Rural connectivity is widely research topic for several years. In India, around 70% of the population have poor or no connectivity to access digital services. Different solutions are being tested and trialled around the world, especially in India. They key driving factor for reducing digital divide is exploring different solutions both technologically and economically to lower the cost for the network deployments and improving service adoption rate. In this survey, we aim to study the rural connectivity use-cases, state of art projects and initiatives, challenges, and technologies to improve digital connectivity in rural parts of India. The strengths and weakness of different technologies which are being tested for rural connectivity is analyzed. We also explore the rural use-case of 6G communication system which would be suitable for rural Indian scenario.
Recent developments of advanced Human-Vehicle Interactions rely on the concept Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV), to achieve large-scale communications and synchronizations of data in practice. The concept of IoV is highly similar to a distributed system, where each vehicle is considered as a node and all nodes are grouped with a centralized server. In this manner, the concerns of data privacy are significant since all vehicles collect, process and share personal statistics (e.g. multi-modal, driving statuses and etc.). Therefore, it's important to understand how modern privacy-preserving techniques suit for IoV. We present the most comprehensive study to characterize modern privacy-preserving techniques for IoV to date. We focus on Differential Privacy (DP), a representative set of mathematically-guaranteed mechanisms for both privacy-preserving processing and sharing on sensitive data. The purpose of our study is to demystify the tradeoffs of deploying DP techniques, in terms of service quality. We first characterize representative privacy-preserving processing mechanisms, enabled by advanced DP approaches. Then we perform a detailed study of an emerging in-vehicle, Deep-Neural-Network-driven application, and study the upsides and downsides of DP for diverse types of data streams. Our study obtains 11 key findings and we highlight FIVE most significant observations from our detailed characterizations. We conclude that there are a large volume of challenges and opportunities for future studies, by enabling privacy-preserving IoV with low overheads for service quality.
Recent developments of advanced Human-Vehicle Interactions rely on the concept Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV), to achieve large-scale communications and synchronizations of data in practice. The concept of IoV is highly similar to a distributed system, where each vehicle is considered as a node and all nodes are grouped with a centralized server. In this manner, the concerns of data privacy are significant since all vehicles collect, process and share personal statistics (e.g. multi-modal, driving statuses and etc.). Therefore, it's important to understand how modern privacy-preserving techniques suit for IoV. We present the most comprehensive study to characterize modern privacy-preserving techniques for IoV to date. We focus on Differential Privacy (DP), a representative set of mathematically-guaranteed mechanisms for both privacy-preserving processing and sharing on sensitive data. The purpose of our study is to demystify the tradeoffs of deploying DP techniques, in terms of service quality. We first characterize representative privacy-preserving processing mechanisms, enabled by advanced DP approaches. Then we perform a detailed study of an emerging in-vehicle, Deep-Neural-Network-driven application, and study the upsides and downsides of DP for diverse types of data streams. Our study obtains 11 key findings and we highlight FIVE most significant observations from our detailed characterizations. We conclude that there are a large volume of challenges and opportunities for future studies, by enabling privacy-preserving IoV with low overheads for service quality.
New interactive physical-digital play technologies are shaping the way children plan. These technologies refer to digital play technologies that engage children in analogue forms of behaviour, either alone or with others. Current interactive physical-digital play technologies include robots, digital agents, mixed or augmented reality devices, and smart-eye based gaming. Little is known, however, about the ways in which these technologies could promote or damage child development. This systematic review was aimed at understanding if and how these physical-digital play technologies promoted developmentally relevant behaviour in typically developing 0 to 12 year-olds. Psychology, Education, and Computer Science databases were searched producing 635 paper. A total of 31 papers met the inclusion criteria, of which 17 were of high enough quality to be included for synthesis. Results indicate that these new interactive play technologies could have a positive effect on children's developmentally relevant behaviour. The review indicated specific ways in which different behaviour were promoted. Providing information about own performance promoted self-monitoring. Slowing interactivity, play interdependency, and joint object accessibility promoted collaboration. Offering delimited choices promoted decision making. Problem solving and physical activity were promoted by requiring children to engage in them to keep playing. Four principles underpinned the ways in which physical digital play technologies afforded child behaviour. These included social expectations framing play situations, the directiveness of action regulations (inviting, guiding or forcing behaviours), the technical features of play technologies (digital play mechanics and physical characteristics), and the alignment between play goals, play technology and the play behaviours promoted.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been a hot spot of recent research and are widely utilized in diverse applications. However, with the use of huger data and deeper models, an urgent demand is unsurprisingly made to accelerate GNNs for more efficient execution. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on acceleration methods for GNNs from an algorithmic perspective. We first present a new taxonomy to classify existing acceleration methods into five categories. Based on the classification, we systematically discuss these methods and highlight their correlations. Next, we provide comparisons from aspects of the efficiency and characteristics of these methods. Finally, we suggest some promising prospects for future research.
