Rajiv Ranjan

Bharath Sudharsan, Dineshkumar Sundaram, Pankesh Patel et al.

The majority of IoT devices like smartwatches, smart plugs, HVAC controllers, etc., are powered by hardware with a constrained specification (low memory, clock speed and processor) which is insufficient to accommodate and execute large, high-quality models. On such resource-constrained devices, manufacturers still manage to provide attractive functionalities (to boost sales) by following the traditional approach of programming IoT devices/products to collect and transmit data (image, audio, sensor readings, etc.) to their cloud-based ML analytics platforms. For decades, this online approach has been facing issues such as compromised data streams, non-real-time analytics due to latency, bandwidth constraints, costly subscriptions, recent privacy issues raised by users and the GDPR guidelines, etc. In this paper, to enable ultra-fast and accurate AI-based offline analytics on resource-constrained IoT devices, we present an end-to-end multi-component model optimization sequence and open-source its implementation. Researchers and developers can use our optimization sequence to optimize high memory, computation demanding models in multiple aspects in order to produce small size, low latency, low-power consuming models that can comfortably fit and execute on resource-constrained hardware. The experimental results show that our optimization components can produce models that are; (i) 12.06 x times compressed; (ii) 0.13% to 0.27% more accurate; (iii) Orders of magnitude faster unit inference at 0.06 ms. Our optimization sequence is generic and can be applied to any state-of-the-art models trained for anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, robotics, voice recognition, and machine vision.

Minxian Xu, Jingfeng Wu, Shengye Song et al.

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized various artificial intelligence (AI) applications, from natural language processing to code generation. However, the computational demands of these models, particularly in training and inference, present significant challenges. Traditional systems are often unable to meet these requirements, necessitating the integration of cloud-native and distributed architectures. This paper explores the role of cloud platforms and distributed systems in supporting the scalability, efficiency, and optimization of LLMs. We discuss the complexities of LLM deployment, including data management, resource optimization, and the need for microservices, autoscaling, and hybrid cloud-edge solutions. Additionally, we examine emerging research trends, such as serverless inference, quantum computing, and federated learning, and their potential to drive the next phase of LLM innovation. The paper concludes with a roadmap for future developments, emphasizing the need for continued research, standardization, and cross-sector collaboration to sustain the growth of LLMs in both research and enterprise applications.

Stanly Wilson, Kwabena Adu-Duodu, Yinhao Li et al.

Trust between entities in any scenario without a trusted third party is very difficult, and trust is exactly what blockchain aims to bring into the digital world with its basic features. Many applications are moving to blockchain adoption, enabling users to work in a trustworthy manner. The early generations of blockchain have a problem; they cannot share information with other blockchains. As more and more entities move their applications to the blockchain, they generate large volumes of data, and as applications have become more complex, sharing information between different blockchains has become a necessity. This has led to the research and development of interoperable solutions allowing blockchains to connect together. This paper discusses a few blockchain platforms that provide interoperable solutions, emphasising their ability to connect heterogeneous blockchains. It also discusses a case study scenario to illustrate the importance and benefits of using interoperable solutions. We also present a few topics that need to be solved in the realm of interoperability.

Zhenyu Liu, Haoran Duan, Huizhi Liang et al.

Adversarial training is one of the most effective methods for enhancing model robustness. Recent approaches incorporate adversarial distillation in adversarial training architectures. However, we notice two scenarios of defense methods that limit their performance: (1) Previous methods primarily use static ground truth for adversarial training, but this often causes robust overfitting; (2) The loss functions are either Mean Squared Error or KL-divergence leading to a sub-optimal performance on clean accuracy. To solve those problems, we propose a dynamic label adversarial training (DYNAT) algorithm that enables the target model to gradually and dynamically gain robustness from the guide model's decisions. Additionally, we found that a budgeted dimension of inner optimization for the target model may contribute to the trade-off between clean accuracy and robust accuracy. Therefore, we propose a novel inner optimization method to be incorporated into the adversarial training. This will enable the target model to adaptively search for adversarial examples based on dynamic labels from the guiding model, contributing to the robustness of the target model. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our approach.

Xiufang Shi, Wei Zhang, Mincheng Wu et al.

