Bradford Campbell

Bharathan Balaji, Brad Campbell, Amit Levy et al.

Internet of Things (IoT) promises to bring ease of monitoring, better efficiency and innovative services across many domains with connected devices around us. With information from critical parts of infrastructure and powerful cloud-based data analytics, many applications can be developed to gain insights about IoT systems as well as transform their capabilities. Actuation applications form an essential part of these IoT systems, as they enable automation as well as fast low-level decision making. However, modern IoT systems are designed for data acquisition, and actuation applications are implemented in an ad-hoc manner. We identify modeling constraints in a systematic manner as indispensable to support actuation applications because constraints encompass high-level policies dictated by laws of physics, legal policies, user preferences. We explore data models for constraints inIoT system with the example of a home heating system and illustrate the challenges in enforcing these constraints in theIoT system architecture.

Amir Farzin Nikkhah, Dong Chen, Bradford Campbell et al.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are transforming infrastructure inspections in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facility Management (AEC+FM) domain. By synthesizing insights from over 150 studies, this review paper highlights UAV-based methodologies for data acquisition, photogrammetric modeling, defect detection, and decision-making support. Key innovations include path optimization, thermal integration, and advanced machine learning (ML) models such as YOLO and Faster R-CNN for anomaly detection. UAVs have demonstrated value in structural health monitoring (SHM), disaster response, urban infrastructure management, energy efficiency evaluations, and cultural heritage preservation. Despite these advancements, challenges in real-time processing, multimodal data fusion, and generalizability remain. A proposed workflow framework, informed by literature and a case study, integrates RGB imagery, LiDAR, and thermal sensing with transformer-based architectures to improve accuracy and reliability in detecting structural defects, thermal anomalies, and geometric inconsistencies. The proposed framework ensures precise and actionable insights by fusing multimodal data and dynamically adapting path planning for complex environments, presented as a comprehensive step-by-step guide to address these challenges effectively. This paper concludes with future research directions emphasizing lightweight AI models, adaptive flight planning, synthetic datasets, and richer modality fusion to streamline modern infrastructure inspections.

Dong Chen, Arman Hosseini, Arik Smith et al.

Electric scooters (e-scooters) have rapidly emerged as a popular mode of transportation in urban areas, yet they pose significant safety challenges. In the United States, the rise of e-scooters has been marked by a concerning increase in related injuries and fatalities. Recently, while deep-learning object detection holds paramount significance in autonomous vehicles to avoid potential collisions, its application in the context of e-scooters remains relatively unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of cutting-edge object detectors designed for e-scooters. To achieve this, the first comprehensive benchmark involving 22 state-of-the-art YOLO object detectors, including five versions (YOLOv3, YOLOv5, YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8), has been established for real-time traffic object detection using a self-collected dataset featuring e-scooters. The detection accuracy, measured in terms of mAP@0.5, ranges from 27.4% (YOLOv7-E6E) to 86.8% (YOLOv5s). All YOLO models, particularly YOLOv3-tiny, have displayed promising potential for real-time object detection in the context of e-scooters. Both the traffic scene dataset (https://zenodo.org/records/10578641) and software program codes (https://github.com/DongChen06/ScooterDet) for model benchmarking in this study are publicly available, which will not only improve e-scooter safety with advanced object detection but also lay the groundwork for tailored solutions, promising a safer and more sustainable urban micromobility landscape.

Guimin Dong, Mingyue Tang, Zhiyuan Wang et al.

The Internet of Things (IoT) boom has revolutionized almost every corner of people's daily lives: healthcare, home, transportation, manufacturing, supply chain, and so on. With the recent development of sensor and communication technologies, IoT devices including smart wearables, cameras, smartwatches, and autonomous vehicles can accurately measure and perceive their surrounding environment. Continuous sensing generates massive amounts of data and presents challenges for machine learning. Deep learning models (e.g., convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks) have been extensively employed in solving IoT tasks by learning patterns from multi-modal sensory data. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), an emerging and fast-growing family of neural network models, can capture complex interactions within sensor topology and have been demonstrated to achieve state-of-the-art results in numerous IoT learning tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of recent advances in the application of GNNs to the IoT field, including a deep dive analysis of GNN design in various IoT sensing environments, an overarching list of public data and source code from the collected publications, and future research directions. To keep track of newly published works, we collect representative papers and their open-source implementations and create a Github repository at https://github.com/GuiminDong/GNN4IoT.

