Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have increasingly become vital for people on the move including the nearly 80 million displaced due to conflict, violence, and human right violations globally. However, existing research on ICTs and migrants, which almost entirely focused on migrants' ICT use 'en route' or within developed economies principally in the perspectives of researchers from these regions, is very fragmented posing a difficulty in understanding the key objects of research. Moreover, ICTs are often celebrated as liberating and exploitable at migrants' rational discretion even though they are 'double-edged swords' with significant risks, burdens, pressures and inequality challenges particularly for vulnerable migrants including those forcefully displaced and trafficked. Towards addressing these limitations and illuminating future directions, this paper, first, scrutinises the existing research vis-a-vis ICTs' liberating and authoritarian role particularly for vulnerable migrants whereby explicating key issues in the research domain. Second, it identifies key gaps and opportunities for future research. Using a tailored methodology, broad literature relating to ICTs and migration/development published in the period 1990-2020 was surveyed resulting in 157 selected publications which were critically appraised vis-a-vis the key themes, major technologies dealt with, and methodologies and theories/concepts adopted. Furthermore, key insights, trends, gaps, and future research opportunities pertaining to both the existing and missing objects of research in ICTs and migration/development are spotlighted.
The prediction interval is gaining prominence in meta-analysis as it enables the assessment of uncertainties in treatment effects and heterogeneity between studies. However, coverage probabilities of the current standard method for constructing prediction intervals cannot retain their nominal levels in general, particularly when the number of synthesized studies is moderate or small, because their validities depend on large sample approximations. Recently, several methods have developed been to address this issue. This paper briefly summarizes the recent developments in methods of prediction intervals and provides readable examples using R for multiple types of data with simple code. The pimeta package is an R package that provides these improved methods to calculate accurate prediction intervals and graphical tools to illustrate these results. The pimeta package is listed in ``CRAN Task View: Meta-Analysis.'' The analysis is easily performed in R using a series of R packages.
Recent years have witnessed the dramatic growth of paper volumes with plenty of new research papers published every day, especially in the area of computer science. How to glean papers worth reading from the massive literature to do a quick survey or keep up with the latest advancement about a specific research topic has become a challenging task. Existing academic search engines such as Google Scholar return relevant papers by individually calculating the relevance between each paper and query. However, such systems usually omit the prerequisite chains of a research topic and cannot form a meaningful reading path. In this paper, we introduce a new task named Reading Path Generation (RPG) which aims at automatically producing a path of papers to read for a given query. To serve as a research benchmark, we further propose SurveyBank, a dataset consisting of large quantities of survey papers in the field of computer science as well as their citation relationships. Each survey paper contains key phrases extracted from its title and multi-level reading lists inferred from its references. Furthermore, we propose a graph-optimization-based approach for reading path generation which takes the relationship between papers into account. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms other baselines. A Real-time Reading Path Generation System (RePaGer) has been also implemented with our designed model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to target this important research problem. Our source code of RePaGer system and SurveyBank dataset can be found on here.
Fast developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled various applied systems deployed in the real world, impacting people's everyday lives. However, many current AI systems were found vulnerable to imperceptible attacks, biased against underrepresented groups, lacking in user privacy protection, etc., which not only degrades user experience but erodes the society's trust in all AI systems. In this review, we strive to provide AI practitioners a comprehensive guide towards building trustworthy AI systems. We first introduce the theoretical framework of important aspects of AI trustworthiness, including robustness, generalization, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, fairness, privacy preservation, alignment with human values, and accountability. We then survey leading approaches in these aspects in the industry. To unify the current fragmented approaches towards trustworthy AI, we propose a systematic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of AI systems, ranging from data acquisition to model development, to development and deployment, finally to continuous monitoring and governance. In this framework, we offer concrete action items to practitioners and societal stakeholders (e.g., researchers and regulators) to improve AI trustworthiness. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges in the future development of trustworthy AI systems, where we identify the need for paradigm shift towards comprehensive trustworthy AI systems.
We review key considerations, practices, and areas for future work aimed at the responsible development and fielding of AI technologies. We describe critical challenges and make recommendations on topics that should be given priority consideration, practices that should be implemented, and policies that should be defined or updated to reflect developments with capabilities and uses of AI technologies. The Key Considerations were developed with a lens for adoption by U.S. government departments and agencies critical to national security. However, they are relevant more generally for the design, construction, and use of AI systems.