With the development of edge computing, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution for the intelligent Internet of Things (IoT). However, applying FL in mobile edge-cloud networks is greatly challenged by statistical heterogeneity and high communication overhead. To address it, we propose a hybrid federated learning framework called HFLDD, which integrates dataset distillation to generate approximately independent and equally distributed (IID) data, thereby improving the performance of model training. In particular, we partition the clients into heterogeneous clusters, where the data labels among different clients within a cluster are unbalanced while the data labels among different clusters are balanced. The cluster heads collect distilled data from the corresponding cluster members, and conduct model training in collaboration with the server. This training process is like traditional federated learning on IID data, and hence effectively alleviates the impact of non-IID data on model training. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the convergence behavior, communication overhead, and computational complexity of the proposed HFLDD. Extensive experimental results based on multiple public datasets demonstrate that when data labels are severely imbalanced, the proposed HFLDD outperforms the baseline methods in terms of both test accuracy and communication cost.

Xingyu Miao, Haoran Duan, Yang Bai et al.

In this work, we propose a method that leverages CLIP feature distillation, achieving efficient 3D segmentation through language guidance. Unlike previous methods that rely on multi-scale CLIP features and are limited by processing speed and storage requirements, our approach aims to streamline the workflow by directly and effectively distilling dense CLIP features, thereby achieving precise segmentation of 3D scenes using text. To achieve this, we introduce an adapter module and mitigate the noise issue in the dense CLIP feature distillation process through a self-cross-training strategy. Moreover, to enhance the accuracy of segmentation edges, this work presents a low-rank transient query attention mechanism. To ensure the consistency of segmentation for similar colors under different viewpoints, we convert the segmentation task into a classification task through label volume, which significantly improves the consistency of segmentation in color-similar areas. We also propose a simplified text augmentation strategy to alleviate the issue of ambiguity in the correspondence between CLIP features and text. Extensive experimental results show that our method surpasses current state-of-the-art technologies in both training speed and performance. Our code is available on: https://github.com/xingy038/Laser.git.

Xingyu Miao, Haoran Duan, Varun Ojha et al.

In this work, we propose a novel Trajectory Score Matching (TSM) method that aims to solve the pseudo ground truth inconsistency problem caused by the accumulated error in Interval Score Matching (ISM) when using the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) inversion process. Unlike ISM which adopts the inversion process of DDIM to calculate on a single path, our TSM method leverages the inversion process of DDIM to generate two paths from the same starting point for calculation. Since both paths start from the same starting point, TSM can reduce the accumulated error compared to ISM, thus alleviating the problem of pseudo ground truth inconsistency. TSM enhances the stability and consistency of the model's generated paths during the distillation process. We demonstrate this experimentally and further show that ISM is a special case of TSM. Furthermore, to optimize the current multi-stage optimization process from high-resolution text to 3D generation, we adopt Stable Diffusion XL for guidance. In response to the issues of abnormal replication and splitting caused by unstable gradients during the 3D Gaussian splatting process when using Stable Diffusion XL, we propose a pixel-by-pixel gradient clipping method. Extensive experiments show that our model significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art models in terms of visual quality and performance. Code: \url{https://github.com/xingy038/Dreamer-XL}.

Rui Sun, Yumin Zhang, Tejal Shah et al.

With impressive achievements made, artificial intelligence is on the path forward to artificial general intelligence. Sora, developed by OpenAI, which is capable of minute-level world-simulative abilities can be considered as a milestone on this developmental path. However, despite its notable successes, Sora still encounters various obstacles that need to be resolved. In this survey, we embark from the perspective of disassembling Sora in text-to-video generation, and conducting a comprehensive review of literature, trying to answer the question, \textit{From Sora What We Can See}. Specifically, after basic preliminaries regarding the general algorithms are introduced, the literature is categorized from three mutually perpendicular dimensions: evolutionary generators, excellent pursuit, and realistic panorama. Subsequently, the widely used datasets and metrics are organized in detail. Last but more importantly, we identify several challenges and open problems in this domain and propose potential future directions for research and development.

Xueqi Qiu, Xingyu Miao, Fan Wan et al.

