Given the tremendous success of the Internet of Things in interconnecting consumer devices, we observe a natural trend to likewise interconnect devices in industrial settings, referred to as Industrial Internet of Things or Industry 4.0. While this coupling of industrial components provides many benefits, it also introduces serious security challenges. Although sharing many similarities with the consumer Internet of Things, securing the Industrial Internet of Things introduces its own challenges but also opportunities, mainly resulting from a longer lifetime of components and a larger scale of networks. In this paper, we identify the unique security goals and challenges of the Industrial Internet of Things, which, unlike consumer deployments, mainly follow from safety and productivity requirements. To address these security goals and challenges, we provide a comprehensive survey of research efforts to secure the Industrial Internet of Things, discuss their applicability, and analyze their security benefits.
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning technique, where each device contributes to the learning model by independently computing the gradient based on its local training data. It has recently become a hot research topic, as it promises several benefits related to data privacy and scalability. However, implementing FL at the network edge is challenging due to system and data heterogeneity and resources constraints. In this article, we examine the existing challenges and trade-offs in Federated Edge Learning (FEEL). The design of FEEL algorithms for resources-efficient learning raises several challenges. These challenges are essentially related to the multidisciplinary nature of the problem. As the data is the key component of the learning, this article advocates a new set of considerations for data characteristics in wireless scheduling algorithms in FEEL. Hence, we propose a general framework for the data-aware scheduling as a guideline for future research directions. We also discuss the main axes and requirements for data evaluation and some exploitable techniques and metrics.
`Tracking' is the collection of data about an individual's activity across multiple distinct contexts and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred. This paper aims to introduce tracking on the web, smartphones, and the Internet of Things, to an audience with little or no previous knowledge. It covers these topics primarily from the perspective of computer science and human-computer interaction, but also includes relevant law and policy aspects. Rather than a systematic literature review, it aims to provide an over-arching narrative spanning this large research space. Section 1 introduces the concept of tracking. Section 2 provides a short history of the major developments of tracking on the web. Section 3 presents research covering the detection, measurement and analysis of web tracking technologies. Section 4 delves into the countermeasures against web tracking and mechanisms that have been proposed to allow users to control and limit tracking, as well as studies into end-user perspectives on tracking. Section 5 focuses on tracking on `smart' devices including smartphones and the internet of things. Section 6 covers emerging issues affecting the future of tracking across these different platforms.
Deep Learning (DL) models have achieved superior performance in many application domains, including vision, language, medical, commercial ads, entertainment, etc. With the fast development, both DL applications and the underlying serving hardware have demonstrated strong scaling trends, i.e., Model Scaling and Compute Scaling, for example, the recent pre-trained model with hundreds of billions of parameters with ~TB level memory consumption, as well as the newest GPU accelerators providing hundreds of TFLOPS. With both scaling trends, new problems and challenges emerge in DL inference serving systems, which gradually trends towards Large-scale Deep learning Serving systems (LDS). This survey aims to summarize and categorize the emerging challenges and optimization opportunities for large-scale deep learning serving systems. By providing a novel taxonomy, summarizing the computing paradigms, and elaborating the recent technique advances, we hope that this survey could shed light on new optimization perspectives and motivate novel works in large-scale deep learning system optimization.
AI in finance broadly refers to the applications of AI techniques in financial businesses. This area has been lasting for decades with both classic and modern AI techniques applied to increasingly broader areas of finance, economy and society. In contrast to either discussing the problems, aspects and opportunities of finance that have benefited from specific AI techniques and in particular some new-generation AI and data science (AIDS) areas or reviewing the progress of applying specific techniques to resolving certain financial problems, this review offers a comprehensive and dense roadmap of the overwhelming challenges, techniques and opportunities of AI research in finance over the past decades. The landscapes and challenges of financial businesses and data are firstly outlined, followed by a comprehensive categorization and a dense overview of the decades of AI research in finance. We then structure and illustrate the data-driven analytics and learning of financial businesses and data. The comparison, criticism and discussion of classic vs. modern AI techniques for finance are followed. Lastly, open issues and opportunities address future AI-empowered finance and finance-motivated AI research.
Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs into five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey helps to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.
Federated Learning (FL) is a concept first introduced by Google in 2016, in which multiple devices collaboratively learn a machine learning model without sharing their private data under the supervision of a central server. This offers ample opportunities in critical domains such as healthcare, finance etc, where it is risky to share private user information to other organisations or devices. While FL appears to be a promising Machine Learning (ML) technique to keep the local data private, it is also vulnerable to attacks like other ML models. Given the growing interest in the FL domain, this report discusses the opportunities and challenges in federated learning.
As we seek to deploy machine learning models beyond virtual and controlled domains, it is critical to analyze not only the accuracy or the fact that it works most of the time, but if such a model is truly robust and reliable. This paper studies strategies to implement adversary robustly trained algorithms towards guaranteeing safety in machine learning algorithms. We provide a taxonomy to classify adversarial attacks and defenses, formulate the Robust Optimization problem in a min-max setting and divide it into 3 subcategories, namely: Adversarial (re)Training, Regularization Approach, and Certified Defenses. We survey the most recent and important results in adversarial example generation, defense mechanisms with adversarial (re)Training as their main defense against perturbations. We also survey mothods that add regularization terms that change the behavior of the gradient, making it harder for attackers to achieve their objective. Alternatively, we've surveyed methods which formally derive certificates of robustness by exactly solving the optimization problem or by approximations using upper or lower bounds. In addition, we discuss the challenges faced by most of the recent algorithms presenting future research perspectives.
Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, the edge computing systems integrate computing, storage and network resources at the edge of the network to provide computing infrastructure, enabling developers to quickly develop and deploy edge applications. Nowadays the edge computing systems have received widespread attention in both industry and academia. To explore new research opportunities and assist users in selecting suitable edge computing systems for specific applications, this survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the existing edge computing systems and introduces representative projects. A comparison of open source tools is presented according to their applicability. Finally, we highlight energy efficiency and deep learning optimization of edge computing systems. Open issues for analyzing and designing an edge computing system are also studied in this survey.
There is a recent large and growing interest in generative adversarial networks (GANs), which offer powerful features for generative modeling, density estimation, and energy function learning. GANs are difficult to train and evaluate but are capable of creating amazingly realistic, though synthetic, image data. Ideas stemming from GANs such as adversarial losses are creating research opportunities for other challenges such as domain adaptation. In this paper, we look at the field of GANs with emphasis on these areas of emerging research. To provide background for adversarial techniques, we survey the field of GANs, looking at the original formulation, training variants, evaluation methods, and extensions. Then we survey recent work on transfer learning, focusing on comparing different adversarial domain adaptation methods. Finally, we take a look forward to identify open research directions for GANs and domain adaptation, including some promising applications such as sensor-based human behavior modeling.
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.