Sandip Chakraborty

Prithviraj Pramanik, Prasenjit Karmakar, Praveen Kumar Sharma et al.

Efficient air quality sensing serves as one of the essential services provided in any recent smart city. Mostly facilitated by sparsely deployed Air Quality Monitoring Stations (AQMSs) that are difficult to install and maintain, the overall spatial variation heavily impacts air quality monitoring for locations far enough from these pre-deployed public infrastructures. To mitigate this, we in this paper propose a framework named AQuaMoHo that can annotate data obtained from a low-cost thermo-hygrometer (as the sole physical sensing device) with the AQI labels, with the help of additional publicly crawled Spatio-temporal information of that locality. At its core, AQuaMoHo exploits the temporal patterns from a set of readily available spatial features using an LSTM-based model and further enhances the overall quality of the annotation using temporal attention. From a thorough study of two different cities, we observe that AQuaMoHo can significantly help annotate the air quality data on a personal scale.

Soumyajit Chatterjee, Bivas Mitra, Sandip Chakraborty

Complex activities of daily living (ADLs) often consist of multiple micro-activities. When performed sequentially, these micro-activities help the user accomplish the broad macro-activity. Naturally, a deeper understanding of these micro-activities can help develop more sophisticated human activity recognition (HAR) models and add explainability to their inferred conclusions. Previous research has attempted to achieve this by utilizing fine-grained annotated data that provided the required supervision and rules for associating the micro-activities to identify the macro-activity. However, this ``bottom-up'' approach is unrealistic as getting such high-quality, fine-grained annotated sensor datasets is challenging, costly, and time-consuming. Understanding this, in this paper, we develop AmicroN, which adapts a ``top-down'' approach by exploiting coarse-grained annotated data to expand the macro-activities into their constituent micro-activities without any external supervision. In the backend, AmicroN uses \textit{unsupervised} change-point detection to search for the micro-activity boundaries across a complex ADL. Then, it applies a \textit{generalized zero-shot} approach to characterize it. We evaluate AmicroN on two real-life publicly available datasets and observe that AmicroN can identify the micro-activities with micro F\textsubscript{1}-score $>0.75$ for both datasets. Additionally, we also perform an initial proof-of-concept on leveraging the state-of-the-art (SOTA) large language models (LLMs) with attribute embeddings predicted by AmicroN to enhance further the explainability surrounding the detection of micro-activities.

Aritra Hota, Soumyajit Chatterjee, Sandip Chakraborty

Traditional human-in-the-loop-based annotation for time-series data like inertial data often requires access to alternate modalities like video or audio from the environment. These alternate sources provide the necessary information to the human annotator, as the raw numeric data is often too obfuscated even for an expert. However, this traditional approach has many concerns surrounding overall cost, efficiency, storage of additional modalities, time, scalability, and privacy. Interestingly, recent large language models (LLMs) are also trained with vast amounts of publicly available alphanumeric data, which allows them to comprehend and perform well on tasks beyond natural language processing. Naturally, this opens up a potential avenue to explore LLMs as virtual annotators where the LLMs will be directly provided the raw sensor data for annotation instead of relying on any alternate modality. Naturally, this could mitigate the problems of the traditional human-in-the-loop approach. Motivated by this observation, we perform a detailed study in this paper to assess whether the state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs can be used as virtual annotators for labeling time-series physical sensing data. To perform this in a principled manner, we segregate the study into two major phases. In the first phase, we investigate the challenges an LLM like GPT-4 faces in comprehending raw sensor data. Considering the observations from phase 1, in the next phase, we investigate the possibility of encoding the raw sensor data using SOTA SSL approaches and utilizing the projected time-series data to get annotations from the LLM. Detailed evaluation with four benchmark HAR datasets shows that SSL-based encoding and metric-based guidance allow the LLM to make more reasonable decisions and provide accurate annotations without requiring computationally expensive fine-tuning or sophisticated prompt engineering.

Yuvraj Dutta, Soumyajit Chatterjee, Sandip Chakraborty et al.

Accurate and adaptive network throughput prediction is essential for latency-sensitive and bandwidth-intensive applications in 5G and emerging 6G networks. However, most existing methods rely on centralized training with uniformly collected data, limiting their applicability in heterogeneous mobile environments with non-IID data distributions. This paper presents the first comprehensive benchmarking of federated learning (FL) strategies for throughput prediction in realistic 5G edge scenarios. We evaluate three aggregation algorithms - FedAvg, FedProx, and FedBN - across four time-series architectures: LSTM, CNN, CNN+LSTM, and Transformer, using five diverse real-world datasets. We systematically analyze the effects of client heterogeneity, cohort size, and history window length on prediction performance. Our results reveal key trade-offs among model complexities, convergence rates, and generalization. It is found that FedBN consistently delivers robust performance under non-IID conditions. On the other hand, LSTM and Transformer models outperform CNN-based baselines by up to 80% in R2 scores. Moreover, although Transformers converge in half the rounds of LSTM, they require longer history windows to achieve a high R2, indicating higher context dependence. LSTM is, therefore, found to achieve a favorable balance between accuracy, rounds, and temporal footprint. To validate the end-to-end applicability of the framework, we have integrated our FL-based predictors into a live adaptive streaming pipeline. It is seen that FedBN-based LSTM and Transformer models improve mean QoE scores by 11.7% and 11.4%, respectively, over FedAvg, while also reducing the variance. These findings offer actionable insights for building scalable, privacy-preserving, and edge-aware throughput prediction systems in next-generation wireless networks.