Due to their increasing spread, confidence in neural network predictions became more and more important. However, basic neural networks do not deliver certainty estimates or suffer from over or under confidence. Many researchers have been working on understanding and quantifying uncertainty in a neural network's prediction. As a result, different types and sources of uncertainty have been identified and a variety of approaches to measure and quantify uncertainty in neural networks have been proposed. This work gives a comprehensive overview of uncertainty estimation in neural networks, reviews recent advances in the field, highlights current challenges, and identifies potential research opportunities. It is intended to give anyone interested in uncertainty estimation in neural networks a broad overview and introduction, without presupposing prior knowledge in this field. A comprehensive introduction to the most crucial sources of uncertainty is given and their separation into reducible model uncertainty and not reducible data uncertainty is presented. The modeling of these uncertainties based on deterministic neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, ensemble of neural networks, and test-time data augmentation approaches is introduced and different branches of these fields as well as the latest developments are discussed. For a practical application, we discuss different measures of uncertainty, approaches for the calibration of neural networks and give an overview of existing baselines and implementations. Different examples from the wide spectrum of challenges in different fields give an idea of the needs and challenges regarding uncertainties in practical applications. Additionally, the practical limitations of current methods for mission- and safety-critical real world applications are discussed and an outlook on the next steps towards a broader usage of such methods is given.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
Stream processing has been an active research field for more than 20 years, but it is now witnessing its prime time due to recent successful efforts by the research community and numerous worldwide open-source communities. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental aspects of stream processing systems and their evolution in the functional areas of out-of-order data management, state management, fault tolerance, high availability, load management, elasticity, and reconfiguration. We review noteworthy past research findings, outline the similarities and differences between early ('00-'10) and modern ('11-'18) streaming systems, and discuss recent trends and open problems.
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.
We survey research on self-driving cars published in the literature focusing on autonomous cars developed since the DARPA challenges, which are equipped with an autonomy system that can be categorized as SAE level 3 or higher. The architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars is typically organized into the perception system and the decision-making system. The perception system is generally divided into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as self-driving-car localization, static obstacles mapping, moving obstacles detection and tracking, road mapping, traffic signalization detection and recognition, among others. The decision-making system is commonly partitioned as well into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as route planning, path planning, behavior selection, motion planning, and control. In this survey, we present the typical architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars. We also review research on relevant methods for perception and decision making. Furthermore, we present a detailed description of the architecture of the autonomy system of the UFES's car, IARA. Finally, we list prominent autonomous research cars developed by technology companies and reported in the media.
Deep learning has been shown successful in a number of domains, ranging from acoustics, images to natural language processing. However, applying deep learning to the ubiquitous graph data is non-trivial because of the unique characteristics of graphs. Recently, a significant amount of research efforts have been devoted to this area, greatly advancing graph analyzing techniques. In this survey, we comprehensively review different kinds of deep learning methods applied to graphs. We divide existing methods into three main categories: semi-supervised methods including Graph Neural Networks and Graph Convolutional Networks, unsupervised methods including Graph Autoencoders, and recent advancements including Graph Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Reinforcement Learning. We then provide a comprehensive overview of these methods in a systematic manner following their history of developments. We also analyze the differences of these methods and how to composite different architectures. Finally, we briefly outline their applications and discuss potential future directions.