Medical conditions and cases are growing at a rapid pace, where physical space is starting to be constrained. Hospitals and clinics no longer have the ability to accommodate large numbers of incoming patients. It is clear that the current state of the health industry needs to improve its valuable and limited resources. The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices along with assistive technologies can alleviate the problem in healthcare, by being a convenient and easy means of accessing healthcare services wirelessly. There is a plethora of IoT devices and potential applications that can take advantage of the unique characteristics that these technologies can offer. However, at the same time, these services pose novel challenges that need to be properly addressed. In this article, we review some popular categories of IoT-based applications for healthcare along with their devices. Then, we describe the challenges and discuss how research can properly address the open issues and improve the already existing implementations in healthcare. Further possible solutions are also discussed to show their potential in being viable solutions for future healthcare applications
In recent years, edge computing has emerged as a promising technology due to its unique feature of real-time computing and parallel processing. They provide computing and storage capacity closer to the data source and bypass the distant links to the cloud. The edge data analytics process the ubiquitous data on the edge layer to offer real-time interactions for the application. However, this process can be prone to security threats like gaining malicious access or manipulating sensitive data. This can lead to the intruder's control, alter, or add erroneous data affecting the integrity and data analysis efficiency. Due to the lack of transparency of stakeholders processing edge data, it is challenging to identify the vulnerabilities. Many reviews are available on data security issues on the edge layer; however, they do not address integrity issues exclusively. Therefore, this paper concentrates only on data integrity threats that directly influence edge data analysis. Further shortcomings in existing work are identified with few research directions.
The new characteristics of AI technology have brought new challenges to the research and development of AI systems. AI technology has benefited humans, but if improperly developed, it will harm humans. At present, there is no systematic interdisciplinary approach to effectively deal with these new challenges. This paper analyzes the new challenges faced by AI systems and further elaborates the "Human-Centered AI" (HCAI) approach we proposed in 2019. In order to enable the implementation of the HCAI approach, we systematically propose an emerging interdisciplinary domain of "Human-AI Interaction" (HAII), and define the objective, methodology, and scope. Based on literature review and analyses, this paper summarizes the main areas of the HAII research and application as well as puts forward the future research agenda for HAII. Finally, the paper provides strategic recommendations for future implementation of the HCAII approach and HAII work.
The Internet of Things, often known as IoT, is an innovative technology that connects digital devices all around us, allowing Machine to Machine (M2M) communication between digital devices all over the world. Due to the convenience, connectivity, and affordability, this IoT is being served in various domains including healthcare where it brings exceptional benefits to improve patient care, uplifting medical resources to the next level. Some of these examples include surveillance networks, healthcare delivery technologies, and smart thermal detection. As of now, the IoT is served in various aspects of healthcare making many of the medical processes much easier as opposed to the earlier times. One of the most important aspects that this IoT can be used is, managing various aspects of healthcare during global pandemics, as pandemics can bring an immense strain on healthcare resources, during the pandemic. As there is no proper study is done with regards to the proper use of IoT for managing pandemics, in this regard, through our study we aim to review various use cases of IoT towards managing pandemics especially in terms of COVID-19; owing to what we are currently going through. In this regard, we are proposing a conceptual framework synthesizing the current literature and resources, which can be adopted when managing global pandemics to accelerate the battle pace with these deadly pandemics and focusing on what the entire world is currently going through where almost more than four (04) million people are diminished of this COVID-19 pandemic.
Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the reduction in the cost of sensors have encouraged the development of smart environments, such as smart homes. Smart homes can offer home assistance services to improve the quality of life, autonomy and health of their residents, especially for the elderly and dependent. To provide such services, a smart home must be able to understand the daily activities of its residents. Techniques for recognizing human activity in smart homes are advancing daily. But new challenges are emerging every day. In this paper, we present recent algorithms, works, challenges and taxonomy of the field of human activity recognition in a smart home through ambient sensors. Moreover, since activity recognition in smart homes is a young field, we raise specific problems, missing and needed contributions. But also propose directions, research opportunities and solutions to accelerate advances in this field.
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.
AI in finance broadly refers to the applications of AI techniques in financial businesses. This area has been lasting for decades with both classic and modern AI techniques applied to increasingly broader areas of finance, economy and society. In contrast to either discussing the problems, aspects and opportunities of finance that have benefited from specific AI techniques and in particular some new-generation AI and data science (AIDS) areas or reviewing the progress of applying specific techniques to resolving certain financial problems, this review offers a comprehensive and dense roadmap of the overwhelming challenges, techniques and opportunities of AI research in finance over the past decades. The landscapes and challenges of financial businesses and data are firstly outlined, followed by a comprehensive categorization and a dense overview of the decades of AI research in finance. We then structure and illustrate the data-driven analytics and learning of financial businesses and data. The comparison, criticism and discussion of classic vs. modern AI techniques for finance are followed. Lastly, open issues and opportunities address future AI-empowered finance and finance-motivated AI research.
Federated Learning (FL) is a concept first introduced by Google in 2016, in which multiple devices collaboratively learn a machine learning model without sharing their private data under the supervision of a central server. This offers ample opportunities in critical domains such as healthcare, finance etc, where it is risky to share private user information to other organisations or devices. While FL appears to be a promising Machine Learning (ML) technique to keep the local data private, it is also vulnerable to attacks like other ML models. Given the growing interest in the FL domain, this report discusses the opportunities and challenges in federated learning.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been around for decades and been employed to solve various sequential decision-making problems. These algorithms however have faced great challenges when dealing with high-dimensional environments. The recent development of deep learning has enabled RL methods to drive optimal policies for sophisticated and capable agents, which can perform efficiently in these challenging environments. This paper addresses an important aspect of deep RL related to situations that demand multiple agents to communicate and cooperate to solve complex tasks. A survey of different approaches to problems related to multi-agent deep RL (MADRL) is presented, including non-stationarity, partial observability, continuous state and action spaces, multi-agent training schemes, multi-agent transfer learning. The merits and demerits of the reviewed methods will be analyzed and discussed, with their corresponding applications explored. It is envisaged that this review provides insights about various MADRL methods and can lead to future development of more robust and highly useful multi-agent learning methods for solving real-world problems.
In recent years with the rise of Cloud Computing (CC), many companies providing services in the cloud, are empowered a new series of services to their catalog, such as data mining (DM) and data processing, taking advantage of the vast computing resources available to them. Different service definition proposals have been proposed to address the problem of describing services in CC in a comprehensive way. Bearing in mind that each provider has its own definition of the logic of its services, and specifically of DM services, it should be pointed out that the possibility of describing services in a flexible way between providers is fundamental in order to maintain the usability and portability of this type of CC services. The use of semantic technologies based on the proposal offered by Linked Data (LD) for the definition of services, allows the design and modelling of DM services, achieving a high degree of interoperability. In this article a schema for the definition of DM services on CC is presented, in addition are considered all key aspects of service in CC, such as prices, interfaces, Software Level Agreement, instances or workflow of experimentation, among others. The proposal presented is based on LD, so that it reuses other schemata obtaining a best definition of the service. For the validation of the schema, a series of DM services have been created where some of the best known algorithms such as \textit{Random Forest} or \textit{KMeans} are modeled as services.
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field.