning to improve prediction accuracy. This holistic solution aims to reduce manual errors, enhance user awareness, and promote sustainable energy use.

The integration of information and communication technology (ICT) with traditional power grids has led to the emergence of smart grids. Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) plays a crucial role in smart grids by facilitating two-way communication between smart meters and the utility provider. This bidirectional communication allows intelligent meters to report fine-grained consumption data at predefined intervals, enabling accurate billing, efficient grid monitoring and management, and rapid outage detection. However, the collection of detailed consumption data can inadvertently disclose consumers' daily activities, raising privacy concerns and potentially leading to privacy violations. To address these issues and preserve individuals' privacy, we propose a lightweight privacy-preserving smart metering protocol specifically designed to support real-time tariff billing service with dynamic policy adjustment. Our scheme employs an efficient data perturbation technique to obscure precise energy usage data from internal adversaries, including the intermediary gateways and the utility provider. Subsequently, we validate the efficiency and security of our protocol through comprehensive

We propose a privacy-preserving billing protocol for local energy markets (PBP-LEM) that takes into account market participants' energy volume deviations from their bids. PBP-LEM enables a group of market entities to jointly compute participants' bills in a decentralized and privacy-preserving manner without sacrificing correctness. It also mitigates risks on individuals' privacy arising from any potential internal collusion. We first propose an efficient and privacy-preserving individual billing scheme, achieving information-theoretic security, which serves as a building block. PBP-LEM utilizes this scheme, along with other techniques such as multiparty computation, inner product functional encryption and Pedersen commitments to ensure data confidentiality and accuracy. Additionally, we present three approaches, resulting in different levels of privacy protection and performance. We prove that the protocol meets its security and privacy requirements and is feasible for deployment in real LEMs: bills can be computed in less than five minutes for 4,000 users using the most computationally intensive approach, and in just 0.18 seconds using the least intensive one.

This paper proposes a privacy-preserving and accountable billing (PA-Bill) protocol for trading in peer-to-peer energy markets, addressing situations where there may be discrepancies between the volume of energy committed and delivered. Such discrepancies can lead to challenges in providing both privacy and accountability while maintaining accurate billing. To overcome these challenges, a universal cost splitting mechanism is proposed that prioritises privacy and accountability. It leverages a homomorphic encryption cryptosystem to provide privacy and employs blockchain technology to establish accountability. A dispute resolution mechanism is also introduced to minimise the occurrence of erroneous bill calculations while ensuring accountability and non-repudiation throughout the billing process. Our evaluation demonstrates that PA-Bill offers an effective billing mechanism that maintains privacy and accountability in peer-to-peer energy markets utilising a semi-decentralised approach.

This paper proposes a zone-based privacy-preserving billing protocol for local energy markets that takes into account energy volume deviations of market participants from their bids. Our protocol incorporates participants' locations on the grid for splitting the deviations cost. The proposed billing model employs multiparty computation so that the accurate calculation of individual bills is performed in a decentralised and privacy-preserving manner. We also present a security analysis as well as performance evaluations for different security settings. The results show superiority of the honest-majority model to the dishonest majority in terms of computational efficiency. They also show that the billing can be executed for 5000 users in less than nine seconds in the online phase for all security settings, demonstrating its feasibility to be deployed in real local energy markets.

In this paper, we present the data preparation activities that we performed for the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) project, commissioned and supervised by Doxee S.p.A.. DXP manages the billing data of the users of different companies operating in various sectors (electricity and gas, telephony, pay TV, etc.). This data has to be processed to provide services to the users (e.g., interactive billing), but mainly to provide analytics to the companies (e.g., churn prediction or user segmentation). We focus on the design of the data preparation pipeline, describing the challenges that we had to overcome in order to get the billing data ready to perform analysis on it. We illustrate the lessons learned by highlighting the key points that could be transferred to similar projects. Moreover, we report some interesting results and considerations derived from the preliminary analysis of the prepared data, also pointing out some possible future directions for the ongoing project, spacing from big data integration to privacy-preserving temporal record linkage.

