With the increasing demand for communication between blockchains, improving the performance of cross-chain communication protocols becomes an emerging challenge. We take a first step towards analyzing the limitations of cross-chain communication protocols by comprehensively evaluating Cosmos Network's Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol. To achieve our goal we introduce a novel framework to guide empirical evaluations of cross-chain communication protocols. We implement an instance of our framework as a tool to evaluate the IBC protocol. Our findings highlight several challenges, such as high transaction confirmation latency, bottlenecks in the blockchain's RPC implementation and concurrency issues that hinder the scalability of the cross-chain message relayer. We also demonstrate how to reduce the time required to complete cross-chain transfers by up to 70% when submitting large amounts of transfers. Finally, we discuss challenges faced during deployment with the objective of contributing to the development and advancement of cross-chain communication.
Computer vision is a broad field of study that encompasses different tasks (e.g., object detection, semantic segmentation, 3D reconstruction). Although computer vision is relevant to the African communities in various applications, yet computer vision research is under-explored in the continent and constructs only 0.06% of top-tier publications in the last 10 years. In this paper, our goal is to have a better understanding of the computer vision research conducted in Africa and provide pointers on whether there is equity in research or not. We do this through an empirical analysis of the African computer vision publications that are Scopus indexed. We first study the opportunities available for African institutions to publish in top-tier computer vision venues. We show that African publishing trends in top-tier venues over the years do not exhibit consistent growth. We also devise a novel way to retrieve African authors through their affiliation history to have a better understanding of their contributions in top-tier venues. Moreover, we study all computer vision publications beyond top-tier venues in different African regions to find that mainly Northern and Southern Africa are publishing in computer vision with more than 85% of African publications. Finally, we present the most recurring keywords in computer vision publications. In summary, our analysis reveals that African researchers are key contributors to African research, yet there exists multiple barriers to publish in top-tier venues and the current trend of topics published in the continent might not necessarily reflect the communities' needs. This work is part of a community based effort that is focused on improving computer vision research in Africa.
LT (Luby transform) codes are a celebrated family of rateless erasure codes (RECs). Most of existing LT codes were designed for applications in which a centralized encoder possesses all message blocks and is solely responsible for encoding them into codewords. Distributed LT codes, in which message blocks are physically scattered across multiple different locations (encoders) that need to collaboratively perform the encoding, has never been systemically studied before despite its growing importance in applications. In this work, we present the first systemic study of LT codes in the distributed setting, and make the following three major contributions. First, we show that only a proper subset of LT codes are feasible in the distributed setting, and give the sufficient and necessary condition for such feasibility. Second, we propose a distributed encoding protocol that can efficiently implement any feasible code. The protocol is parameterized by a so-called action probability array (APA) that is only a few KBs in size, and any feasible code corresponds to a valid APA setting and vice versa. Third, we propose two heuristic search algorithms that have led to the discovery of feasible codes that are much more efficient than the state of the art.
Peer code reviews are crucial for maintaining the quality of the code in software repositories. Developers have introduced a number of software bots to help with the code review process. Despite the benefits of automating code review tasks, many developers face challenges interacting with these bots due to non-comprehensive feedback and disruptive notifications. In this paper, we analyze how incorporating a bot in software development cycle will decrease turnaround time of pull request. We created a bot called SUGGESTION BOT to automatically review the code base using GitHub's suggested changes functionality in order to solve this issue. A preliminary comparative empirical investigation between the utilization of this bot and manual review procedures was also conducted in this study. We evaluate SUGGESTION BOT concerning its impact on review time and also analyze whether the comments given by the bot are clear and useful for users. Our results provide implications for the design of future systems and improving human-bot interactions for code review.
The Circular Economy (CE) is regarded as a solution to the environmental crisis. However, mainstream CE measures skirt around challenging the ethos of ever-increasing economic growth, overlooking social impacts and under-representing solutions such as reducing overall consumption. Circular Societies (CS) address these concerns by challenging this ethos. They emphasize ground-up social reorganization,address over-consumption through sufficiency strategies, and highlight the need for considering the complex inter-dependencies between nature, society, and technology on local, regional and global levels. However, no blueprint exists for forming CSs. An initial objective of my thesis is exploring existing social-network ontologies and developing a broadly applicable model for CSs. Since ground-up social reorganization on local, regional, and global levels has compounding effects on network complexities,a technological framework digitizing these inter-dependencies is necessary. Finally, adhering to CS principles of transparency and democratization, a system of trust is necessary to achieve collaborative consensus of the network state.
As blockchains continue to seek to scale to a larger number of nodes, the communication complexity of protocols has become a significant priority as the network can quickly become overburdened. Several schemes have attempted to address this, one of which uses coded computation to lighten the load. Here we seek to address one issue with all such coded blockchain schemes known to the authors: transaction confirmation. In a coded blockchain, only the leader has access to the uncoded block, while the nodes receive encoded data that makes it effectively impossible for them to identify which transactions were included in the block. As a result, a Byzantine leader might choose not to notify a sender or receiver of a transaction that the transaction went into the block, and even with an honest leader, they would not be able to produce a proof of a transaction's inclusion. To address this, we have constructed a protocol to send the nodes enough information so that a client sending or receiving a transaction is guaranteed to not only be notified but also to receive a proof of that transaction's inclusion in the block. Crucially, we do this without substantially increasing the bit complexity of the original coded blockchain protocol.