Deepfake detection is crucial for curbing the harm it causes to society. However, current Deepfake detection methods fail to thoroughly explore artifact information across different domains due to insufficient intrinsic interactions. These interactions refer to the fusion and coordination after feature extraction processes across different domains, which are crucial for recognizing complex forgery clues. Focusing on more generalized Deepfake detection, in this work, we introduce a novel bi-directional attention module to capture the local positional information of artifact clues from the spatial domain. This enables accurate artifact localization, thus addressing the coarse processing with artifact features. To further address the limitation that the proposed bi-directional attention module may not well capture global subtle forgery information in the artifact feature (e.g., textures or edges), we employ a fine-grained frequency attention module in the frequency domain. By doing so, we can obtain high-frequency information in the fine-grained features, which contains the global and subtle forgery information. Although these features from the diverse domains can be effectively and independently improved, fusing them directly does not effectively improve the detection performance. Therefore, we propose a feature superposition strategy that complements information from spatial and frequency domains. This strategy turns the feature components into the form of wave-like tokens, which are updated based on their phase, such that the distinctions between authentic and artifact features can be amplified. Our method demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on five public Deepfake datasets in capturing abnormalities across different manipulated operations and real-life.

Haoran Duan, Shidong Wang, Varun Ojha et al.

While traditional feature engineering for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) involves a trial-anderror process, deep learning has emerged as a preferred method for high-level representations of sensor-based human activities. However, most deep learning-based HAR requires a large amount of labelled data and extracting HAR features from unlabelled data for effective deep learning training remains challenging. We, therefore, introduce a deep semi-supervised HAR approach, MixHAR, which concurrently uses labelled and unlabelled activities. Our MixHAR employs a linear interpolation mechanism to blend labelled and unlabelled activities while addressing both inter- and intra-activity variability. A unique challenge identified is the activityintrusion problem during mixing, for which we propose a mixing calibration mechanism to mitigate it in the feature embedding space. Additionally, we rigorously explored and evaluated the five conventional/popular deep semi-supervised technologies on HAR, acting as the benchmark of deep semi-supervised HAR. Our results demonstrate that MixHAR significantly improves performance, underscoring the potential of deep semi-supervised techniques in HAR.

Yumin Zhang, Xingyu Miao, Haoran Duan et al.

Text-to-3D content creation is a rapidly evolving research area. Given the scarcity of 3D data, current approaches often adapt pre-trained 2D diffusion models for 3D synthesis. Among these approaches, Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has been widely adopted. However, the issue of over-smoothing poses a significant limitation on the high-fidelity generation of 3D models. To address this challenge, LucidDreamer replaces the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) in SDS with the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) to construct Interval Score Matching (ISM). However, ISM inevitably inherits inconsistencies from DDIM, causing reconstruction errors during the DDIM inversion process. This results in poor performance in the detailed generation of 3D objects and loss of content. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel method named Exact Score Matching (ESM). Specifically, ESM leverages auxiliary variables to mathematically guarantee exact recovery in the DDIM reverse process. Furthermore, to effectively capture the dynamic changes of the original and auxiliary variables, the LoRA of a pre-trained diffusion model implements these exact paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ESM in text-to-3D generation, particularly highlighting its superiority in detailed generation.

Rajiv Ranjan, Tejasavi Birdh, Nandan Mandal et al.

This study investigates the relationship between sugarcane yield and cane height derived under different water and nitrogen conditions from pre-harvest Digital Surface Model (DSM) obtained via Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flights over a sugarcane test farm. The farm was divided into 62 blocks based on three water levels (low, medium, and high) and three nitrogen levels (low, medium, and high), with repeated treatments. In pixel distribution of DSM for each block, it provided bimodal distribution representing two peaks, ground level (gaps within canopies) and top of the canopies respectively. Using bimodal distribution, mean cane height was extracted for each block by applying a trimmed mean to the pixel distribution, focusing on the top canopy points. Similarly, the extracted mean elevation of the base was derived from the bottom points, representing ground level. The Derived Cane Height Model (DCHM) was generated by taking the difference between the mean canopy height and mean base elevation for each block. Yield measurements (tons/acre) were recorded post-harvest for each block. By aggregating the data into nine treatment zones (e.g., high water-low nitrogen, low water-high nitrogen), the DCHM and median yield were calculated for each zone. The regression analysis between the DCHM and corresponding yields for the different treatment zones yielded an R 2 of 0.95. This study demonstrates the significant impact of water and nitrogen treatments on sugarcane height and yield, utilizing one-time UAV-derived DSM data.

