Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) represents a transformative approach to collecting data from the environment as it utilizes the ubiquity and sensory capabilities of mobile devices with human participants. This paradigm enables scales of data collection critical for applications ranging from environmental monitoring to urban planning. However, the effective harnessing of this distributed data collection capability faces significant challenges. One of the most significant challenges is the variability in the sensing qualities of the participating devices while they are initially unknown and must be learned over time to optimize task assignments. This paper tackles the dual challenges of managing task diversity to mitigate data redundancy and optimizing task assignment amidst the inherent variability of worker performance. We introduce a novel model that dynamically adjusts task weights based on assignment frequency to promote diversity and incorporates a flexible approach to account for the different qualities of task completion, especially in scenarios with overlapping task assignments. Our strategy aims to maximize the overall weighted quality of data collected within the constraints of a predefined budget. Our strategy leverages a combinatorial multi-armed bandit framework with an upper confidence bound approach to guide decision-making. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through a combination of regret analysis and simulations grounded in realistic scenarios.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging privacy-preserving distributed computing paradigm, enabling numerous clients to collaboratively train machine learning models without the necessity of transmitting clients’ private datasets to the central server. Unlike most existing research where the local datasets of clients are assumed to be unchanged over time throughout the whole FL process, our study addresses such scenarios in this paper where clients’ datasets need to be updated periodically, and the server can incentivize clients to employ as fresh as possible datasets for local model training. Our primary objective is to design a client selection strategy to minimize the loss of the global model for FL loss within a constrained budget. To this end, we introduce the concept of ‘‘Age of Information’’ (AoI) to quantitatively assess the freshness of local datasets and conduct a theoretical analysis of the convergence bound in our AoI-aware FL system. Based on the convergence bound, we further formulate our problem as a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem. Next, we relax the RMAB problem and apply the Lagrangian Dual approach to decouple it into multiple subproblems. Finally, we propose a Whittle’s Index Based Client Selection (WICS) algorithm to determine the set of selected clients. In addition, comprehensive simulations substantiate that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce training loss and enhance the learning accuracy compared with some state-of-the-art methods.

Federated learning has been widely employed in many applications to protect the data privacy of participating clients. Although the dataset is decentralized among training devices in federated learning, the model parameters are usually stored in a centralized manner. Centralized federated learning is easy to implement; however, a centralized scheme causes a communication bottleneck at the central server, which may significantly slow down the training process. To improve training efficiency, we investigate the decentralized federated learning scheme. The decentralized scheme has become feasible with the rapid development of device-to-device communication techniques under 5G. Nevertheless, the convergence rate of learning models in the decentralized scheme depends on the network topology design. We propose optimizing the topology design to improve training efficiency for decentralized federated learning, which is a non-trivial problem, especially when considering data heterogeneity. In this paper, we first demonstrate the advantage of hypercube topology and present a hypercube graph construction method to reduce data heterogeneity by carefully selecting neighbors of each training device—a process that resembles classic graph embedding. In addition, we propose a heuristic method for generating torus graphs. Moreover, we have explored the communication patterns in hypercube topology and propose a sequential synchronization scheme to reduce communication cost during training. A batch synchronization scheme is presented to fine-tune the communication pattern for hypercube topology. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our proposed graph construction methods can accelerate the training process, and our sequential synchronization scheme can significantly reduce the overall communication traffic during training.

Federated learning has emerged as a distributed learning paradigm by training at each client and aggregating at a parameter server. System heterogeneity hinders stragglers from responding to the server in time with huge communication costs. Although client grouping in federated learning can solve the straggler problem, the stochastic selection strategy in client grouping neglects the impact of data distribution within each group. Besides, current client grouping approaches make clients suffer unfair participation, leading to biased performances for different clients. In order to guarantee the fairness of client participation and mitigate biased local performances, we propose a federated dynamic client selection method based on data representativity (FedSDR). FedSDR clusters clients into groups correlated with their own local computational efficiency. To estimate the significance of client datasets, we design a novel data representativity evaluation scheme based on local data distribution. Furthermore, the two most representative clients in each group are selected to optimize the global model. Finally, the DYNAMIC-SELECT algorithm updates local computational efficiency and data representativity states to regroup clients after periodic average aggregation. Evaluations on real datasets show that FedSDR improves client participation by 27.4%, 37.9%, and 23.3% compared with FedAvg, TiFL, and FedSS, respectively, taking fairness into account in federated learning. In addition, FedSDR surpasses FedAvg, FedGS, and FedMS by 21.32%, 20.4%, and 6.90%, respectively, in local test accuracy variance, balancing the performance bias of the global model across clients.

When a human body moves within the coverage range of Wi-Fi signals, the reflected Wi-Fi signals by the various parts of the human body change the propagation path, so analysis of the channel state data can achieve the perception of the human motion. By extracting the Channel State Information (CSI) related to human motion from the Wi-Fi signals and analyzing it with the introduced machine learning classification algorithm, the human motion in the spatial environment can be perceived. On the basis of this theory, this paper proposed an algorithm of human behavior recognition based on CSI wireless sensing to realize deviceless and over-the-air slide turning. This algorithm collects the environmental information containing upward or downward wave in a conference room scene, uses the local outlier factor detection algorithm to segment the actions, and then the time domain features are extracted to train Support Vector Machine (SVM) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classification modules. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of the XGBoost module sensing slide flipping can reach 94%, and the SVM module can reach 89%, so the module could be extended to the field of smart classroom and significantly improve speech efficiency.

