Susanna Pirttikangas

Henna Kokkonen, Lauri Lovén, Naser Hossein Motlagh et al.

Future AI applications require performance, reliability and privacy that the existing, cloud-dependant system architectures cannot provide. In this article, we study orchestration in the device-edge-cloud continuum, and focus on edge AI for resource orchestration. We claim that to support the constantly growing requirements of intelligent applications in the device-edge-cloud computing continuum, resource orchestration needs to embrace edge AI and emphasize local autonomy and intelligence. To justify the claim, we provide a general definition for continuum orchestration, and look at how current and emerging orchestration paradigms are suitable for the computing continuum. We describe certain major emerging research themes that may affect future orchestration, and provide an early vision of an orchestration paradigm that embraces those research themes. Finally, we survey current key edge AI methods and look at how they may contribute into fulfilling the vision of future continuum orchestration.

Alaa Saleh, Praveen Kumar Donta, Roberto Morabito et al.

Human biological systems sustain life through extraordinary resilience, continually detecting damage, orchestrating targeted responses, and restoring function through self-healing. Inspired by these capabilities, this paper introduces ReCiSt, a bio-inspired agentic self-healing framework designed to achieve resilience in Distributed Computing Continuum Systems (DCCS). Modern DCCS integrate heterogeneous computing resources, ranging from resource-constrained IoT devices to high-performance cloud infrastructures, and their inherent complexity, mobility, and dynamic operating conditions expose them to frequent faults that disrupt service continuity. These challenges underscore the need for scalable, adaptive, and self-regulated resilience strategies. ReCiSt reconstructs the biological phases of Hemostasis, Inflammation, Proliferation, and Remodeling into the computational layers Containment, Diagnosis, Meta-Cognitive, and Knowledge for DCCS. These four layers perform autonomous fault isolation, causal diagnosis, adaptive recovery, and long-term knowledge consolidation through Language Model (LM)-powered agents. These agents interpret heterogeneous logs, infer root causes, refine reasoning pathways, and reconfigure resources with minimal human intervention. The proposed ReCiSt framework is evaluated on public fault datasets using multiple LMs, and no baseline comparison is included due to the scarcity of similar approaches. Nevertheless, our results, evaluated under different LMs, confirm ReCiSt's self-healing capabilities within tens of seconds with minimum of 10% of agent CPU usage. Our results also demonstrated depth of analysis to over come uncertainties and amount of micro-agents invoked to achieve resilience.

Lauri Lovén, Roberto Morabito, Abhishek Kumar et al.

The edge-cloud computing continuum demands self-management mechanisms that scale across autonomous administrative domains while honouring tenant- and operator-specified data sovereignty. We present Neural Pub/Sub, a federated-broker autonomic substrate whose self-organising behaviour emerges from market-based price signals rather than centralised control. Its MAPE-K control loop closes over per-broker health and load monitoring, marginal-cost clearing-price analysis, placement planning over a polymatroidal feasibility region, federated cross-domain dispatch, and shared peer subscription summaries with bounded-staleness price signals. The Plan step is anchored in a Walrasian convergence proposition: under gross-substitutes valuations on tree and series-parallel service-dependency DAGs, decentralised price-based allocation matches the welfare of a centralised oracle. We evaluate the substrate on a 4-VM, 4-domain, 48-worker federated edge-cloud testbed (single data centre, 50 ms emulated WAN) in a 1005-run campaign augmented by a fair-process-count sharded-oracle comparator. The federated market dominates a single-process oracle by 2-4% with 45 of 45 per-seed wins (sign-test p ~ 2.8e-14, Hodges-Lehmann median -39.6 ms); against a four-shard centralised orchestrator at equal process count the gap stays within +/-1.5% across all nine (pipeline, load) cells. Round-robin completion rate collapses 98.8% -> 22.4% -> 3.3% across arrival rates 5/10/15 pps while the market preserves completion; the advantage decomposes into three Walrasian properties (information completeness, admission control, price discovery). Federation withstands broker death and network partition (completion rate >= 98.7% across 75 cells), and sovereignty enforcement adds no measurable runtime overhead across 60 governance-grid runs. Heterogeneous-domain stressors and cross-site WAN deployment remain future work.

