Traditionally, network and system administrators are responsible for designing, configuring, and resolving the Internet service requests. Human-driven system configuration and management are proving unsatisfactory due to the recent interest in time-sensitive applications with stringent quality of service (QoS). Aiming to transition from the traditional human-driven to zero-touch service management in the field of networks and computing, intent-driven service management (IDSM) has been proposed as a response to stringent quality of service requirements. In IDSM, users express their service requirements in a declarative manner as intents. IDSM, with the help of closed control-loop operations, perform configurations and deployments, autonomously to meet service request requirements. The result is a faster deployment of Internet services and reduction in configuration errors caused by manual operations, which in turn reduces the service-level agreement (SLA) violations. In the early stages of development, IDSM systems require attention from industry as well as academia. In an attempt to fill the gaps in current research, we conducted a systematic literature review of SLA management in IDSM systems. As an outcome, we have identified four IDSM intent management activities and proposed a taxonomy for each activity. Analysis of all studies and future research directions, are presented in the conclusions.
Blockchain (BC) and Computer Vision (CV) are the two emerging fields with the potential to transform various sectors.The ability of BC can help in offering decentralized and secure data storage, while CV allows machines to learn and understand visual data. This integration of the two technologies holds massive promise for developing innovative applications that can provide solutions to the challenges in various sectors such as supply chain management, healthcare, smart cities, and defense. This review explores a comprehensive analysis of the integration of BC and CV by examining their combination and potential applications. It also provides a detailed analysis of the fundamental concepts of both technologies, highlighting their strengths and limitations. This paper also explores current research efforts that make use of the benefits offered by this combination. The effort includes how BC can be used as an added layer of security in CV systems and also ensure data integrity, enabling decentralized image and video analytics using BC. The challenges and open issues associated with this integration are also identified, and appropriate potential future directions are also proposed.
Recommendation systems have become popular and effective tools to help users discover their interesting items by modeling the user preference and item property based on implicit interactions (e.g., purchasing and clicking). Humans perceive the world by processing the modality signals (e.g., audio, text and image), which inspired researchers to build a recommender system that can understand and interpret data from different modalities. Those models could capture the hidden relations between different modalities and possibly recover the complementary information which can not be captured by a uni-modal approach and implicit interactions. The goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive review of the recent research efforts on the multimodal recommendation. Specifically, it shows a clear pipeline with commonly used techniques in each step and classifies the models by the methods used. Additionally, a code framework has been designed that helps researchers new in this area to understand the principles and techniques, and easily runs the SOTA models. Our framework is located at: //github.com/enoche/MMRec
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is transforming the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by enhancing the trust of end-users in machines. As the number of connected devices keeps on growing, the Internet of Things (IoT) market needs to be trustworthy for the end-users. However, existing literature still lacks a systematic and comprehensive survey work on the use of XAI for IoT. To bridge this lacking, in this paper, we address the XAI frameworks with a focus on their characteristics and support for IoT. We illustrate the widely-used XAI services for IoT applications, such as security enhancement, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), Industrial IoT (IIoT), and Internet of City Things (IoCT). We also suggest the implementation choice of XAI models over IoT systems in these applications with appropriate examples and summarize the key inferences for future works. Moreover, we present the cutting-edge development in edge XAI structures and the support of sixth-generation (6G) communication services for IoT applications, along with key inferences. In a nutshell, this paper constitutes the first holistic compilation on the development of XAI-based frameworks tailored for the demands of future IoT use cases.
Edge computing facilitates low-latency services at the network's edge by distributing computation, communication, and storage resources within the geographic proximity of mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The recent advancement in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technologies has opened new opportunities for edge computing in military operations, disaster response, or remote areas where traditional terrestrial networks are limited or unavailable. In such environments, UAVs can be deployed as aerial edge servers or relays to facilitate edge computing services. This form of computing is also known as UAV-enabled Edge Computing (UEC), which offers several unique benefits such as mobility, line-of-sight, flexibility, computational capability, and cost-efficiency. However, the resources on UAVs, edge servers, and IoT devices are typically very limited in the context of UEC. Efficient resource management is, therefore, a critical research challenge in UEC. In this article, we present a survey on the existing research in UEC from the resource management perspective. We identify a conceptual architecture, different types of collaborations, wireless communication models, research directions, key techniques and performance indicators for resource management in UEC. We also present a taxonomy of resource management in UEC. Finally, we identify and discuss some open research challenges that can stimulate future research directions for resource management in UEC.
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.
Recommender system is one of the most important information services on today's Internet. Recently, graph neural networks have become the new state-of-the-art approach of recommender systems. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in graph neural network-based recommender systems. We first introduce the background and the history of the development of both recommender systems and graph neural networks. For recommender systems, in general, there are four aspects for categorizing existing works: stage, scenario, objective, and application. For graph neural networks, the existing methods consist of two categories, spectral models and spatial ones. We then discuss the motivation of applying graph neural networks into recommender systems, mainly consisting of the high-order connectivity, the structural property of data, and the enhanced supervision signal. We then systematically analyze the challenges in graph construction, embedding propagation/aggregation, model optimization, and computation efficiency. Afterward and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a multitude of existing works of graph neural network-based recommender systems, following the taxonomy above. Finally, we raise discussions on the open problems and promising future directions of this area. We summarize the representative papers along with their codes repositories in //github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/GNN-Recommender-Systems.
Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic. It often surpasses traditional recommendation models even most deep learning-based methods, owing to its interactive nature and autonomous learning ability. Nevertheless, there are various challenges of RL when applying in recommender systems. Toward this end, we firstly provide a thorough overview, comparisons, and summarization of RL approaches for five typical recommendation scenarios, following three main categories of RL: value-function, policy search, and Actor-Critic. Then, we systematically analyze the challenges and relevant solutions on the basis of existing literature. Finally, under discussion for open issues of RL and its limitations of recommendation, we highlight some potential research directions in this field.
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.
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.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.