Enterprises have paid attention to consortium blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric, which is one of the most promising platforms, for efficient decentralized transactions without depending on any particular organization. A consortium blockchain-based system will be typically built across multiple organizations. In such blockchain-based systems, system operations across multiple organizations in a decentralized manner are essential to maintain the value of introducing consortium blockchains. Decentralized system operations have recently been becoming realistic with the evolution of consortium blockchains. For instance, the release of Hyperledger Fabric v2.x, in which individual operational tasks for a blockchain network, such as command execution of configuration change of channels (Fabric's sub-networks) and upgrade of chaincodes (Fabric's smart contracts), can be partially executed in a decentralized manner. However, the operations workflows also include the preceding procedure of pre-sharing, coordinating, and pre-agreeing the operational information (e.g., configuration parameters) among organizations, after which operation executions can be conducted, and this preceding procedure relies on costly manual tasks. To realize efficient decentralized operations workflows for consortium blockchain-based systems in general, we propose a decentralized inter-organizational operations method that we call Operations Smart Contract (OpsSC), which defines an operations workflow as a smart contract. Furthermore, we design and implement OpsSC for blockchain network operations with Hyperledger Fabric v2.x. This paper presents OpsSC for operating channels and chaincodes, which are essential for managing the blockchain networks, through clarifying detailed workflows of those operations. A cost evaluation based on an estimation model shows that the total operational cost for executing a typical operational scenario to add an organization to a blockchain network having ten organizations could be reduced by 54 percent compared with a conventional script-based method. The implementation of OpsSC has been open-sourced and registered as one of Hyperledger Labs projects, which hosts experimental projects approved by Hyperledger.

Crowdedness of buses is playing an increasingly important role in the disease control of COVID-19. The lack of a practical approach to sensing the crowdedness of buses is a major problem. This paper proposes a bus crowdedness sensing system which exploits deep learning-based object detection to count the numbers of passengers getting on and off a bus and thus estimate the crowdedness of buses in real time. In our prototype system, we combine YOLOv5s object detection model with Kalman Filter object tracking algorithm to implement a sensing algorithm running on a Jetson nano-based vehicular device mounted on a bus. By using the driving recorder video data taken from real bus, we experimentally evaluate the performance of the proposed sensing system to verify that our proposed system system improves counting accuracy and achieves real-time processing at the Jetson Nano platform.

Running IoT applications on edge computing infrastructures has the benefits of low response times and efficient bandwidth usage. System verification on a testbed is required to deploy IoT applications in production environments. In a testbed, Docker containers are preferable for a smooth transition of tested application programs to production environments. In addition, the round-trip times (RTT) of Docker containers to clients must be ensured, according to the target application's response time requirements. However, in existing testbed systems, the RTTs between Docker containers and clients are not ensured. Thus, we must undergo a large amount of configuration data including RTTs between all pairs of wireless base station nodes and servers to set up a testbed environment. In this paper, we present an edge computing testbed system with simple application programming interfaces (API) for testbed users that ensures RTTs between Docker containers and clients. The proposed system automatically determines which servers to place Docker containers on according to virtual regions and the RTTs specified by the testbed users through APIs. The virtual regions provide reduced size information about the RTTs in a network. In the proposed system, the configuration data size is reduced to one divided by the number of the servers and the command arguments length is reduced to approximately one-third or less, whereas the increased system running time is 4.3s.

The integration of social networking concepts into the Internet of Things has led to the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, and trust evaluation is essential to secure interaction in SIoT. In SIoT, when resource-constrained nodes respond to unexpected malicious services and malicious recommendations, the trust assessment is prone to be inaccurate, and the existing architecture has the risk of privacy leakage. An edge-cloud collaborative trust evaluation architecture in SIoT is proposed in this paper. Utilize the resource advantages of the cloud and the edge to complete the trust assessment task collaboratively. An evaluation algorithm of relationship closeness between nodes is designed to evaluate neighbor nodes' reliability in SIoT. A trust computing algorithm with enhanced sensitivity is proposed, considering the fluctuation of trust value and the conflict between trust indicators to enhance the sensitivity of identifying malicious behaviors. Simulation results show that compared with traditional methods, the proposed trust evaluation method can effectively improve the success rate of interaction and reduce the false detection rate when dealing with malicious services and malicious recommendations.