Alaa Saleh, Roberto Morabito, Sasu Tarkoma et al.

In today's digital world, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) such as Large Language Models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly prevalent, extending its reach across diverse applications. This surge in adoption has sparked a significant increase in demand for data-centric GenAI models, highlighting the necessity for robust data communication infrastructures. Central to this need are message brokers, which serve as essential channels for data transfer within various system components. This survey aims to delve into a comprehensive analysis of traditional and modern message brokers, offering a comparative study of prevalent platforms. Our study considers numerous criteria including, but not limited to, open-source availability, integrated monitoring tools, message prioritization mechanisms, capabilities for parallel processing, reliability, distribution and clustering functionalities, authentication processes, data persistence strategies, fault tolerance, and scalability. Furthermore, we explore the intrinsic constraints that the design and operation of each message broker might impose, recognizing that these limitations are crucial in understanding their real-world applicability. Finally, this study examines the enhancement of message broker mechanisms specifically for GenAI contexts, emphasizing the criticality of developing a versatile message broker framework. Such a framework would be poised for quick adaptation, catering to the dynamic and growing demands of GenAI in the foreseeable future. Through this dual-pronged approach, we intend to contribute a foundational compendium that can guide future innovations and infrastructural advancements in the realm of GenAI data communication.

Shouhua Zhang, Jiehan Zhou, Xue Ma et al.

Traditional fault diagnosis methods using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) often struggle with capturing the temporal dynamics of vibration signals. To overcome this, the application of Transformer-based Vision Transformer (ViT) methods to fault diagnosis is gaining attraction. Nonetheless, these methods typically require extensive preprocessing, which increases computational complexity, potentially reducing the efficiency of the diagnosis process. Addressing this gap, this paper presents the Time Series Vision Transformer (TSViT), tailored for effective fault diagnosis. TSViT incorporates a convolutional layer to extract local features from vibration signals, alongside a transformer encoder to discern long-term temporal patterns. A thorough experimental comparison on three diverse datasets demonstrates TSViT's effectiveness and adaptability. Moreover, the paper delves into the influence of hyperparameter tuning on the model's performance, computational demand, and parameter count. Remarkably, TSViT achieves an unprecedented 100% average accuracy on two test sets and 99.99% on another, showcasing its exceptional diagnostic capabilities.

Da-Lun Chen, Prasasthy Balasubramanian, Lauri Lovén et al.

Many staff and students in higher education have adopted generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools in their work and study. GenAI is expected to enhance cognitive systems by enabling personalized learning and streamlining educational services. However, stakeholders perceptions of GenAI in higher education remain divided, shaped by cultural, disciplinary, and institutional contexts. In addition, the EU AI Act requires universities to ensure regulatory compliance when deploying cognitive systems. These developments highlight the need for institutions to engage stakeholders and tailor GenAI integration to their needs while addressing concerns. This study investigates how GenAI is perceived within the disciplines of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE). Using a mixed-method approach, we surveyed 61 staff and 37 students at the Faculty of ITEE, University of Oulu. The results reveal both shared and discipline-specific themes, including strong interest in programming support from GenAI and concerns over response quality, privacy, and academic integrity. Drawing from these insights, the study identifies a set of high-level requirements and proposes a conceptual framework for responsible GenAI integration. Disciplinary-specific requirements reinforce the importance of stakeholder engagement when integrating GenAI into higher education. The high-level requirements and the framework provide practical guidance for universities aiming to harness GenAI while addressing stakeholder concerns and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Talha Zeeshan, Abhishek Kumar, Susanna Pirttikangas et al.

This paper presents the development and evaluation of a Large Language Model (LLM), also known as foundation models, based multi-agent system framework for complex event processing (CEP) with a focus on video query processing use cases. The primary goal is to create a proof-of-concept (POC) that integrates state-of-the-art LLM orchestration frameworks with publish/subscribe (pub/sub) tools to address the integration of LLMs with current CEP systems. Utilizing the Autogen framework in conjunction with Kafka message brokers, the system demonstrates an autonomous CEP pipeline capable of handling complex workflows. Extensive experiments evaluate the system's performance across varying configurations, complexities, and video resolutions, revealing the trade-offs between functionality and latency. The results show that while higher agent count and video complexities increase latency, the system maintains high consistency in narrative coherence. This research builds upon and contributes to, existing novel approaches to distributed AI systems, offering detailed insights into integrating such systems into existing infrastructures.