Rui Sun, Haoran Duan, Jiahua Dong et al.

We introduce a rehearsal-free federated domain incremental learning framework, RefFiL, based on a global prompt-sharing paradigm to alleviate catastrophic forgetting challenges in federated domain-incremental learning, where unseen domains are continually learned. Typical methods for mitigating forgetting, such as the use of additional datasets and the retention of private data from earlier tasks, are not viable in federated learning (FL) due to devices' limited resources. Our method, RefFiL, addresses this by learning domain-invariant knowledge and incorporating various domain-specific prompts from the domains represented by different FL participants. A key feature of RefFiL is the generation of local fine-grained prompts by our domain adaptive prompt generator, which effectively learns from local domain knowledge while maintaining distinctive boundaries on a global scale. We also introduce a domain-specific prompt contrastive learning loss that differentiates between locally generated prompts and those from other domains, enhancing RefFiL's precision and effectiveness. Compared to existing methods, RefFiL significantly alleviates catastrophic forgetting without requiring extra memory space, making it ideal for privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained devices.

Zhenyu Liu, Huizhi Liang, Rajiv Ranjan et al.

The robustness of Deep Neural Network models is crucial for defending models against adversarial attacks. Recent defense methods have employed collaborative learning frameworks to enhance model robustness. Two key limitations of existing methods are (i) insufficient guidance of the target model via loss functions and (ii) non-collaborative adversarial generation. We, therefore, propose a dual regularization loss (D2R Loss) method and a collaborative adversarial generation (CAG) strategy for adversarial training. D2R loss includes two optimization steps. The adversarial distribution and clean distribution optimizations enhance the target model's robustness by leveraging the strengths of different loss functions obtained via a suitable function space exploration to focus more precisely on the target model's distribution. CAG generates adversarial samples using a gradient-based collaboration between guidance and target models. We conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark databases, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and two popular target models, WideResNet34-10 and PreActResNet18. Our results show that D2R loss with CAG produces highly robust models.

Muhammad Usman Shahid, Chuadhry Mujeeb Ahmed, Rajiv Ranjan

The security of code generated by large language models (LLMs) is a significant concern, as studies indicate that such code often contains vulnerabilities and lacks essential defensive programming constructs. This work focuses on examining and evaluating the security of LLM-generated code, particularly in the context of C/C++. We categorized known vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) and, to study their criticality, mapped them to CVEs. We used ten different LLMs for code generation and analyzed the outputs through static analysis. The amount of CWEs present in AI-generated code is concerning. Our findings highlight the need for developers to be cautious when using LLM-generated code. This study provides valuable insights to advance automated code generation and encourage further research in this domain.

Tomasz Szydlo, Viacheslaw Horbanow, Dev Nandan Jha et al.

Edge computing has emerged as a pivotal technology, offering significant advantages such as low latency, enhanced data security, and reduced reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure. These benefits are crucial for applications requiring real-time data processing or strict security measures. Despite these advantages, edge devices operating within edge clusters are often underutilized. This inefficiency is mainly due to the absence of a holistic performance profiling mechanism which can help dynamically adjust the desired system configuration for a given workload. Since edge computing environments involve a complex interplay between CPU frequency, power consumption, and application performance, a deeper understanding of these correlations is essential. By uncovering these relationships, it becomes possible to make informed decisions that enhance both computational efficiency and energy savings. To address this gap, this paper evaluates the power consumption and performance characteristics of a single processing node within an edge cluster using a synthetic microbenchmark by varying the workload size and CPU frequency. The results show how an optimal measure can lead to optimized usage of edge resources, given both performance and power consumption.

Yumin Zhang, Yan Gao, Haoran Duan et al.