A code of length $n$ is said to be (combinatorially) $(\rho,L)$-list decodable if the Hamming ball of radius $\rho n$ around any vector in the ambient space does not contain more than $L$ codewords. We study a recently introduced class of higher order MDS codes, which are closely related (via duality) to codes that achieve a generalized Singleton bound for list decodability. For some $\ell\geq 1$, higher order MDS codes of length $n$, dimension $k$, and order $\ell$ are denoted as $(n,k)$-MDS($\ell$) codes. We present a number of results on the structure of these codes, identifying the `extend-ability' of their parameters in various scenarios. Specifically, for some parameter regimes, we identify conditions under which $(n_1,k_1)$-MDS($\ell_1$) codes can be obtained from $(n_2,k_2)$-MDS($\ell_2$) codes, via various techniques. We believe that these results will aid in efficient constructions of higher order MDS codes. We also obtain a new field size upper bound for the existence of such codes, which arguably improves over the best known existing bound, in some parameter regimes.
Channel splicing is a rather new and very promising concept. It allows to realize a wideband channel sounder by combining multiple narrow-band measurements. Among others, channel splicing is a sparse sensing techniques suggested for use in joint communication and sensing (JCAS), channel measurements and prediction using cheap hardware that cannot measure wideband channels directly such as in the internet of things (IoT). This work validates the practicality of a channel splicing technique by integrating it into an OFDM-based IEEE 802.11ac system, which we consider representative for many IoT solutions. Our system allows computing both the channel impulse response (CIR) and the channel frequency response (CFR). In this paper, we concentrate on the impact of the number of sub-bands in our study and show that even using only 50% of the overall spectrum leads to very accurate CIR measures. We validate the system in simulation and confirm the results in an experimental in-door scenario using software defined radios.
Federated learning (FL) is a prospective distributed machine learning framework that can preserve data privacy. In particular, cross-silo FL can complete model training by making isolated data islands of different organizations collaborate with a parameter server (PS) via exchanging model parameters for multiple communication rounds. In cross-silo FL, an incentive mechanism is indispensable for motivating data owners to contribute their models to FL training. However, how to allocate the reward budget among different rounds is an essential but complicated problem largely overlooked by existing works. The challenge of this problem lies in the opaque feedback between reward budget allocation and model utility improvement of FL, making the optimal reward budget allocation complicated. To address this problem, we design an online reward budget allocation algorithm using Bayesian optimization named BARA (\underline{B}udget \underline{A}llocation for \underline{R}everse \underline{A}uction). Specifically, BARA can model the complicated relationship between reward budget allocation and final model accuracy in FL based on historical training records so that the reward budget allocated to each communication round is dynamically optimized so as to maximize the final model utility. We further incorporate the BARA algorithm into reverse auction-based incentive mechanisms to illustrate its effectiveness. Extensive experiments are conducted on real datasets to demonstrate that BARA significantly outperforms competitive baselines by improving model utility with the same amount of reward budget.
Distributed detection over a blockchain-aided Internet of Things (BIoT) network in the presence of attacks is considered, where the integrated blockchain is employed to secure data exchanges over the BIoT as well as data storage at the agents of the BIoT. We consider a general adversary model where attackers jointly exploit the vulnerability of IoT devices and that of the blockchain employed in the BIoT. The optimal attacking strategy which minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence is pursued. It can be shown that this optimization problem is nonconvex, and hence it is generally intractable to find the globally optimal solution to such a problem. To overcome this issue, we first propose a relaxation method that can convert the original nonconvex optimization problem into a convex optimization problem, and then the analytic expression for the optimal solution to the relaxed convex optimization problem is derived. The optimal value of the relaxed convex optimization problem provides a detection performance guarantee for the BIoT in the presence of attacks. In addition, we develop a coordinate descent algorithm which is based on a capped water-filling method to solve the relaxed convex optimization problem, and moreover, we show that the convergence of the proposed coordinate descent algorithm can be guaranteed.
Blockchain is an emerging decentralized data collection, sharing and storage technology, which have provided abundant transparent, secure, tamper-proof, secure and robust ledger services for various real-world use cases. Recent years have witnessed notable developments of blockchain technology itself as well as blockchain-adopting applications. Most existing surveys limit the scopes on several particular issues of blockchain or applications, which are hard to depict the general picture of current giant blockchain ecosystem. In this paper, we investigate recent advances of both blockchain technology and its most active research topics in real-world applications. We first review the recent developments of consensus mechanisms and storage mechanisms in general blockchain systems. Then extensive literature is conducted on blockchain enabled IoT, edge computing, federated learning and several emerging applications including healthcare, COVID-19 pandemic, social network and supply chain, where detailed specific research topics are discussed in each. Finally, we discuss the future directions, challenges and opportunities in both academia and industry.