Dong Sam Ha

Zhuqing Zhao, Dong Ha, Abhishek Damle et al.

Many activity classifications segments data into fixed window size for feature extraction and classification. However, animal behaviors have various durations that do not match the predetermined window size. The dense labeling and dense prediction methods address this limitation by predicting labels for every point. Thus, by tracing the starting and ending points, we could know the time location and duration of all occurring activities. Still, the dense prediction could be noisy with misalignments problems. We modified the U-Net and Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) with customized loss functions as a training strategy to reduce fragmentation and other misalignments. In cGAN, the discriminator and generator trained against each other like an adversarial competition. The generator produces dense predictions. The discriminator works as a high-level consistency check, in our case, pushing the generator to predict activities with reasonable duration. The model trained with cGAN shows better or comparable performance in the cow, pig, and UCI HAPT dataset. The cGAN-trained modified U-Net improved from 92.17% to 94.66% for the UCI HAPT dataset and from 90.85% to 93.18% for pig data compared to previous dense prediction work.

Dian Chen, Paul Yang, Ing-Ray Chen et al.

We propose a novel energy-aware federated learning (FL)-based system, namely SusFL, for sustainable smart farming to address the challenge of inconsistent health monitoring due to fluctuating energy levels of solar sensors. This system equips animals, such as cattle, with solar sensors with computational capabilities, including Raspberry Pis, to train a local deep-learning model on health data. These sensors periodically update Long Range (LoRa) gateways, forming a wireless sensor network (WSN) to detect diseases like mastitis. Our proposed SusFL system incorporates mechanism design, a game theory concept, for intelligent client selection to optimize monitoring quality while minimizing energy use. This strategy ensures the system's sustainability and resilience against adversarial attacks, including data poisoning and privacy threats, that could disrupt FL operations. Through extensive comparative analysis using real-time datasets, we demonstrate that our FL-based monitoring system significantly outperforms existing methods in prediction accuracy, operational efficiency, system reliability (i.e., mean time between failures or MTBF), and social welfare maximization by the mechanism designer. Our findings validate the superiority of our system for effective and sustainable animal health monitoring in smart farms. The experimental results show that SusFL significantly improves system performance, including a $10\%$ reduction in energy consumption, a $15\%$ increase in social welfare, and a $34\%$ rise in Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), alongside a marginal increase in the global model's prediction accuracy.

Dian Chen, Zelin Wan, Dong Sam Ha et al.

Solar sensor-based monitoring systems have become a crucial agricultural innovation, advancing farm management and animal welfare through integrating sensor technology, Internet-of-Things, and edge and cloud computing. However, the resilience of these systems to cyber-attacks and their adaptability to dynamic and constrained energy supplies remain largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we propose a sustainable smart farm network designed to maintain high-quality animal monitoring under various cyber and adversarial threats, as well as fluctuating energy conditions. Our approach utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to devise optimal policies that maximize both monitoring effectiveness and energy efficiency. To overcome DRL's inherent challenge of slow convergence, we integrate transfer learning (TL) and decision theory (DT) to accelerate the learning process. By incorporating DT-guided strategies, we optimize monitoring quality and energy sustainability, significantly reducing training time while achieving comparable performance rewards. Our experimental results prove that DT-guided DRL outperforms TL-enhanced DRL models, improving system performance and reducing training runtime by 47.5%.