Friend recommendation plays a key role in promoting user experience in online social networks (OSNs). However, existing studies usually neglect users' fine-grained interest as well as the evolving feature of interest, which may cause unsuitable recommendation. In particular, some OSNs, such as the online learning community, even have little work on friend recommendation. To this end, we strive to improve friend recommendation with fine-grained evolving interest in this paper. We take the online learning community as an application scenario, which is a special type of OSNs for people to learn courses online. Learning partners can help improve learners' learning effect and improve the attractiveness of platforms. We propose a learning partner recommendation framework based on the evolution of fine-grained learning interest (LPRF-E for short). We extract a sequence of learning interest tags that changes over time. Then, we explore the time feature to predict evolving learning interest. Next, we recommend learning partners by fine-grained interest similarity. We also refine the learning partner recommendation framework with users' social influence (denoted as LPRF-F for differentiation). Extensive experiments on two real datasets crawled from Chinese University MOOC and Douban Book validate that the proposed LPRF-E and LPRF-F models achieve a high accuracy (i.e., approximate 50% improvements on the precision and the recall) and can recommend learning partners with high quality (e.g., more experienced and helpful).

Sustaining an operational wireless sensor network (WSN) is challenging due to the persistent need of the battery-powered sensors to be charged from time to time. The procedure of exploiting mobile chargers (MCs) that traverse to the fixed sensors of the network and wirelessly transfer energy in an efficient matter has been considered widely as a promising way to tackle this challenge. An optimization problem, called the mobile charger coverage problem, arises naturally to keep all of the sensors alive with an objective of determining both the minimum number of MCs required meeting the sensor recharge frequency and the schedule of these MCs. It is shown that this optimization problem becomes NP-hard in high-dimensional spaces. Moreover, the special case of the homogeneous recharge frequency of the sensors has already been proven to have a tractable algorithm if we consider whether the 1-dimensional space is a line or a ring. In this work, we seek to find a delicate border between the tractable and the intractable problem space. Specifically, we study the special case of heterogeneous sensors that take frequencies of 1's and 2's (lifetime of 1 and 0.5 time units) on a line, conjecture the special case's NP-hardness, propose a novel brute-force optimal algorithm, and present a linear-time greedy algorithm that gives a 1.5-approximation solution for the problem. Afterwards, we introduce the energy optimization problem of the MCs with the minimized number and solve it optimally. Comprehensive simulation is conducted to verify the efficiency of using our proposed algorithms that minimize the number of MCs.

The volume of information that needs to be processed in big data clusters increases rapidly nowadays. It is critical to execute the data analysis in a time-efficient manner. However, simply adding more computation resources may not speed up the data analysis significantly. The data analysis jobs usually consist of multiple stages which are organized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The precedence relationships between stages cause scheduling challenges. General DAG scheduling is a well-known NP-hard problem. Moreover, we observe that in some parallel computing frameworks such as Spark, the execution of a stage in DAG contains multiple phases that use different resources. We notice that carefully arranging the execution of those resources in pipeline can reduce their idle time and improve the average resource utilization. Therefore, we propose a resource pipeline scheme with the objective of minimizing the job makespan. For perfectly parallel stages, we propose a contention-free scheduler with detailed theoretical analysis. Moreover, we extend the contention-free scheduler for three-phase stages, considering the computation phase of some stages can be partitioned. Additionally, we are aware that job stages in real-world applications are usually not perfectly parallel. We need to frequently adjust the parallelism levels during the DAG execution. Considering reinforcement learning (RL) techniques can adjust the scheduling policy on the fly, we investigate a scheduler based on RL for online arrival jobs. The RL-based scheduler can adjust the resource contention adaptively. We evaluate both contention-free and RL-based schedulers on a Spark cluster. In the evaluation, a real-world cluster trace dataset is used to simulate different DAG styles. Evaluation results show that our pipelined scheme can significantly improve CPU and network utilization.

As the main health threat to the elderly living alone and performing indoor activities, falls have attracted great attention from institutions and society. Currently, fall detection systems are mainly based on wear sensors, environmental sensors, and computer vision, which need to be worn or require complex equipment construction. However, they have limitations and will interfere with the daily life of the elderly. On the basis of the indoor propagation theory of wireless signals, this paper proposes a conceptual verification module using Wi-Fi signals to identify human fall behavior. The module can detect falls without invading privacy and affecting human comfort and has the advantages of noninvasive, robustness, universality, and low price. The module combines digital signal processing technology and machine learning technology. This paper analyzes and processes the channel state information (CSI) data of wireless signals, and the local outlier factor algorithm is used to find the abnormal CSI sequence. The support vector machine and extreme gradient boosting algorithms are used for classification, recognition, and comparative research. Experimental results show that the average accuracy of fall detection based on wireless sensing is more than 90%. This work has important social significance in ensuring the safety of the elderly.

The intelligent transportation system (ITS) integrates a variety of advanced science and technology to support and monitor road traffic systems and accelerate the urbanization process of various countries. This paper analyzes the shortcomings of ITS, introduces the principle of quantum computing and the performance of universal quantum computer and special-purpose quantum computer, and shows how to use quantum advantages to improve the existing ITS. The application of quantum computer in transportation field is reviewed from three application directions: path planning, transportation operation management, and transportation facility layout. Due to the slow development of the current universal quantum computer, the D-Wave quantum machine is used as a breakthrough in the practical application. This paper makes it clear that quantum computing is a powerful tool to promote the development of ITS, emphasizes the importance and necessity of introducing quantum computing into intelligent transportation, and discusses the possible development direction in the future.