Traditional pipeline methods for task-oriented dialogue systems are designed individually and expensively. Existing memory augmented end-to-end methods directly map the inputs to outputs and achieve promising results. However, the most existing end-to-end solutions store the dialogue history and knowledge base (KB) information in the same memory and represent KB information in the form of KB triples, making the memory reader's reasoning on the memory more difficult, which makes the system difficult to retrieve the correct information from the memory to generate a response. Some methods introduce many manual annotations to strengthen reasoning. To reduce the use of manual annotations, while strengthening reasoning, we propose a hierarchical memory model (HM2Seq) for task-oriented systems. HM2Seq uses a hierarchical memory to separate the dialogue history and KB information into two memories and stores KB in KB rows, then we use memory rows pointer combined with an entity decoder to perform hierarchical reasoning over memory. The experimental results on two publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets confirm our hypothesis and show the outstanding performance of our HM2Seq by outperforming the baselines.

We propose “Temporal Ensemble SSDLite,” a new method for video object detection that boosts accuracy while maintaining detection speed and energy consumption. Object detection for video is becoming increasingly important as a core part of applications in robotics, autonomous driving and many other promising fields. Many of these applications require high accuracy and speed to be viable, but are used in compute and energy restricted environments. Therefore, new methods that increase the overall performance of video object detection i.e., accuracy and speed have to be developed. To increase accuracy we use ensemble, the machine learning method of combining predictions of multiple different models. The drawback of ensemble is the increased computational cost which is proportional to the number of models used. We overcome this deficit by deploying our ensemble temporally, meaning we inference with only a single model at each frame, cycling through our ensemble of models at each frame. Then, we combine the predictions for the last N frames where N is the number of models in our ensemble through non-max-suppression. This is possible because close frames in a video are extremely similar due to temporal correlation. As a result, we increase accuracy through the ensemble while only inferencing a single model at each frame and therefore keeping the detection speed. To evaluate the proposal, we measure the accuracy, detection speed and energy consumption on the Google Edge TPU, a machine learning inference accelerator, with the Imagenet VID dataset. Our results demonstrate an accuracy boost of up to 4.9% while maintaining real-time detection speed and an energy consumption of 181mJ per image.

This study tries to predict date of ear emergence of rice plants, based on cropping records over 25 years. Predicting ear emergence of rice plants is known to be crucial for practicing good harvesting quality, and has long been dependent upon old farmers who acquire skills of intuitive prediction based on their long term experiences. Facing with aging farmers, data driven approach for the prediction have been pursued. Nevertheless, they are not necessarily sufficient in terms of practical use. One of the issue is to adopt weather forecast as the feature so that the predictive performance is varied by the accuracy of the forecast. The other issue is that the performance is varied by region and the regional characteristics have not been used as the features for the prediction. With this background, we propose a feature engineering to quantify hidden regional characteristics as the feature for the prediction. Further the feature is engineered based only on observational data without any forecast. Applying our proposal to the data on the cropping records resulted in sufficient predictive performance, ±2.69days of RMSE.

In this study, edge diffraction of an electromagnetic plane wave by two-dimensional conducting wedges has been analyzed by the physical optics (PO) method for both E and H polarizations. Non-uniform and uniform asymptotic solutions of diffracted fields have been derived. A unified edge diffraction coefficient has also been derived with four cotangent functions from the conventional angle-dependent coefficients. Numerical calculations have been made to compare the results with those by other methods, such as the exact solution and the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD). A good agreement has been observed to confirm the validity of our method.