Soumyajit Chatterjee, Arun Singh, Bivas Mitra et al.

Human activities within smart infrastructures generate a vast amount of IMU data from the wearables worn by individuals. Many existing studies rely on such sensory data for human activity recognition (HAR); however, one of the major bottlenecks is their reliance on pre-annotated or labeled data. Manual human-driven annotations are neither scalable nor efficient, whereas existing auto-annotation techniques heavily depend on video signatures. Still, video-based auto-annotation needs high computation resources and has privacy concerns when the data from a personal space, like a smart-home, is transferred to the cloud. This paper exploits the acoustic signatures generated from human activities to label the wearables' IMU data at the edge, thus mitigating resource requirement and data privacy concerns. We utilize acoustic-based pre-trained HAR models for cross-modal labeling of the IMU data even when two individuals perform simultaneous but different activities under the same environmental context. We observe that non-overlapping acoustic gaps exist with a high probability during the simultaneous activities performed by two individuals in the environment's acoustic context, which helps us resolve the overlapping activity signatures to label them individually. A principled evaluation of the proposed approach on two real-life in-house datasets further augmented to create a dual occupant setup, shows that the framework can correctly annotate a significant volume of unlabeled IMU data from both individuals with an accuracy of $\mathbf{82.59\%}$ ($\mathbf{\pm 17.94\%}$) and $\mathbf{98.32\%}$ ($\mathbf{\pm 3.68\%}$), respectively, for a workshop and a kitchen environment.

Rohit Verma, Sugandh Pargal, Debasree Das et al.

Commuter comfort in cab rides affects driver rating as well as the reputation of ride-hailing firms like Uber/Lyft. Existing research has revealed that commuter comfort not only varies at a personalized level but also is perceived differently on different trips for the same commuter. Furthermore, there are several factors, including driving behavior and driving environment, affecting the perception of comfort. Automatically extracting the perceived comfort level of a commuter due to the impact of the driving behavior is crucial for a timely feedback to the drivers, which can help them to meet the commuter's satisfaction. In light of this, we surveyed around 200 commuters who usually take such cab rides and obtained a set of features that impact comfort during cab rides. Following this, we develop a system Ridergo which collects smartphone sensor data from a commuter, extracts the spatial time series feature from the data, and then computes the level of commuter comfort on a five-point scale with respect to the driving. Ridergo uses a Hierarchical Temporal Memory model-based approach to observe anomalies in the feature distribution and then trains a Multi-task learning-based neural network model to obtain the comfort level of the commuter at a personalized level. The model also intelligently queries the commuter to add new data points to the available dataset and, in turn, improve itself over periodic training. Evaluation of Ridergo on 30 participants shows that the system could provide efficient comfort score with high accuracy when the driving impacts the perceived comfort.

Ratna Mandal, Prasenjit Karmakar, Soumyajit Chatterjee et al.

Intelligent city transportation systems are one of the core infrastructures of a smart city. The true ingenuity of such an infrastructure lies in providing the commuters with real-time information about citywide transports like public buses, allowing her to pre-plan the travel. However, providing prior information for transportation systems like public buses in real-time is inherently challenging because of the diverse nature of different stay-locations that a public bus stops. Although straightforward factors stay duration, extracted from unimodal sources like GPS, at these locations look erratic, a thorough analysis of public bus GPS trails for 720km of bus travels at the city of Durgapur, a semi-urban city in India, reveals that several other fine-grained contextual features can characterize these locations accurately. Accordingly, we develop BuStop, a system for extracting and characterizing the stay locations from multi-modal sensing using commuters' smartphones. Using this multi-modal information BuStop extracts a set of granular contextual features that allow the system to differentiate among the different stay-location types. A thorough analysis of BuStop using the collected dataset indicates that the system works with high accuracy in identifying different stay locations like regular bus stops, random ad-hoc stops, stops due to traffic congestion stops at traffic signals, and stops at sharp turns. Additionally, we also develop a proof-of-concept setup on top of BuStop to analyze the potential of the framework in predicting expected arrival time, a critical piece of information required to pre-plan travel, at any given bus stop. Subsequent analysis of the PoC framework, through simulation over the test dataset, shows that characterizing the stay-locations indeed helps make more accurate arrival time predictions with deviations less than 60s from the ground-truth arrival time.

Sandip Chakraborty, Jiban Dalal, Bikramjit Sarkar et al.

Exchange of secret keys over public channels based on neural synchronization using a variety of learning rules offer an appealing alternative to number theory based cryptography algorithms. Though several forms of attacks are possible on this neural protocol e.g. geometric, genetic and majority attacks, our survey finds that deterministic algorithms that synchronize with the end-point networks have high time complexity, while probabilistic and population-based algorithms have demonstrated ability to decode the key during its exchange over the public channels. Our survey also discusses queries, heuristics, erroneous information, group key exchange, synaptic depths, etc, that have been proposed to increase the time complexity of algorithmic interception or decoding of the key during exchange. The Tree Parity Machine and its variants, neural networks with tree topologies incorporating parity checking of state bits, appear to be one of the most secure and stable models of the end-point networks. Our survey also mentions some noteworthy studies on neural networks applied to other necessary aspects of cryptography. We conclude that discovery of neural architectures with very high synchronization speed, and designing the encoding and entropy of the information exchanged during mutual learning, and design of extremely sensitive chaotic maps for transformation of synchronized states of the networks to chaotic encryption keys, are the primary issues in this field.