The very first infected novel coronavirus case (COVID-19) was found in Hubei, China in Dec. 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has spread over 214 countries and areas in the world, and has significantly affected every aspect of our daily lives. At the time of writing this article, the numbers of infected cases and deaths still increase significantly and have no sign of a well-controlled situation, e.g., as of 13 July 2020, from a total number of around 13.1 million positive cases, 571, 527 deaths were reported in the world. Motivated by recent advances and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data in various areas, this paper aims at emphasizing their importance in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak and preventing the severe effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We firstly present an overview of AI and big data, then identify the applications aimed at fighting against COVID-19, next highlight challenges and issues associated with state-of-the-art solutions, and finally come up with recommendations for the communications to effectively control the COVID-19 situation. It is expected that this paper provides researchers and communities with new insights into the ways AI and big data improve the COVID-19 situation, and drives further studies in stopping the COVID-19 outbreak.
UAVs are increasingly appearing in swarms or formations to leverage cooperative behavior, forming flying ad hoc networks. These UAV-enabled networks can meet several complex mission requirements and are seen as a potential enabler for many of the emerging use-cases in future communication networks. Such networks, however, are characterized by a highly dynamic and mobile environment with no guarantee of a central network infrastructure which can cause both connectivity and security issues. While wireless mesh networks are envisioned as a solution for such scenarios, these networks come with their own challenges and security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we analyze the key security and resilience issues resulting from the application of wireless mesh networks within UAV swarms. Specifically, we highlight the main challenges of applying current mesh technologies within the domain of UAV swarms and expose existing vulnerabilities across the communication stack. Based on this analysis, we present a security-focused architecture for UAV mesh communications. Finally, from the identification of these vulnerabilities, we discuss research opportunities posed by the unique challenges of UAV swarm connectivity.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extensively studied in the past few years. Arguably their most significant impact has been in the area of computer vision where great advances have been made in challenges such as plausible image generation, image-to-image translation, facial attribute manipulation and similar domains. Despite the significant successes achieved to date, applying GANs to real-world problems still poses significant challenges, three of which we focus on here. These are: (1) the generation of high quality images, (2) diversity of image generation, and (3) stable training. Focusing on the degree to which popular GAN technologies have made progress against these challenges, we provide a detailed review of the state of the art in GAN-related research in the published scientific literature. We further structure this review through a convenient taxonomy we have adopted based on variations in GAN architectures and loss functions. While several reviews for GANs have been presented to date, none have considered the status of this field based on their progress towards addressing practical challenges relevant to computer vision. Accordingly, we review and critically discuss the most popular architecture-variant, and loss-variant GANs, for tackling these challenges. Our objective is to provide an overview as well as a critical analysis of the status of GAN research in terms of relevant progress towards important computer vision application requirements. As we do this we also discuss the most compelling applications in computer vision in which GANs have demonstrated considerable success along with some suggestions for future research directions. Code related to GAN-variants studied in this work is summarized on //github.com/sheqi/GAN_Review.
As data are increasingly being stored in different silos and societies becoming more aware of data privacy issues, the traditional centralized training of artificial intelligence (AI) models is facing efficiency and privacy challenges. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an alternative solution and continue to thrive in this new reality. Existing FL protocol design has been shown to be vulnerable to adversaries within or outside of the system, compromising data privacy and system robustness. Besides training powerful global models, it is of paramount importance to design FL systems that have privacy guarantees and are resistant to different types of adversaries. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on this topic. Through a concise introduction to the concept of FL, and a unique taxonomy covering: 1) threat models; 2) poisoning attacks and defenses against robustness; 3) inference attacks and defenses against privacy, we provide an accessible review of this important topic. We highlight the intuitions, key techniques as well as fundamental assumptions adopted by various attacks and defenses. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions towards robust and privacy-preserving federated learning.
In recent years, disinformation including fake news, has became a global phenomenon due to its explosive growth, particularly on social media. The wide spread of disinformation and fake news can cause detrimental societal effects. Despite the recent progress in detecting disinformation and fake news, it is still non-trivial due to its complexity, diversity, multi-modality, and costs of fact-checking or annotation. The goal of this chapter is to pave the way for appreciating the challenges and advancements via: (1) introducing the types of information disorder on social media and examine their differences and connections; (2) describing important and emerging tasks to combat disinformation for characterization, detection and attribution; and (3) discussing a weak supervision approach to detect disinformation with limited labeled data. We then provide an overview of the chapters in this book that represent the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. We hope this book to be a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains.
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.