Alaa Saleh, Sasu Tarkoma, Praveen Kumar Donta et al.

Agentic AI, with its autonomous and proactive decision-making, has transformed smart environments. By integrating Generative AI (GenAI) and multi-agent systems, modern AI frameworks can dynamically adapt to user preferences, optimize data management, and improve resource allocation. This paper introduces UserCentrix, an agentic memory-augmented AI framework designed to enhance smart spaces through dynamic, context-aware decision-making. This framework integrates personalized Large Language Model (LLM) agents that leverage user preferences and LLM memory management to deliver proactive and adaptive assistance. Furthermore, it incorporates a hybrid hierarchical control system, balancing centralized and distributed processing to optimize real-time responsiveness while maintaining global situational awareness. UserCentrix achieves resource-efficient AI interactions by embedding memory-augmented reasoning, cooperative agent negotiation, and adaptive orchestration strategies. Our key contributions include (i) a self-organizing framework with proactive scaling based on task urgency, (ii) a Value of Information (VoI)-driven decision-making process, (iii) a meta-reasoning personal LLM agent, and (iv) an intelligent multi-agent coordination system for seamless environment adaptation. Experimental results across various models confirm the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing response accuracy, system efficiency, and computational resource management in real-world application.

Alaa Saleh, Roberto Morabito, Sasu Tarkoma et al.

As 6G networks evolve into increasingly AI-driven, user-centric ecosystems, traditional reactive handover mechanisms demonstrate limitations, especially in mobile edge computing and autonomous agent-based service scenarios. This manuscript introduces WAAN, a cross-layer framework that enables intent-aware and proactive handovers by embedding lightweight TinyML agents as autonomous, negotiation-capable entities across heterogeneous edge nodes that contribute to intent propagation and network adaptation. To ensure continuity across mobility-induced disruptions, WAAN incorporates semi-stable rendezvous points that serve as coordination anchors for context transfer and state preservation. The framework's operational capabilities are demonstrated through a multimodal environmental control case study, highlighting its effectiveness in maintaining user experience under mobility. Finally, the article discusses key challenges and future opportunities associated with the deployment and evolution of WAAN.

Lam Huynh, Tri Nguyen, Thu Nguyen et al.

Smartwatches have rapidly evolved towards capabilities to accurately capture physiological signals. As an appealing application, stress detection attracts many studies due to its potential benefits to human health. It is propitious to investigate the applicability of deep neural networks (DNN) to enhance human decision-making through physiological signals. However, manually engineering DNN proves a tedious task especially in stress detection due to the complex nature of this phenomenon. To this end, we propose an optimized deep neural network training scheme using neural architecture search merely using wrist-worn data from WESAD. Experiments show that our approach outperforms traditional ML methods by 8.22% and 6.02% in the three-state and two-state classifiers, respectively, using the combination of WESAD wrist signals. Moreover, the proposed method can minimize the need for human-design DNN while improving performance by 4.39% (three-state) and 8.99% (binary).

Jiehan Zhou, Shouhua Zhang, Qinghua Lu et al.

Federated learning (FL) brings collaborative intelligence into industries without centralized training data to accelerate the process of Industry 4.0 on the edge computing level. FL solves the dilemma in which enterprises wish to make the use of data intelligence with security concerns. To accelerate industrial Internet of things with the further leverage of FL, existing achievements on FL are developed from three aspects: 1) define terminologies and elaborate a general framework of FL for accommodating various scenarios; 2) discuss the state-of-the-art of FL on fundamental researches including data partitioning, privacy preservation, model optimization, local model transportation, personalization, motivation mechanism, platform & tools, and benchmark; 3) discuss the impacts of FL from the economic perspective. To attract more attention from industrial academia and practice, a FL-transformed manufacturing paradigm is presented, and future research directions of FL are given and possible immediate applications in Industry 4.0 domain are also proposed.