Transformer-based foundation models (FMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in medical image segmentation. However, scaling these models is challenging due to the limited size of medical image datasets within isolated hospitals, where data centralization is restricted due to privacy concerns. These constraints, combined with the data-intensive nature of FMs, hinder their broader application. Integrating federated learning (FL) with foundation models (FLFM) fine-tuning offers a potential solution to these challenges by enabling collaborative model training without data sharing, thus allowing FMs to take advantage of a diverse pool of sensitive medical image data across hospitals/clients. However, non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data among clients, paired with computational and communication constraints in federated environments, presents an additional challenge that limits further performance improvements and remains inadequately addressed in existing studies. In this work, we propose a novel FLFM fine-tuning framework, \underline{\textbf{Fed}}erated tuning with \underline{\textbf{S}}imilarity-guided \underline{\textbf{C}}ollaborative \underline{\textbf{A}}ggregation (FedSCA), encompassing all phases of the FL process. This includes (1) specially designed parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for local client training to enhance computational efficiency; (2) partial low-level adapter transmission for communication efficiency; and (3) similarity-guided collaborative aggregation (SGCA) on the server side to address non-IID issues. Extensive experiments on three FL benchmarks for medical image segmentation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed FedSCA, establishing new SOTA performance.

Kwabena Adu-Duodu, Stanly Wilson, Yinhao Li et al.

Efficient management of end-of-life (EoL) products is critical for advancing circularity in supply chains, particularly within the construction industry where EoL strategies are hindered by heterogenous lifecycle data and data silos. Current tools like Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are limited by their dependency on seamless data integration and interoperability which remain significant challenges. To address these, we present the Circular Construction Product Ontology (CCPO), an applied framework designed to overcome semantic and data heterogeneity challenges in EoL decision-making for construction products. CCPO standardises vocabulary and facilitates data integration across supply chain stakeholders enabling lifecycle assessments (LCA) and robust decision-making. By aggregating disparate data into a unified product provenance, CCPO enables automated EoL recommendations through customisable SWRL rules aligned with European standards and stakeholder-specific circularity SLAs, demonstrating its scalability and integration capabilities. The adopted circular product scenario depicts CCPO's application while competency question evaluations show its superior performance in generating accurate EoL suggestions highlighting its potential to greatly improve decision-making in circular supply chains and its applicability in real-world construction environments.

Rui Sun, Yumin Zhang, Varun Ojha et al.

We propose Exemplar-Condensed federated class-incremental learning (ECoral) to distil the training characteristics of real images from streaming data into informative rehearsal exemplars. The proposed method eliminates the limitations of exemplar selection in replay-based approaches for mitigating catastrophic forgetting in federated continual learning (FCL). The limitations particularly related to the heterogeneity of information density of each summarized data. Our approach maintains the consistency of training gradients and the relationship to past tasks for the summarized exemplars to represent the streaming data compared to the original images effectively. Additionally, our approach reduces the information-level heterogeneity of the summarized data by inter-client sharing of the disentanglement generative model. Extensive experiments show that our ECoral outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and can be seamlessly integrated with many existing approaches to enhance performance.

Zheng Li, Rajiv Ranjan

By seamlessly integrating everyday objects and by changing the way we interact with our surroundings, Internet of Things (IoT) is drastically improving the life quality of households and enhancing the productivity of businesses. Given the unique IoT characteristics, IoT applications have emerged distinctively from the mainstream application types. Inspired by the outlook of a programmable world, we further foresee an IoT-native trend in designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining software systems. However, although the challenges of IoT software projects are frequently discussed, addressing those challenges are still in the "crossing the chasm" period. By participating in a few various IoT projects, we gradually distilled three fundamental principles for engineering IoT-native software systems, such as just enough, just in time, and just for "me". These principles target the challenges that are associated with the most typical features of IoT environments, ranging from resource limits to technology heterogeneity of IoT devices. We expect this research to trigger dedicated efforts, techniques and theories for the topic IoT-native software engineering.

Hao Peng, Jianxin Li, Yangqiu Song et al.

