The next revolution of industry will turn the industries as well as the entire society into a human-centric shape. The presence and impacts of human beings in industrial systems and processes will be magnified more than ever before. To cope with the emerging challenges raised by this revolution, 6G will massively deploy digital twins to merge the cyber-physicalhuman worlds; novel solutions for multi-sensory human-machine interfaces will play a key role in this strategy.
Manually monitoring water quality is very exhausting and requires several hours of sampling and laboratory testing for a particular body of water. This article presents a solution to test water properties like electrical conductivity and pH with a remote-controlled floating vehicle that minimizes time intervals. An autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) has been designed mathematically and operated via MATLAB \& Simulink simulation where the Proportional integral derivative (PID) controller has been considered. A PVC model with Small waterplane area twin-hull (SWATH) technology is used to develop this vehicle. Manually collected data is compared to online sensors, suggesting a better solution for determining water properties such as dissolved oxygen (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), temperature, conductivity, total alkalinity, and bacteria. Preliminary computational results show the promising result, as Sungai Pasu rivers tested water falls in the safe range of pH (~6.8-7.14) using the developed ASV.
Backdoor attacks have been considered a severe security threat to deep learning. Such attacks can make models perform abnormally on inputs with predefined triggers and still retain state-of-the-art performance on clean data. While backdoor attacks have been thoroughly investigated in the image domain from both attackers' and defenders' sides, an analysis in the frequency domain has been missing thus far. This paper first revisits existing backdoor triggers from a frequency perspective and performs a comprehensive analysis. Our results show that many current backdoor attacks exhibit severe high-frequency artifacts, which persist across different datasets and resolutions. We further demonstrate these high-frequency artifacts enable a simple way to detect existing backdoor triggers at a detection rate of 98.50% without prior knowledge of the attack details and the target model. Acknowledging previous attacks' weaknesses, we propose a practical way to create smooth backdoor triggers without high-frequency artifacts and study their detectability. We show that existing defense works can benefit by incorporating these smooth triggers into their design consideration. Moreover, we show that the detector tuned over stronger smooth triggers can generalize well to unseen weak smooth triggers. In short, our work emphasizes the importance of considering frequency analysis when designing both backdoor attacks and defenses in deep learning.
The maritime industry is experiencing a technological revolution that affects shipbuilding, operation of both seagoing and inland vessels, cargo management, and working practices in harbors. This ongoing transformation is driven by the ambition to make the ecosystem more sustainable and cost-efficient. Digitalization and automation help achieve these goals by transforming shipping and cruising into a much more cost- and energy-efficient, and decarbonized industry segment. The key enablers in these processes are always-available connectivity and content delivery services, which can not only aid shipping companies in improving their operational efficiency and reducing carbon emissions but also contribute to enhanced crew welfare and passenger experience. Due to recent advancements in integrating high-capacity and ultra-reliable terrestrial and non-terrestrial networking technologies, ubiquitous maritime connectivity is becoming a reality. To cope with the increased complexity of managing these integrated systems, this article advocates the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning-based approaches to meet the service requirements and energy efficiency targets in various maritime communications scenarios.
Computational task offloading based on edge computing can deal with the performance bottleneck faced by traditional cloud-based systems for industrial Internet of things (IIoT). To further optimize computing efficiency and resource allocation, collaborative offloading has been put forward to enable the offloading from edge devices to IIoT terminal devices. However, there still lack incentive mechanisms to encourage participants to take over the tasks from others. To counter this situation, this paper proposes a distributed computational resource trading strategy considering multiple preferences of IIoT users. Unlike most existing works, the objective of our trading strategy comprehensively considers different satisfaction degrees with task delay, energy consumption, price, and user reputation of both requesters and collaborators. Our system uses blockchain to enhance the decentralization, security, and automation. Compared with the trading method based on classical double auction matching mechanism, our trading method will have more tasks offloaded and executed, and the trading results are more friendly to collaborators with higher reputation scores.
The next revolution of industry will turn the industries as well as the entire society into a human-centric shape. The human presence in industrial environment and the human participation in industrial processes will be magnified more than ever before. To cope with the emerging challenges raised by this revolution, 6G ambitions to bridge the three domains of digital information, physical assets and humans into one merged cyberphysical-human world. This proposes not only an unprecedented demand for digital twin solutions, but also new technical requirements. Especially, aiming at a human-centric industrial DT system, novel multi-sensory human-machine interfaces will play a key role in this paradigm shift.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm enabled edge computing is envisioned to be promising in the sixth generation wireless communication networks due to their wide application sensories and flexible deployment. However, most of the existing works focus on edge computing enabled by a single or a small scale UAVs, which are very different from UAV swarm-enabled edge computing. In order to facilitate the practical applications of UAV swarm-enabled edge computing, the state of the art research is presented in this article. The potential applications, architectures and implementation considerations are illustrated. Moreover, the promising enabling technologies for UAV swarm-enabled edge computing are discussed. Furthermore, we outline challenges and open issues in order to shed light on the future research directions.
Autonomous driving has achieved a significant milestone in research and development over the last decade. There is increasing interest in the field as the deployment of self-operating vehicles on roads promises safer and more ecologically friendly transportation systems. With the rise of computationally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, autonomous vehicles can sense their environment with high precision, make safe real-time decisions, and operate more reliably without human interventions. However, intelligent decision-making in autonomous cars is not generally understandable by humans in the current state of the art, and such deficiency hinders this technology from being socially acceptable. Hence, aside from making safe real-time decisions, the AI systems of autonomous vehicles also need to explain how these decisions are constructed in order to be regulatory compliant across many jurisdictions. Our study sheds a comprehensive light on developing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for autonomous vehicles. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a thorough overview of the present gaps with respect to explanations in the state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle industry. We then show the taxonomy of explanations and explanation receivers in this field. Thirdly, we propose a framework for an architecture of end-to-end autonomous driving systems and justify the role of XAI in both debugging and regulating such systems. Finally, as future research directions, we provide a field guide on XAI approaches for autonomous driving that can improve operational safety and transparency towards achieving public approval by regulators, manufacturers, and all engaged stakeholders.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
This paper presents an upgraded, real world application oriented version of gym-gazebo, the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo based Reinforcement Learning (RL) toolkit, which complies with OpenAI Gym. The content discusses the new ROS 2 based software architecture and summarizes the results obtained using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Ultimately, the output of this work presents a benchmarking system for robotics that allows different techniques and algorithms to be compared using the same virtual conditions. We have evaluated environments with different levels of complexity of the Modular Articulated Robotic Arm (MARA), reaching accuracies in the millimeter scale. The converged results show the feasibility and usefulness of the gym-gazebo 2 toolkit, its potential and applicability in industrial use cases, using modular robots.
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field.