To support the newly introduced multimedia services with ultra-low latency and extensive computation requirements, resource-constrained end user devices should utilize the ubiquitous computing resources available at network edge for augmenting on-board (local) processing with edge computing. In this regard, the capability of cell-free massive MIMO to provide reliable access links by guaranteeing uniform quality of service without cell edge can be exploited for seamless parallel processing. Taking this into account, we consider a cell-free massive MIMO-enabled mobile edge network to meet the stringent requirements of the advanced services. For the considered mobile edge network, we formulate a joint communication and computing resource allocation (JCCRA) problem with the objective of minimizing energy consumption of the users while meeting the tight delay constraints. We then propose a fully distributed cooperative solution approach based on multiagent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) algorithm. The simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed distributed approach has converged to that of a centralized deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based target benchmark, while alleviating the large overhead associated with the latter. Furthermore, it has been shown that our approach significantly outperforms heuristic baselines in terms of energy efficiency, roughly up to 5 times less total energy consumption.
This paper considers a human-autonomy collaborative sensor data fusion for dynamic target localization in a Bayesian framework. To compensate for the shortcomings of an autonomous tracking system, we propose to collect spatial sensing information from human operators who visually monitor the target and can provide target localization information in the form of free sketches encircling the area where the target is located. Our focus in this paper is to construct an adaptive probabilistic model for human-provided inputs where the adaption terms capture the level of reliability of the human inputs. The next contribution of this paper is a novel joint Bayesian learning method to fuse human and autonomous sensor inputs in a manner that the dynamic changes in human detection reliability are also captured and accounted for. A unique aspect of this Bayesian modeling framework is its analytical closed-form update equations, endowing our method with significant computational efficiency. Simulations demonstrate our results.
Intrusion detection systems (IDS) reinforce cyber defense by autonomously monitoring various data sources for traces of attacks. However, IDSs are also infamous for frequently raising false positives and alerts that are difficult to interpret without context. This results in high workloads on security operators who need to manually verify all reported alerts, often leading to fatigue and incorrect decisions. To generate more meaningful alerts and alleviate these issues, the research domain focused on multi-step attack analysis proposes approaches for filtering, clustering, and correlating IDS alerts, as well as generation of attack graphs. Unfortunately, existing data sets are outdated, unreliable, narrowly focused, or only suitable for IDS evaluation. Since hardly any suitable benchmark data sets are publicly available, researchers often resort to private data sets that prevent reproducibility of evaluations. We therefore generate a new alert data set that we publish alongside this paper. The data set contains alerts from three distinct IDSs monitoring eight executions of a multi-step attack as well as simulations of normal user behavior. To illustrate the potential of our data set, we experiment with alert prioritization as well as two open-source tools for meta-alert generation and attack graph extraction.
Following the successful debut of polyp detection and characterization, more advanced automation tools are being developed for colonoscopy. The new automation tasks, such as quality metrics or report generation, require understanding of the procedure flow that includes activities, events, anatomical landmarks, etc. In this work we present a method for automatic semantic parsing of colonoscopy videos. The method uses a novel DL multi-label temporal segmentation model trained in supervised and unsupervised regimes. We evaluate the accuracy of the method on a test set of over 300 annotated colonoscopy videos, and use ablation to explore the relative importance of various method's components.
Motivated by the challenges of the Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (DANES) community, we develop digital tools for processing cuneiform script being a 3D script imprinted into clay tablets used for more than three millennia and at least eight major languages. It consists of thousands of characters that have changed over time and space. Photographs are the most common representations usable for machine learning, while ink drawings are prone to interpretation. Best suited 3D datasets that are becoming available. We created and used the HeiCuBeDa and MaiCuBeDa datasets, which consist of around 500 annotated tablets. For our novel OCR-like approach to mixed image data, we provide an additional mapping tool for transferring annotations between 3D renderings and photographs. Our sign localization uses a RepPoints detector to predict the locations of characters as bounding boxes. We use image data from GigaMesh's MSII (curvature, see //gigamesh.eu) based rendering, Phong-shaded 3D models, and photographs as well as illumination augmentation. The results show that using rendered 3D images for sign detection performs better than other work on photographs. In addition, our approach gives reasonably good results for photographs only, while it is best used for mixed datasets. More importantly, the Phong renderings, and especially the MSII renderings, improve the results on photographs, which is the largest dataset on a global scale.
The latest satellite communication (SatCom) missions are characterized by a fully reconfigurable on-board software-defined payload, capable of adapting radio resources to the temporal and spatial variations of the system traffic. As pure optimization-based solutions have shown to be computationally tedious and to lack flexibility, machine learning (ML)-based methods have emerged as promising alternatives. We investigate the application of energy-efficient brain-inspired ML models for on-board radio resource management. Apart from software simulation, we report extensive experimental results leveraging the recently released Intel Loihi 2 chip. To benchmark the performance of the proposed model, we implement conventional convolutional neural networks (CNN) on a Xilinx Versal VCK5000, and provide a detailed comparison of accuracy, precision, recall, and energy efficiency for different traffic demands. Most notably, for relevant workloads, spiking neural networks (SNNs) implemented on Loihi 2 yield higher accuracy, while reducing power consumption by more than 100$\times$ as compared to the CNN-based reference platform. Our findings point to the significant potential of neuromorphic computing and SNNs in supporting on-board SatCom operations, paving the way for enhanced efficiency and sustainability in future SatCom systems.
Embedded Network Stacks (ENS) enable low-resource devices to communicate with the outside world, facilitating the development of the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems. Some defects in ENS are thus high-severity cybersecurity vulnerabilities: they are remotely triggerable and can impact the physical world. While prior research has shed light on the characteristics of defects in many classes of software systems, no study has described the properties of ENS defects nor identified a systematic technique to expose them. The most common automated approach to detecting ENS defects is feedback-driven randomized dynamic analysis ("fuzzing"), a costly and unpredictable technique. This paper provides the first systematic characterization of cybersecurity vulnerabilities in ENS. We analyzed 61 vulnerabilities across 6 open-source ENS. Most of these ENS defects are concentrated in the transport and network layers of the network stack, require reaching different states in the network protocol, and can be triggered by only 1-2 modifications to a single packet. We therefore propose a novel systematic testing framework that focuses on the transport and network layers, uses seeds that cover a network protocol's states, and systematically modifies packet fields. We evaluated this framework on 4 ENS and replicated 12 of the 14 reported IP/TCP/UDP vulnerabilities. On recent versions of these ENSs, it discovered 7 novel defects (6 assigned CVES) during a bounded systematic test that covered all protocol states and made up to 3 modifications per packet. We found defects in 3 of the 4 ENS we tested that had not been found by prior fuzzing research. Our results suggest that fuzzing should be deferred until after systematic testing is employed.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.