Events are happening in real-world and real-time, which can be planned and organized for occasions, such as social gatherings, festival celebrations, influential meetings or sports activities. Social media platforms generate a lot of real-time text information regarding public events with different topics. However, mining social events is challenging because events typically exhibit heterogeneous texture and metadata are often ambiguous. In this paper, we first design a novel event-based meta-schema to characterize the semantic relatedness of social events and then build an event-based heterogeneous information network (HIN) integrating information from external knowledge base. Second, we propose a novel Pairwise Popularity Graph Convolutional Network, named as PP-GCN, based on weighted meta-path instance similarity and textual semantic representation as inputs, to perform fine-grained social event categorization and learn the optimal weights of meta-paths in different tasks. Third, we propose a streaming social event detection and evolution discovery framework for HINs based on meta-path similarity search, historical information about meta-paths, and heterogeneous DBSCAN clustering method. Comprehensive experiments on real-world streaming social text data are conducted to compare various social event detection and evolution discovery algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms other alternative social event detection and evolution discovery techniques.

Abdur Rahim Mohammad Forkan, Yong-Bin Kang, Prem Prakash Jayaraman et al.

In this paper, we propose a new technique that applies automated image analysis in the area of structural corrosion monitoring and demonstrate improved efficacy compared to existing approaches. Structural corrosion monitoring is the initial step of the risk-based maintenance philosophy and depends on an engineer's assessment regarding the risk of building failure balanced against the fiscal cost of maintenance. This introduces the opportunity for human error which is further complicated when restricted to assessment using drone captured images for those areas not reachable by humans due to many background noises. The importance of this problem has promoted an active research community aiming to support the engineer through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) image analysis for corrosion detection. In this paper, we advance this area of research with the development of a framework, CorrDetector. CorrDetector uses a novel ensemble deep learning approach underpinned by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for structural identification and corrosion feature extraction. We provide an empirical evaluation using real-world images of a complicated structure (e.g. telecommunication tower) captured by drones, a typical scenario for engineers. Our study demonstrates that the ensemble approach of \model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of classification accuracy.

Bin Qian, Jie Su, Zhenyu Wen et al.

Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT) are complementary advances: ML techniques unlock complete potentials of IoT with intelligence, and IoT applications increasingly feed data collected by sensors into ML models, thereby employing results to improve their business processes and services. Hence, orchestrating ML pipelines that encompasses model training and implication involved in holistic development lifecycle of an IoT application often leads to complex system integration. This paper provides a comprehensive and systematic survey on the development lifecycle of ML-based IoT application. We outline core roadmap and taxonomy, and subsequently assess and compare existing standard techniques used in individual stage.

Raj Gaire, Ratan K. Ghosh, Jongkil Kim et al.

Smartness in smart cities is achieved by sensing phenomena of interest and using them to make smart decisions. Since the decision makers may not own all the necessary sensing infrastructures, crowdsourced sensing, can help collect important information of the city in near real-time. However, involving people brings of the risk of exposing their private information.This chapter explores crowdsensing in smart city applications and its privacy implications.

Raj Gaire, Chigulapalli Sriharsha, Deepak Puthal et al.

Disaster management demands a near real-time information dissemina-tion so that the emergency services can be provided to the right people at the right time. Recent advances in information and communication technologies enable collection of real-time information from various sources. For example, sensors deployed in the fields collect data about the environment. Similarly, social networks like Twitter and Facebook can help to collect data from people in the disaster zone. On one hand, inadequate situation awareness in disasters has been identified as one of the primary factors in human errors with grave consequences such as loss of lives and destruction of critical infrastructure. On the other hand, the growing ubiquity of social media and mobile devices, and pervasive nature of the Internet-of-Things means that there are more sources of outbound traffic, which ultimately results in the creation of a data deluge, beginning shortly after the onset of disaster events, leading to the problem of information tsunami. In addition, security and privacy has crucial role to overcome the misuse of the system for either intrusions into data or overcome the misuse of the information that was meant for a specified purpose. .... In this chapter, we provide such a situation aware application to support disaster management data lifecycle, i.e. from data ingestion and processing to alert dissemination. We utilize cloud computing, Internet of Things and social computing technologies to achieve a scalable, effi-cient, and usable situation-aware application called Cloud4BigData.

Yinhao Li, Awa Alqahtani, Ellis Solaiman et al.

