Abdulsalam Yassine

Yi Liu, Ruihui Zhao, Jiawen Kang et al.

Federated Edge Learning (FEL) allows edge nodes to train a global deep learning model collaboratively for edge computing in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which significantly promotes the development of Industrial 4.0. However, FEL faces two critical challenges: communication overhead and data privacy. FEL suffers from expensive communication overhead when training large-scale multi-node models. Furthermore, due to the vulnerability of FEL to gradient leakage and label-flipping attacks, the training process of the global model is easily compromised by adversaries. To address these challenges, we propose a communication-efficient and privacy-enhanced asynchronous FEL framework for edge computing in IIoT. First, we introduce an asynchronous model update scheme to reduce the computation time that edge nodes wait for global model aggregation. Second, we propose an asynchronous local differential privacy mechanism, which improves communication efficiency and mitigates gradient leakage attacks by adding well-designed noise to the gradients of edge nodes. Third, we design a cloud-side malicious node detection mechanism to detect malicious nodes by testing the local model quality. Such a mechanism can avoid malicious nodes participating in training to mitigate label-flipping attacks. Extensive experimental studies on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can not only improve communication efficiency but also mitigate malicious attacks while its accuracy is comparable to traditional FEL frameworks.

Pallavi Kuhad, Abdulsalam Yassine, Shervin Shirmohammadi

High calorie intake in the human body on the one hand, has proved harmful in numerous occasions leading to several diseases and on the other hand, a standard amount of calorie intake has been deemed essential by dieticians to maintain the right balance of calorie content in human body. As such, researchers have proposed a variety of automatic tools and systems to assist users measure their calorie in-take. In this paper, we consider the category of those tools that use image processing to recognize the food, and we propose a method for fully automatic and user-friendly calibration of the dimension of the food portion sizes, which is needed in order to measure food portion weight and its ensuing amount of calories. Experimental results show that our method, which uses deep learning, mobile cloud computing, distance estimation and size calibration inside a mobile device, leads to an accuracy improvement to 95% on average compared to previous work

Abdulsalam Yassine

With the rapid development of applications in open distributed environments such as eCommerce, privacy of information is becoming a critical issue. Today, many online companies are gathering information and have assembled sophisticated databases that know a great deal about many people, generally without the knowledge of those people. Such information changes hands or ownership as a normal part of eCommerce transactions, or through strategic decisions that often includes the sale of users' information to other firms. The key commercial value of users' personal information derives from the ability of firms to identify consumers and charge them personalized prices for goods and services they have previously used or may wish to use in the future. A look at present-day practices reveals that consumers' profile data is now considered as one of the most valuable assets owned by online businesses. In this thesis, we argue the following: if consumers' private data is such a valuable asset, should they not be entitled to commercially benefit from their asset as well? The scope of this thesis is on developing architecture for privacy payoff as a means of rewarding consumers for sharing their personal information with online businesses. The architecture is a multi-agent system in which several agents employ various requirements for personal information valuation and interaction capabilities that most users cannot do on their own. The agents in the system bear the responsibility of working on behalf of consumers to categorize their personal data objects, report to consumers on online businesses' trustworthiness and reputation, determine the value of their compensation using risk-based financial models, and, finally, negotiate for a payoff value in return for the dissemination of users' information.