With the high development of computation requirements in Internet of Things, resource-limited edge servers usually require to cooperate to perform the tasks. Most related studies usually assume a static cooperation approach which might not suit the dynamic environment of edge computing. In this paper, we consider a dynamic cooperation approach by guiding edge servers to form coalitions dynamically. It raises two issues: 1) how to guide them to optimally form coalitions and 2) how to cope with the dynamic feature where server statuses dynamically change as the tasks are performed. The coalitional Markov decision process (CMDP) model proposed in our previous work can handle these issues well. However, its basic solution, coalitional Q-learning, cannot handle the large scale problem when the task number is large in edge computing. Our response is to propose a novel algorithm called deep coalitional Q-learning (DCQL) to solve it. To sum up, we first formulate the dynamic cooperation problem of edge servers as a CMDP: each edge server is regarded as an agent and the dynamic process is modeled as a MDP where the agents observe the current state to formulate several coalitions. Each coalition takes an action to impact the environment which correspondingly transfers to the next state to repeat the above process. Then, we propose DCQL which includes a deep neural network and so can well cope with large scale problem. DCQL can guide the edge servers to form coalitions dynamically with the target of optimizing some goal. Furthermore, we run experiments to verify our proposed algorithm's effectiveness in different settings.

Distributed edge cloud computing is an important computation infrastructure for Internet of Things (IoT) and its task offloading problem has attracted much attention recently. Most existing work on task offloading in distributed edge cloud computing usually assumes that each self-interested user owns one edge server and chooses whether to execute its tasks locally or to offload the tasks to cloud servers. The goal of each edge server is to maximize its own interest like low delay cost, which corresponds to a non-cooperative setting. However, with the strong development of smart IoT communities such as smart hospital and smart factory, all edge and cloud servers can belong to one organization like a technology company. This corresponds to a cooperative setting where the goal of the organization is to maximize the team interest in the overall edge cloud computing system. In this paper, we consider a new problem called cooperative task offloading where all edge servers try to cooperate to make the entire edge cloud computing system achieve good performance such as low delay cost and low energy cost. However, this problem is hard to solve due to two issues: 1) each edge server status dynamically changes and task arrival is uncertain; 2) each edge server can observe only its own status, which makes it hard to optimize team interest as global information is unavailable. For solving these issues, we formulate the problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) which can well handle the dynamic features under partial observations. Then, we apply a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm called value decomposition network (VDN) and propose a VDN-based task offloading algorithm (VDN-TO) to solve the problem. Specifically, the motivation is that we use a team value function to evaluate the team interest, which is then divided into individual value functions for each edge server. Then, each edge server updates its individual value function in the direction that can maximize the team interest. Finally, we choose a part of a real dataset to evaluate our algorithm and the results show the effectiveness of our algorithm in a comparison with some other existing methods.

Fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication systems employ beamforming technology using massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) to improve the reception quality and spectrum efficiency within a cell. Meanwhile, coordinated beamforming among multiple base stations is an effective approach to improving the spectrum efficiency at the cell edges, in which massive MIMO is deployed at geographically distant base stations and beamforming control is conducted in a cooperative manner. Codebook-based beamforming is a method for realizing multi-cell coordinated beamforming, in which each base station selects one of multiple beams that are predefined in a codebook. In codebook-based beamforming, it is important to design an efficient codebook that takes into account the beam allocation and the number of beams. In general, the larger the number of beams defined in a codebook, the more finely tuned the beam control can be and a greater improvement in spectrum efficiency can be expected. However, it requires a huge signal processing to optimize the beam combinations with a large number of beams by coordinated beamforming. This paper proposes a novel codebook design that efficiently assigns beam directions and widths in a vertical plane. Computer simulations showed that the proposed codebook performs as well as the conventional method while requiring fewer beam combinations.

Machine reading comprehension with multi-hop reasoning always suffers from reasoning path breaking due to the lack of world knowledge, which always results in wrong answer detection. In this paper, we analyze what knowledge the previous work lacks, e.g., dependency relations and commonsense. Based on our analysis, we propose a Multi-dimensional Knowledge enhanced Graph Network, named MKGN, which exploits specific knowledge to repair the knowledge gap in reasoning process. Specifically, our approach incorporates not only entities and dependency relations through various graph neural networks, but also commonsense knowledge by a bidirectional attention mechanism, which aims to enhance representations of both question and contexts. Besides, to make the most of multi-dimensional knowledge, we investigate two kinds of fusion architectures, i.e., in the sequential and parallel manner. Experimental results on HotpotQA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and verify that using multi-dimensional knowledge, especially dependency relations and commonsense, can indeed improve the reasoning process and contribute to correct answer detection.

