Nouman Ashraf

Muhammad Zawish, Nouman Ashraf, Rafay Iqbal Ansari et al.

6G envisions artificial intelligence (AI) powered solutions for enhancing the quality-of-service (QoS) in the network and to ensure optimal utilization of resources. In this work, we propose an architecture based on the combination of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), AI and blockchain for agricultural supply-chain management with the purpose of ensuring traceability, transparency, tracking inventories and contracts. We propose a solution to facilitate on-device AI by generating a roadmap of models with various resource-accuracy trade-offs. A fully convolutional neural network (FCN) model is used for biomass estimation through images captured by the UAV. Instead of a single compressed FCN model for deployment on UAV, we motivate the idea of iterative pruning to provide multiple task-specific models with various complexities and accuracy. To alleviate the impact of flight failure in a 6G enabled dynamic UAV network, the proposed model selection strategy will assist UAVs to update the model based on the runtime resource requirements.

Maurf Hassan, Steven Davy, Muhammad Zawish et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer significant potential for enabling energy-efficient intelligence at the edge. However, performing full SNN inference at the edge can be challenging due to the latency and energy constraints arising from fixed and high timestep overheads. Edge-cloud co-inference systems present a promising solution, but their deployment is often hindered by high latency and feature transmission costs. To address these issues, we introduce NeuCODEX, a neuromorphic co-inference architecture that jointly optimizes both spatial and temporal redundancy. NeuCODEX incorporates a learned spike-driven compression module to reduce data transmission and employs a dynamic early-exit mechanism to adaptively terminate inference based on output confidence. We evaluated NeuCODEX on both static images (CIFAR10 and Caltech) and neuromorphic event streams (CIFAR10-DVS and N-Caltech). To demonstrate practicality, we prototyped NeuCODEX on ResNet-18 and VGG-16 backbones in a real edge-to-cloud testbed. Our proposed system reduces data transfer by up to 2048x and edge energy consumption by over 90%, while reducing end-to-end latency by up to 3x compared to edge-only inference, all with a negligible accuracy drop of less than 2%. In doing so, NeuCODEX enables practical, high-performance SNN deployment in resource-constrained environments.