Designing Human-Centered Collective Intelligence

Human-Centered Collective Intelligence (HCCI) is an emergent research area that seeks to bring together major research areas like machine learning, statistical modeling, information retrieval, market research, and software engineering to address challenges pertaining to deriving intelligent insights and solutions through the collaboration of several intelligent sensors, devices and data sources. An archetypal contextual CI scenario might be concerned with deriving affect-driven intelligence through multimodal emotion detection sources in a bid to determine the likability of one movie trailer over another. On the other hand, the key tenets to designing robust and evolutionary software and infrastructure architecture models to address cross-cutting quality concerns is of keen interest in the “Cloud” age of today. Some of the key quality concerns of interest in CI scenarios span the gamut of security and privacy, scalability, performance, fault-tolerance, and reliability. I present recent advances in CI system design with a focus on highlighting optimal solutions for the aforementioned cross-cutting concerns. I also describe a number of design challenges and a framework that I have determined to be critical to designing CI systems. With inspiration from machine learning, computational advertising, ubiquitous computing, and sociable robotics, this literature incorporates theories and concepts from various viewpoints to empower the collective intelligence engine, ZOEI, to discover affective state and emotional intent across multiple mediums. The discerned affective state is used in recommender systems among others to support content personalization. I dive into the design of optimal architectures that allow humans and intelligent systems to work collectively to solve complex problems. I present an evaluation of various studies that leverage the ZOEI framework to design collective intelligence

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography, distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful privacy-preserving decentralized systems

Evolutionary Service Composition and Personalization Ecosystem for Elderly Care

Current demographic trends suggest that people are living longer, while the ageing process entails many necessities, calling for care services tailored to the individual senior’s needs and life style. Personalized provision of care services usually involves a number of stakeholders, including relatives, friends, caregivers, professional assistance organizations, enterprises, and other support entities. Traditional Information and Communication Technology based care and assistance services for the elderly have been mainly focused on the development of isolated and generic services, considering a single service provider, and excessively featuring a techno-centric approach. In contrast, advances on collaborative networks for elderly care suggest the integration of services from multiple providers, encouraging collaboration as a way to provide better personalized services. This approach requires a support system to manage the personalization process and allow ranking the {service, provider} pairs. An additional issue is the problem of service evolution, as individual’s care needs are not static over time. Consequently, the care services need to evolve accordingly to keep the elderly’s requirements satisfied. In accordance with these requirements, an Elderly Care Ecosystem (ECE) framework, a Service Composition and Personalization Environment (SCoPE), and a Service Evolution Environment (SEvol) are proposed. The ECE framework provides the context for the personalization and evolution methods. The SCoPE method is based on the match between the customer´s profile and the available {service, provider} pairs to identify suitable services and corresponding providers to attend the needs. SEvol is a method to build an adaptive and evolutionary system based on the MAPE-K methodology supporting the solution evolution to cope with the elderly's new life stages. To demonstrate the feasibility, utility and applicability of SCoPE and SEvol, a number of methods and algorithms are presented, and illustrative scenarios are introduced in which {service, provider} pairs are ranked based on a multidimensional assessment method. Composition strategies are based on customer’s profile and requirements, and the evolutionary solution is determined considering customer’s inputs and evolution plans. For the ECE evaluation process the following steps are adopted: (i) feature selection and software prototype development; (ii) detailing the ECE framework validation based on applicability and utility parameters; (iii) development of a case study illustrating a typical scenario involving an elderly and her care needs; and (iv) performing a survey based on a modified version of the technology acceptance model (TAM), considering three contexts: Technological, Organizational and Collaborative environment

Review and analysis of networking challenges in cloud computing

Cloud Computing offers virtualized computing, storage, and networking resources, over the Internet, to organizations and individual users in a completely dynamic way. These cloud resources are cheaper, easier to manage, and more elastic than sets of local, physical, ones. This encourages customers to outsource their applications and services to the cloud. The migration of both data and applications outside the administrative domain of customers into a shared environment imposes transversal, functional problems across distinct platforms and technologies. This article provides a contemporary discussion of the most relevant functional problems associated with the current evolution of Cloud Computing, mainly from the network perspective. The paper also gives a concise description of Cloud Computing concepts and technologies. It starts with a brief history about cloud computing, tracing its roots. Then, architectural models of cloud services are described, and the most relevant products for Cloud Computing are briefly discussed along with a comprehensive literature review. The paper highlights and analyzes the most pertinent and practical network issues of relevance to the provision of high-assurance cloud services through the Internet, including security. Finally, trends and future research directions are also presented

A multi-dimensional trust-model for dynamic, scalable and resources-efficient trust-management in social internet of things