Seyed Hamidreza Nabaei, Ryan Lenfant, Viswajith Govinda Rajan et al.

In the era of growing interest in healthy buildings and smart homes, the importance of sustainable, health conscious indoor environments is paramount. Smart tools, especially VOC sensors, are crucial for monitoring indoor air quality, yet interpreting signals from various VOC sources remains challenging. A promising approach involves understanding how indoor plants respond to environmental conditions. Plants produce terpenes, a type of VOC, when exposed to abiotic and biotic stressors - including pathogens, predators, light, and temperature - offering a novel pathway for monitoring indoor air quality. While prior work often relies on specialized laboratory sensors, our research leverages readily available commercial sensors to detect and classify plant emitted VOCs that signify changes in indoor conditions. We quantified the sensitivity of these sensors by measuring 16 terpenes in controlled experiments, then identified and tested the most promising terpenes in realistic environments. We also examined physics based models to map VOC responses but found them lacking for real world complexity. Consequently, we trained machine learning models to classify terpenes using commercial sensors and identified optimal sensor placement. To validate this approach, we analyzed emissions from a living basil plant, successfully detecting terpene output. Our findings establish a foundation for overcoming challenges in plant VOC detection, paving the way for advanced plant based sensors to enhance indoor environmental quality in future smart buildings.

Jiechao Gao, Yuangang Li, Yue Zhao et al.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) has increased interest in federated learning (FL) for privacy-preserving distributed data utilization. However, traditional two-tier FL architectures inadequately adapt to multi-tier IoT environments. While Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) improves practicality in multi-tier IoT environments by multi-layer aggregation, it still faces challenges in communication efficiency and accuracy due to high data transfer volumes, data heterogeneity, and imbalanced device distribution, struggling to meet the low-latency and high-accuracy model training requirements of practical IoT scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose H-FedSN, an innovative approach for practical IoT environments. H-FedSN introduces a binary mask mechanism with shared and personalized layers to reduce communication overhead by creating a sparse network while keeping original weights frozen. To address data heterogeneity and imbalanced device distribution, we integrate personalized layers for local data adaptation and apply Bayesian aggregation with cumulative Beta distribution updates at edge and cloud levels, effectively balancing contributions from diverse client groups. Evaluations on three real-world IoT datasets and MNIST under non-IID settings demonstrate that H-FedSN significantly reduces communication costs by 58 to 238 times compared to HierFAVG while achieving high accuracy, making it highly effective for practical IoT applications in hierarchical federated learning scenarios.

Ana Nora Evans, Bradford Campbell, Mary Lou Soffa

Rust, an emerging programming language with explosive growth, provides a robust type system that enables programmers to write memory-safe and data-race free code. To allow access to a machine's hardware and to support low-level performance optimizations, a second language, Unsafe Rust, is embedded in Rust. It contains support for operations that are difficult to statically check, such as C-style pointers for access to arbitrary memory locations and mutable global variables. When a program uses these features, the compiler is unable to statically guarantee the safety properties Rust promotes. In this work, we perform a large-scale empirical study to explore how software developers are using Unsafe Rust in real-world Rust libraries and applications. Our results indicate that software engineers use the keyword unsafe in less than 30% of Rust libraries, but more than half cannot be entirely statically checked by the Rust compiler because of Unsafe Rust hidden somewhere in a library's call chain. We conclude that although the use of the keyword unsafe is limited, the propagation of unsafeness offers a challenge to the claim of Rust as a memory-safe language. Furthermore, we recommend changes to the Rust compiler and to the central Rust repository's interface to help Rust software developers be aware of when their Rust code is unsafe.