M. Shamim Hossain

Yuanhang Qi, M. Shamim Hossain

The rapid proliferation of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) has ushered in a transformative era of data-driven connectivity across various domains. However, this exponential growth has raised pressing concerns about environmental sustainability and data privacy. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces One-shot Federated Learning (OSFL), an innovative paradigm that harmonizes sustainability and machine learning within IoT ecosystems. OSFL revolutionizes the traditional Federated Learning (FL) workflow by condensing multiple iterative communication rounds into a single operation, thus significantly reducing energy consumption, communication overhead, and latency. This breakthrough is coupled with the strategic integration of generative learning techniques, ensuring robust data privacy while promoting efficient knowledge sharing among IoT devices. By curtailing resource utilization, OSFL aligns seamlessly with the vision of green and sustainable IoT, effectively extending device lifespans and mitigating their environmental footprint. Our research underscores the transformative potential of OSFL, poised to reshape the landscape of IoT applications across domains such as energy-efficient smart cities and groundbreaking healthcare solutions. This contribution marks a pivotal step towards a more responsible, sustainable, and technologically advanced future.

Rahatara Ferdousi, Chunsheng Yang, M. Anwar Hossain et al.

Recent advancements in cognitive computing, with the integration of deep learning techniques, have facilitated the development of intelligent cognitive systems (ICS). This is particularly beneficial in the context of rail defect detection, where the ICS would emulate human-like analysis of image data for defect patterns. Despite the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in visual defect classification, the scarcity of large datasets for rail defect detection remains a challenge due to infrequent accident events that would result in defective parts and images. Contemporary researchers have addressed this data scarcity challenge by exploring rule-based and generative data augmentation models. Among these, Variational Autoencoder (VAE) models can generate realistic data without extensive baseline datasets for noise modeling. This study proposes a VAE-based synthetic image generation technique for rail defects, incorporating weight decay regularization and image reconstruction loss to prevent overfitting. The proposed method is applied to create a synthetic dataset for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) with just 50 real samples across five classes. Remarkably, 500 synthetic samples are generated with a minimal reconstruction loss of 0.021. A Visual Transformer (ViT) model underwent fine-tuning using this synthetic CPR dataset, achieving high accuracy rates (98%-99%) in classifying the five defect classes. This research offers a promising solution to the data scarcity challenge in rail defect detection, showcasing the potential for robust ICS development in this domain.

Omar H. Khater, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui, M. Shamim Hossain et al.

Sustainable agriculture plays a crucial role in ensuring world food security for consumers. A critical challenge faced by sustainable precision agriculture is weed growth, as weeds compete for essential resources with crops, such as water, soil nutrients, and sunlight, which notably affect crop yields. The adoption of automated computer vision technologies and ground agricultural consumer electronic vehicles in precision agriculture offers sustainable, low-carbon solutions. However, prior works suffer from issues such as low accuracy and precision, as well as high computational expense. This work proposes EcoWeedNet, a novel model that enhances weed detection performance without introducing significant computational complexity, aligning with the goals of low-carbon agricultural practices. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on the CottonWeedDet12 benchmark dataset, which reflects real-world scenarios. EcoWeedNet achieves performance comparable to that of large models (mAP@0.5 = 95.2%), yet with significantly fewer parameters (approximately 4.21% of the parameters of YOLOv4), lower computational complexity and better computational efficiency 6.59% of the GFLOPs of YOLOv4). These key findings indicate EcoWeedNet's deployability on low-power consumer hardware, lower energy consumption, and hence reduced carbon footprint, thereby emphasizing the application prospects of EcoWeedNet in next-generation sustainable agriculture. These findings provide the way forward for increased application of environmentally-friendly agricultural consumer technologies.

Bing Zhang, Mikio Takeuchi, Ryo Kawahara et al.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to a greater challenge of having a rigorous and systematic evaluation of complex tasks performed, especially in enterprise applications. Therefore, LLMs need to be able to benchmark enterprise datasets for various tasks. This work presents a systematic exploration of benchmarking strategies tailored to LLM evaluation, focusing on the utilization of domain-specific datasets and consisting of a variety of NLP tasks. The proposed evaluation framework encompasses 25 publicly available datasets from diverse enterprise domains like financial services, legal, cyber security, and climate and sustainability. The diverse performance of 13 models across different enterprise tasks highlights the importance of selecting the right model based on the specific requirements of each task. Code and prompts are available on GitHub.

Al Amin, Kamrul Hasan, Sharif Ullah et al.

Privacy-preserving and secure data sharing are critical for medical image analysis while maintaining accuracy and minimizing computational overhead are also crucial. Applying existing deep neural networks (DNNs) to encrypted medical data is not always easy and often compromises performance and security. To address these limitations, this research introduces a secure framework consisting of a learnable encryption method based on the block-pixel operation to encrypt the data and subsequently integrate it with the Vision Transformer (ViT). The proposed framework ensures data privacy and security by creating unique scrambling patterns per key, providing robust performance against leading bit attacks and minimum difference attacks.

Omar H. Khater, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui, Aiman El-Maleh et al.

Deploying deep learning models in agriculture is difficult because edge devices have limited resources, but this work presents a compressed version of EcoWeedNet using structured channel pruning, quantization-aware training (QAT), and acceleration with NVIDIA's TensorRT on the Jetson Orin Nano. Despite the challenges of pruning complex architectures with residual shortcuts, attention mechanisms, concatenations, and CSP blocks, the model size was reduced by up to 68.5% and computations by 3.2 GFLOPs, while inference speed reached 184 FPS at FP16, 28.7% faster than the baseline. On the CottonWeedDet12 dataset, the pruned EcoWeedNet with a 39.5% pruning ratio outperformed YOLO11n and YOLO12n (with only 20% pruning), achieving 83.7% precision, 77.5% recall, and 85.9% mAP50, proving it to be both efficient and effective for precision agriculture.