Tengjiao He

Junfei Zhan, Tengjiao He, Kwan-Wu Chin et al.

Future Internet of things (IoT) networks will host applications that involve data collection and computation tasks on one or more servers. To this end, this paper proposes the first mixed integer linear program (MILP) to schedule and embed applications on energy harvesting nodes, where it optimizes (i) the sampling time of devices, (ii) whether to run an application, and (iii) the energy usage of devices, gateways and servers. To ensure applications are run often, we adopt the maximum age of service (AoS) metric, and set the MILP's objective to minimize the maximum AoS or min-max AoS of applications. This paper also proposes two novel solutions: (i) a receding horizon control (RHC) based method, and (ii) a solution that greedily embeds applications according to their AoS. The results show that the min-max AoS of RHC and greedy approach is respectively 1.07x and 1.13x higher than MILP.

Tengjiao He, Wenguang Wang

Video anomaly detection has great potential in enhancing safety in the production and monitoring of crucial areas. Currently, most video anomaly detection methods are based on RGB modality, but its redundant semantic information may breach the privacy of residents or patients. The 3D data obtained by depth camera and LiDAR can accurately locate anomalous events in 3D space while preserving human posture and motion information. Identifying individuals through the point cloud is difficult due to its sparsity, which protects personal privacy. In this study, we propose Point Spatio-Temporal Auto-Encoder (PSTAE), an autoencoder framework that uses point cloud videos as input to detect anomalies in point cloud videos. We introduce PSTOp and PSTTransOp to maintain spatial geometric and temporal motion information in point cloud videos. To measure the reconstruction loss of the proposed autoencoder framework, we propose a reconstruction loss measurement strategy based on a shallow feature extractor. Experimental results on the TIMo dataset show that our method outperforms currently representative depth modality-based methods in terms of AUROC and has superior performance in detecting Medical Issue anomalies. These results suggest the potential of point cloud modality in video anomaly detection. Our method sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the TIMo dataset.

Junfei Zhan, Haoxun Shen, Zheng Lin et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but incur high communication overhead and privacy risks in cloud deployments, while facing compute and memory constraints when confined to edge devices. Cloud-edge inference has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving privacy in LLM services by retaining sensitive computations on local devices. However, existing cloud-edge inference approaches apply uniform privacy protection without considering input sensitivity, resulting in unnecessary perturbation and degraded utility even for non-sensitive tokens. To address this limitation, we propose Privacy-aware Routing for Inference with Semantic Modulation (PRISM), a context-aware framework that dynamically balances privacy and inference quality. PRISM executes in four stages: (1) the edge device profiles entity-level sensitivity; (2) a soft gating module on the edge selects an execution mode - cloud, edge, or collaboration; (3) for collaborative paths, the edge applies adaptive two-layer local differential privacy based on entity risks; and (4) the cloud LLM generates a semantic sketch from the perturbed prompt, which is then refined by the edge-side small language model (SLM) using local context. Our results show that PRISM consistently achieves superior privacy-utility trade-offs across various scenarios, reducing energy consumption and latency to 40-50% of baseline methods such as Uniform and Selective LDP, while maintaining high output quality under strong privacy constraints. These findings are validated through comprehensive evaluations involving realistic prompts, actual energy measurements, and heterogeneous cloud-edge model deployments.

Yizhou Luo, Kwan-Wu Chin, Ruyi Guan et al.

Devices operating in Internet of Things (IoT) networks may be deployed across vast geographical areas and interconnected via multi-hop communications. Further, they may be unguarded. This makes them vulnerable to attacks and motivates operators to check on devices frequently. To this end, we propose and study an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-aided attestation framework for use in IoT networks with a charging station powered by solar. A key challenge is optimizing the trajectory of the UAV to ensure it attests as many devices as possible. A trade-off here is that devices being checked by the UAV are offline, which affects the amount of data delivered to a gateway. Another challenge is that the charging station experiences time-varying energy arrivals, which in turn affect the flight duration and charging schedule of the UAV. To address these challenges, we employ a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) solution to optimize the UAV's charging schedule and the selection of devices to be attested during each flight. The simulation results show that our solution reduces the average age of trust by 88% and throughput loss due to attestation by 30%.