Low power consumption is important in edge artificial intelligence (AI) chips, where power supply is limited. Therefore, we propose reconfigurable neural network accelerator (ReNA), an AI chip that can process both a convolutional layer and fully connected layer with the same structure by reconfiguring the circuit. In addition, we developed tools for pre-evaluation of the performance when a deep neural network (DNN) model is implemented on ReNA. With this approach, we established the flow for the implementation of DNN models on ReNA and evaluated its power consumption. ReNA achieved 1.51TOPS/W in the convolutional layer and 1.38TOPS/W overall in a VGG16 model with a 70% pruning rate.

To prove the graph relations such as the connectivity and isolation for a certified graph, a system of a graph signature and proofs has been proposed. In this system, an issuer generates a signature certifying the topology of an undirected graph, and issues the signature to a prover. The prover can prove the knowledge of the signature and the graph in the zero-knowledge, i.e., the signature and the signed graph are hidden. In addition, the prover can prove relations on the certified graph such as the connectivity and isolation between two vertexes. In the previous system, using integer commitments on RSA modulus, the graph relations are proved. However, the RSA modulus needs a longer size for each element. Furthermore, the proof size and verification cost depend on the total numbers of vertexes and edges. In this paper, we propose a graph signature and proof system, where these are computed on bilinear groups without the RSA modulus. Moreover, using a bilinear map accumulator, the prover can prove the connectivity and isolation on a graph, where the proof size and verification cost become independent from the total numbers of vertexes and edges.

The usefulness and usability of existing knowledge graphs (KGs) are mostly limited because of the incompleteness of knowledge compared to the growing number of facts about the real world. Most existing ontology-based KG completion methods are based on the closed-world assumption, where KGs are fixed. In these methods, entities and relations are defined, and new entity information cannot be easily added. In contrast, in open-world assumptions, entities and relations are not previously defined. Thus there is a vast scope to find new entity information. Despite this, knowledge acquisition under the open-world assumption is challenging because most available knowledge is in a noisy unstructured text format. Nevertheless, Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) systems can extract triples, namely (head text; relation text; tail text), from raw text without any prespecified vocabulary. Such triples contain noisy information that is not essential for KGs. Therefore, to use such triples for the KG completion task, it is necessary to identify competent triples for KGs from the extracted triple set. Here, competent triples are the triples that can contribute to add new information to the existing KGs. In this paper, we propose the Competent Triple Identification (CTID) model for KGs. We also propose two types of feature, namely syntax- and semantic-based features, to identify competent triples from a triple set extracted by a state-of-the-art OpenIE system. We investigate both types of feature and test their effectiveness. It is found that the performance of the proposed features is about 20% better compared to that of the ReVerb system in identifying competent triples.

The problem of enumerating connected induced subgraphs of a given graph is classical and studied well. It is known that connected induced subgraphs can be enumerated in constant time for each subgraph. In this paper, we focus on highly connected induced subgraphs. The most major concept of connectivity on graphs is vertex connectivity. For vertex connectivity, some enumeration problem settings and enumeration algorithms have been proposed, such as k-vertex connected spanning subgraphs. In this paper, we focus on another major concept of graph connectivity, edge-connectivity. This is motivated by the problem of finding evacuation routes in road networks. In evacuation routes, edge-connectivity is important, since highly edge-connected subgraphs ensure multiple routes between two vertices. In this paper, we consider the problem of enumerating 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs of a given graph. We present an algorithm that enumerates 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs of an input graph G with n vertices and m edges. Our algorithm enumerates all the 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs in O(n3m|SG|) time, where SG is the set of the 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs of G. Moreover, by slightly modifying the algorithm, we have a O(n3m)-delay enumeration algorithm for 2-edge-connected induced subgraphs.