Within the rapidly developing Internet of Things (IoT), numerous and diverse physical devices, Edge devices, Cloud infrastructure, and their quality of service requirements (QoS), need to be represented within a unified specification in order to enable rapid IoT application development, monitoring, and dynamic reconfiguration. But heterogeneities among different configuration knowledge representation models pose limitations for acquisition, discovery and curation of configuration knowledge for coordinated IoT applications. This paper proposes a unified data model to represent IoT resource configuration knowledge artifacts. It also proposes IoT-CANE (Context-Aware recommendatioN systEm) to facilitate incremental knowledge acquisition and declarative context driven knowledge recommendation.

Charith Perera, Chang Liu, Rajiv Ranjan et al.

Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing together give us the ability to sense, collect, process, and analyse data so we can use them to better understand behaviours, habits, preferences and life patterns of users and lead them to consume resources more efficiently. In such knowledge discovery activities, privacy becomes a significant challenge due to the extremely personal nature of the knowledge that can be derived from the data and the potential risks involved. Therefore, understanding the privacy expectations and preferences of stakeholders is an important task in the IoT domain. In this paper, we review how privacy knowledge has been modelled and used in the past in different domains. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT. Finally, we discuss major research challenges and opportunities.

Charith Perera, Rajiv Ranjan, Lizhe Wang

The idea of an open data market envisions the creation of a data trading model to facilitate exchange of data between different parties in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. The data collected by IoT products and solutions are expected to be traded in these markets. Data owners will collect data using IoT products and solutions. Data consumers who are interested will negotiate with the data owners to get access to such data. Data captured by IoT products will allow data consumers to further understand the preferences and behaviours of data owners and to generate additional business value using different techniques ranging from waste reduction to personalized service offerings. In open data markets, data consumers will be able to give back part of the additional value generated to the data owners. However, privacy becomes a significant issue when data that can be used to derive extremely personal information is being traded. This paper discusses why privacy matters in the IoT domain in general and especially in open data markets and surveys existing privacy-preserving strategies and design techniques that can be used to facilitate end to end privacy for open data markets. We also highlight some of the major research challenges that need to be address in order to make the vision of open data markets a reality through ensuring the privacy of stakeholders.

Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Rajiv Ranjan, Karan Mitra et al.

The MediaWise project aims to expand the scope of existing media delivery systems with novel cloud, personalization and collaboration capabilities that can serve the needs of more users, communities, and businesses. The project develops a MediaWise Cloud platform that supports do-it-yourself creation, search, management, and consumption of multimedia content. The MediaWise Cloud supports pay-as-you-go models and elasticity that are similar to those offered by commercially available cloud services. However, unlike existing commercial CDN services providers such as Limelight Networks and Akamai the MediaWise Cloud require no ownerships of computing infrastructure and instead rely on the public Internet and public cloud services (e.g., commercial cloud storage to store its content). In addition to integrating such public cloud services into a public cloud-based Content Delivery Network, the MediaWise Cloud also provides advanced Quality of Service (QoS) management as required for the delivery of streamed and interactive high resolution multimedia content. In this paper, we give a brief overview of MediaWise Cloud architecture and present a comprehensive discussion on research objectives related to its service components. Finally, we also compare the features supported by the existing CDN services against the envisioned objectives of MediaWise Cloud.

Michael Menzel, Rajiv Ranjan

Cloud computing is the latest computing paradigm that delivers hardware and software resources as virtualized services in which users are free from the burden of worrying about the low-level system administration details. Migrating Web applications to Cloud services and integrating Cloud services into existing computing infrastructures is non-trivial. It leads to new challenges that often require innovation of paradigms and practices at all levels: technical, cultural, legal, regulatory, and social. The key problem in mapping Web applications to virtualized Cloud services is selecting the best and compatible mix of software images (e.g., Web server image) and infrastructure services to ensure that Quality of Service (QoS) targets of an application are achieved. The fact that, when selecting Cloud services, engineers must consider heterogeneous sets of criteria and complex dependencies between infrastructure services and software images, which are impossible to resolve manually, is a critical issue. To overcome these challenges, we present a framework (called CloudGenius) which automates the decision-making process based on a model and factors specifically for Web server migration to the Cloud. CloudGenius leverages a well known multi-criteria decision making technique, called Analytic Hierarchy Process, to automate the selection process based on a model, factors, and QoS parameters related to an application. An example application demonstrates the applicability of the theoretical CloudGenius approach. Moreover, we present an implementation of CloudGenius that has been validated through experiments.