Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are gaining the interest of the academy, companies, and institutions. Nonetheless, the path toward blockchain adoption is not straightforward, as blockchain is a complex technology that requires revisiting the standard way of addressing problems and tackling them from a decentralized perspective. Thus, decision-makers adopt blockchain technology for the wrong reasons or prefer it to more suitable ones. This work presents a decision framework for blockchain adoption to help decision-makers decide whether blockchain is applicable, valuable, and preferable to other technologies. In particular, The decision framework is composed of a small set of questions that can be answered from a managerial standpoint and that do not require a deep technical knowledge of blockchain-related topics.
Prior work has identified a resilient phenomenon that threatens the performance of human-AI decision-making teams: overreliance, when people agree with an AI, even when it is incorrect. Surprisingly, overreliance does not reduce when the AI produces explanations for its predictions, compared to only providing predictions. Some have argued that overreliance results from cognitive biases or uncalibrated trust, attributing overreliance to an inevitability of human cognition. By contrast, our paper argues that people strategically choose whether or not to engage with an AI explanation, demonstrating empirically that there are scenarios where AI explanations reduce overreliance. To achieve this, we formalize this strategic choice in a cost-benefit framework, where the costs and benefits of engaging with the task are weighed against the costs and benefits of relying on the AI. We manipulate the costs and benefits in a maze task, where participants collaborate with a simulated AI to find the exit of a maze. Through 5 studies (N = 731), we find that costs such as task difficulty (Study 1), explanation difficulty (Study 2, 3), and benefits such as monetary compensation (Study 4) affect overreliance. Finally, Study 5 adapts the Cognitive Effort Discounting paradigm to quantify the utility of different explanations, providing further support for our framework. Our results suggest that some of the null effects found in literature could be due in part to the explanation not sufficiently reducing the costs of verifying the AI's prediction.
Deploying deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models on ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) devices has attracted much attention from industry and academia since it greatly facilitates our lives by providing various rapid-response services. Due to the limited resources of IoT devices, cloud-assisted training of CNN models has become the mainstream. However, most existing related works suffer from a large amount of model parameter transmission and weak model robustness. To this end, this paper proposes a cloud-assisted CNN training framework with low model parameter transmission and strong model robustness. In the proposed framework, we first introduce MonoCNN, which contains only a few learnable filters, and other filters are nonlearnable. These nonlearnable filter parameters are generated according to certain rules, i.e., the filter generation function (FGF), and can be saved and reproduced by a few random seeds. Thus, the cloud server only needs to send these learnable filters and a few seeds to the IoT device. Compared to transmitting all model parameters, sending several learnable filter parameters and seeds can significantly reduce parameter transmission. Then, we investigate multiple FGFs and enable the IoT device to use the FGF to generate multiple filters and combine them into MonoCNN. Thus, MonoCNN is affected not only by the training data but also by the FGF. The rules of the FGF play a role in regularizing the MonoCNN, thereby improving its robustness. Experimental results show that compared to state-of-the-art methods, our proposed framework can reduce a large amount of model parameter transfer between the cloud server and the IoT device while improving the performance by approximately 2.2% when dealing with corrupted data. The code is available at //github.com/evoxlos/mono-cnn-pytorch.
In recent years, deep learning (DL) models have demonstrated remarkable achievements on non-trivial tasks such as speech recognition and natural language understanding. One of the significant contributors to its success is the proliferation of end devices that acted as a catalyst to provide data for data-hungry DL models. However, computing DL training and inference is the main challenge. Usually, central cloud servers are used for the computation, but it opens up other significant challenges, such as high latency, increased communication costs, and privacy concerns. To mitigate these drawbacks, considerable efforts have been made to push the processing of DL models to edge servers. Moreover, the confluence point of DL and edge has given rise to edge intelligence (EI). This survey paper focuses primarily on the fifth level of EI, called all in-edge level, where DL training and inference (deployment) are performed solely by edge servers. All in-edge is suitable when the end devices have low computing resources, e.g., Internet-of-Things, and other requirements such as latency and communication cost are important in mission-critical applications, e.g., health care. Firstly, this paper presents all in-edge computing architectures, including centralized, decentralized, and distributed. Secondly, this paper presents enabling technologies, such as model parallelism and split learning, which facilitate DL training and deployment at edge servers. Thirdly, model adaptation techniques based on model compression and conditional computation are described because the standard cloud-based DL deployment cannot be directly applied to all in-edge due to its limited computational resources. Fourthly, this paper discusses eleven key performance metrics to evaluate the performance of DL at all in-edge efficiently. Finally, several open research challenges in the area of all in-edge are presented.