With the development of IoT devices and sensors, edge computing is leading towards new services like autonomous cars and smart cities. Low-latency data access is an essential requirement for such services, and a large-capacity cache server is needed on the edge side. However, it is not realistic to build a large capacity cache server using only DRAM because DRAM is expensive and consumes substantially large power. A hybrid main memory system is promising to address this issue, in which main memory consists of DRAM and non-volatile memory. It achieves a large capacity of main memory within the power supply capabilities of current servers. In this paper, we propose Fogcached, that is, the extension of a widely-used KVS (Key-Value Store) server program (i.e., Memcached) to exploit both DRAM and non-volatile main memory (NVMM). We used Intel Optane DCPM as NVMM for its prototype. Fogcached implements a Dual-LRU (Least Recently Used) mechanism that seamlessly extends the memory management of Memcached to hybrid main memory. Fogcached reuses the segmented LRU of Memcached to manage cached objects in DRAM, adds another segmented LRU for those in DCPM and bridges the LRUs by a mechanism to automatically replace cached objects between DRAM and DCPM. Cached objects are autonomously moved between the two memory devices according to their access frequencies. Through experiments, we confirmed that Fogcached improved the peak value of a latency distribution by about 40% compared to Memcached.

Recently, edge servers located closer than the cloud have become expected for the purpose of processing the large amount of sensor data generated by IoT devices such as robots. Research has been proposed to improve responsiveness as a cache server by applying KVS (Key-Value Store) to the edge as a method for obtaining high responsiveness. Above all, a hybrid-KVS server that uses both DRAM and NVMM (Non-Volatile Main Memory) devices is expected to achieve both responsiveness and reliability. However, its effectiveness has not been verified in actual applications, and its effectiveness is not clear in terms of its relationship with the cloud. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of hybrid-KVS servers using the SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), which is a widely used application in robots and autonomous driving. It is appropriate for applying an edge server and requires responsiveness and reliability. SLAM is generally implemented on ROS (Robot Operating System) middleware and communicates with the server through ROS middleware. However, if we use hybrid-KVS on the edge with the SLAM and ROS, the communication could not be achieved since the message objects are different from the format expected by KVS. Therefore, in this research, we propose a mechanism to apply the ROS memory object to hybrid-KVS by designing and implementing the data serialization function to extend ROS. As a result of the proposed fogcached-ros and evaluation, we confirm the effectiveness of low API overhead, support for data used by SLAM, and low latency difference between the edge and cloud.

In cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) architecture, the Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) protocol imposes a strict limit on the latency between the baseband unit (BBU) pool and the remote radio head (RRH), which is a key challenge in the adoption of C-RANs. In this letter, we propose a joint edge caching and network coding strategy (ENC) in the C-RANs with multicast fronthaul to improve the performance of HARQ and thus achieve ultra-low latency in 5G cellular systems. We formulate the edge caching design as an optimization problem for maximizing caching utility so as to obtain the optimal caching time. Then, for real-time data flows with different latency constraints, we propose a scheduling policy based on network coding group (NCG) to maximize coding opportunities and thus improve the overall latency performance of multicast fronthaul transmission. We evaluate the performance of ENC by conducting simulation experiments based on NS-3. Numerical results show that ENC can efficiently reduce the delivery delay.

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical Stackelberg game based resource allocation algorithm (HGRAA) to jointly allocate the wireless and computational resources of a mobile edge computing (MEC) system. The proposed HGRAA is composed of two levels: the lower-level evolutionary game (LEG) minimizes the cost of mobile terminals (MTs), and the upper-level exact potential game (UEPG) maximizes the utility of MEC servers. At the lower-level, the MTs are divided into delay-sensitive MTs (DSMTs) and non-delay-sensitive MTs (NDSMTs) according to their different quality of service (QoS) requirements. The competition among DSMTs and NDSMTs in different service areas to share the limited available wireless and computational resources is formulated as a dynamic evolutionary game. The dynamic replicator is applied to obtain the evolutionary equilibrium so as to minimize the costs imposed on MTs. At the upper level, the exact potential game is formulated to solve the resource sharing problem among MEC servers and the resource sharing problem is transferred to nonlinear complementarity. The existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) is proved and is obtained through the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition. Simulations illustrate that substantial performance improvements such as average utility and the resource utilization of MEC servers can be achieved by applying the proposed HGRAA. Moreover, the cost of MTs is significantly lower than other existing algorithms with the increasing size of input data, and the QoS requirements of different kinds of MTs are well guaranteed in terms of average delay and transmission data rate.