The need for different energy sources has increased due to the decrease in the amount and the harm caused to the environment by its usage. Today, fossil fuels used as an energy source in land, sea or air vehicles are rapidly being replaced by different energy sources. The number and types of vehicles using energy sources other than fossil fuels are also increasing. Electricity stands out among the energy sources used. The possibility of generating electricity that is renewable, compatible with nature and at a lower cost provides a great advantage. For all these reasons, the use of electric vehicles is increasing day by day. Various solutions continue to be developed for the charging systems and post-charge billing processes of these vehicles. As a result of these solutions, the standards have not yet been fully formed. In this study, an authentication and billing scheme is proposed for charging and post-charging billing processes of electric land vehicles keeping security and privacy in the foreground. This scheme is named EVABS, which derives from the phrase "Electric Vehicle Authentication and Billing Scheme". An authentication and billing scheme is proposed where data communicat

Burstable billing is widely adopted in practice, e.g., by colocation data center providers, to charge for their users, e.g., data centers, for data transferring. However, there is still a lack of research on what the best way is for a user to manage its workload in response to burstable billing. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel method to optimally respond to burstable billing under demand uncertainty. First, we develop a tractable mathematical expression to calculate the 95th percentile usage of a user, who is charged by provider via burstable billing for bandwidth usage. This model is then used to formulate a new bandwidth allocation problem to maximize the user's surplus, i.e., its net utility minus cost. Additionally, we examine different non-convex solution methods for the formulated stochastic optimization problem. We also extend our design to the case where a user can receive service from multiple providers, who all employ burstable billing. Using real-world workload traces, we show that our proposed method can reduce user's bandwidth cost by 26% and increase its total surplus by 23%, compared to the current practice of allocating bandwidth on-demand.

Audio/visual recognition and retrieval applications have recently garnered significant attention within Internet-of-Things (IoT) oriented services, given that video cameras and audio processing chipsets are now ubiquitous even in low-end embedded systems. In the most typical scenario for such services, each device extracts audio/visual features and compacts them into feature descriptors, which comprise media queries. These queries are uploaded to a remote cloud computing service that performs content matching for classification or retrieval applications. Two of the most crucial aspects for such services are: (i) controlling the device energy consumption when using the service; (ii) reducing the billing cost incurred from the cloud infrastructure provider. In this paper we derive analytic conditions for the optimal coupling between the device energy consumption and the incurred cloud infrastructure billing. Our framework encapsulates: the energy consumption to produce and transmit audio/visual queries, the billing rates of the cloud infrastructure, the number of devices concurrently connected to the same cloud server, {the query volume constraint of each cluster of devices,} and the

Audio/visual recognition and retrieval applications have recently garnered significant attention within Internet-of-Things (IoT) oriented services, given that video cameras and audio processing chipsets are now ubiquitous even in low-end embedded systems. In the most typical scenario for such services, each device extracts audio/visual features and compacts them into feature descriptors, which comprise media queries. These queries are uploaded to a remote cloud computing service that performs content matching for classification or retrieval applications. Two of the most crucial aspects for such services are: (i) controlling the device energy consumption when using the service; (ii) reducing the billing cost incurred from the cloud infrastructure provider. In this paper we derive analytic conditions for the optimal coupling between the device energy consumption and the incurred cloud infrastructure billing. Our framework encapsulates: the energy consumption to produce and transmit audio/visual queries, the billing rates of the cloud infrastructure, the number of devices concurrently connected to the same cloud server, and the statistics of the query data production volume per device

Smart grids are being increasingly deployed worldwide, as they constitute the electricity grid of the future, providing bidirectional communication between households. One of their main potential applications is the peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading market, which promises users better electricity prices and higher incentives to produce renewable energy. However, most P2P markets require users to submit energy bids/offers in advance, which cannot account for unexpected surpluses of energy consumption/production. Moreover, the fine-grained metering information used in calculating and settling bills/rewards is inherently sensitive and must be protected in conformity with existing privacy regulations. To address these issues, this report proposes a novel privacy-preserving billing and settlements protocol, PPBSP, for use in local energy markets with imperfect bid-offer fulfillment, which only uses homomorphically encrypted versions of the half-hourly user consumption data. PPBSP also supports various cost-sharing mechanisms among market participants, including two new and improved methods of proportionally redistributing the cost of maintaining the balance of the grid in a fair manner.