Graphs are ubiquitous in nature and can therefore serve as models for many practical but also theoretical problems. For this purpose, they can be defined as many different types which suitably reflect the individual contexts of the represented problem. To address cutting-edge problems based on graph data, the research field of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has emerged. Despite the field's youth and the speed at which new models are developed, many recent surveys have been published to keep track of them. Nevertheless, it has not yet been gathered which GNN can process what kind of graph types. In this survey, we give a detailed overview of already existing GNNs and, unlike previous surveys, categorize them according to their ability to handle different graph types and properties. We consider GNNs operating on static and dynamic graphs of different structural constitutions, with or without node or edge attributes. Moreover, we distinguish between GNN models for discrete-time or continuous-time dynamic graphs and group the models according to their architecture. We find that there are still graph types that are not or only rarely covered by existing GNN models. We point out where models are missing and give potential reasons for their absence.
Bitcoin and its underlying technology, blockchain, have gained significant popularity in recent years. Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin to enable a secure, distributed platform without the need for central authorities, and blockchain has been hailed as a paradigm that will be as impactful as Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Machine Learning. Blockchain incorporates innovative ideas from various fields, such as public-key encryption and distributed systems. As a result, readers often encounter resources that explain Blockchain technology from a single perspective, leaving them with more questions than answers. In this primer, we aim to provide a comprehensive view of blockchain. We will begin with a brief history and introduce the building blocks of the blockchain. As graph mining is a major area of blockchain analysis, we will delve into the graph-theoretical aspects of Blockchain technology. We will also discuss the future of blockchain and explain how extensions such as smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations will function. Our goal is to provide a concise but complete description of blockchain technology that is accessible to readers with no prior expertise in the field.
Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.
Game theory has by now found numerous applications in various fields, including economics, industry, jurisprudence, and artificial intelligence, where each player only cares about its own interest in a noncooperative or cooperative manner, but without obvious malice to other players. However, in many practical applications, such as poker, chess, evader pursuing, drug interdiction, coast guard, cyber-security, and national defense, players often have apparently adversarial stances, that is, selfish actions of each player inevitably or intentionally inflict loss or wreak havoc on other players. Along this line, this paper provides a systematic survey on three main game models widely employed in adversarial games, i.e., zero-sum normal-form and extensive-form games, Stackelberg (security) games, zero-sum differential games, from an array of perspectives, including basic knowledge of game models, (approximate) equilibrium concepts, problem classifications, research frontiers, (approximate) optimal strategy seeking techniques, prevailing algorithms, and practical applications. Finally, promising future research directions are also discussed for relevant adversarial games.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
Deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques have gained popularity in public and government domains. This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. As datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex data problem. Because military is investigating how heterogeneous IoT devices can aid processes and tasks, we investigate a multi-sensor approach. Moreover, we propose a signal to image encoding approach to transform information (signal) to integrate (fuse) data from IoT wearable devices to an image which is invertible and easier to visualize supporting decision making. Furthermore, we investigate the challenge of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application that utilizes hand gesture data from wearable devices.
The concept of smart grid has been introduced as a new vision of the conventional power grid to figure out an efficient way of integrating green and renewable energy technologies. In this way, Internet-connected smart grid, also called energy Internet, is also emerging as an innovative approach to ensure the energy from anywhere at any time. The ultimate goal of these developments is to build a sustainable society. However, integrating and coordinating a large number of growing connections can be a challenging issue for the traditional centralized grid system. Consequently, the smart grid is undergoing a transformation to the decentralized topology from its centralized form. On the other hand, blockchain has some excellent features which make it a promising application for smart grid paradigm. In this paper, we have an aim to provide a comprehensive survey on application of blockchain in smart grid. As such, we identify the significant security challenges of smart grid scenarios that can be addressed by blockchain. Then, we present a number of blockchain-based recent research works presented in different literatures addressing security issues in the area of smart grid. We also summarize several related practical projects, trials, and products that have been emerged recently. Finally, we discuss essential research challenges and future directions of applying blockchain to smart grid security issues.