L'internet des Objets (IoT) est un paradigme qui a rendu les objets du quotidien, intelligents en leur offrant la possibilité de se connecter à Internet, de communiquer et d'interagir. L'intégration de la composante sociale dans l'IoT a donné naissance à l'Internet des Objets Social (SIoT), qui a permis de surmonter diverse problématiques telles que l'interopérabilité et la découverte de ressources. Dans ce type d'environnement, les participants rivalisent afin d'offrir une variété de services attrayants. Certains d'entre eux ont recours à des comportements malveillants afin de propager des services de mauvaise qualité. Ils lancent des attaques, dites de confiance, et brisent les fonctionnalités de base du système. Plusieurs travaux de la littérature ont abordé ce problème et ont proposé différents modèles de confiance. La majorité d'entre eux ont tenté de réappliquer des modèles de confiance conçus pour les réseaux sociaux ou les réseaux pair-à-pair. Malgré les similitudes entre ces types de réseaux, les réseaux SIoT présentent des particularités spécifiques. Dans les SIoT, nous avons différents types d'entités qui collaborent, à savoir des humains, des dispositifs et des services. Les dispositifs peuvent présenter des capacités de calcul et de stockage très limitées et leur nombre peut atteindre des millions. Le réseau qui en résulte est complexe et très dynamique et les répercussions des attaques de confiance peuvent être plus importantes. Nous proposons un nouveau modèle de confiance, multidimensionnel, dynamique et scalable, spécifiquement conçu pour les environnements SIoT. Nous proposons, en premier lieu, des facteurs permettant de décrire le comportement des trois types de nœuds impliqués dans les réseaux SIoT et de quantifier le degré de confiance selon les trois dimensions de confiance résultantes. Nous proposons, ensuite, une méthode d'agrégation basée sur l'apprentissage automatique et l'apprentissage profond qui permet d'une part d'agréger les facteurs proposés pour obtenir un score de confiance permettant de classer les nœuds, mais aussi de détecter les types d'attaques de confiance et de les contrer. Nous proposons, ensuite, une méthode de propagation hybride qui permet de diffuser les valeurs de confiance dans le réseau, tout en remédiant aux inconvénients des méthodes centralisée et distribuée. Cette méthode permet d'une part d'assurer la scalabilité et le dynamisme et d'autre part, de minimiser la consommation des ressources. Les expérimentations appliquées sur des de données synthétiques nous ont permis de valider le modèle proposé.The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that has made everyday objects intelligent by giving them the ability to connect to the Internet, communicate and interact. The integration of the social component in the IoT has given rise to the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), which has overcome various issues such as interoperability, navigability and resource/service discovery. In this type of environment, participants compete to offer a variety of attractive services. Some of them resort to malicious behavior to propagate poor quality services. They launch so-called Trust-Attacks (TA) and break the basic functionality of the system. Several works in the literature have addressed this problem and have proposed different trust-models. Most of them have attempted to adapt and reapply trust models designed for traditional social networks or peer-to-peer networks. Despite the similarities between these types of networks, SIoT ones have specific particularities. In SIoT, there are different types of entities that collaborate: humans, devices, and services. Devices can have very limited computing and storage capacities, and their number can be as high as a few million. The resulting network is complex and highly dynamic, and the impact of Trust-Attacks can be more compromising. In this work, we propose a Multidimensional, Dynamic, Resources-efficient and Scalable trust-model that is specifically designed for SIoT environments. We, first, propose features to describe the behavior of the three types of nodes involved in SIoT networks and to quantify the degree of trust according to the three resulting Trust-Dimensions. We propose, secondly, an aggregation method based on Supervised Machine-Learning and Deep Learning that allows, on the one hand, to aggregate the proposed features to obtain a trust score allowing to rank the nodes, but also to detect the different types of Trust-Attacks and to counter them. We then propose a hybrid propagation method that allows spreading trust values in the network, while overcoming the drawbacks of centralized and distributed methods. The proposed method ensures scalability and dynamism on the one hand, and minimizes resource consumption (computing and storage), on the other. Experiments applied to synthetic data have enabled us to validate the resilience and performance of the proposed model

Incentive Mechanisms for Participatory Sensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Participatory sensing is a powerful paradigm which takes advantage of smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. Given that participatory sensing systems rely completely on the users' willingness to submit up-to-date and accurate information, it is paramount to effectively incentivize users' active and reliable participation. In this paper, we survey existing literature on incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems. In particular, we present a taxonomy of existing incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems, which are subsequently discussed in depth by comparing and contrasting different approaches. Finally, we discuss an agenda of open research challenges in incentivizing users in participatory sensing.Comment: Updated version, 4/25/201

Game theory for cooperation in multi-access edge computing

Cooperative strategies amongst network players can improve network performance and spectrum utilization in future networking environments. Game Theory is very suitable for these emerging scenarios, since it models high-complex interactions among distributed decision makers. It also finds the more convenient management policies for the diverse players (e.g., content providers, cloud providers, edge providers, brokers, network providers, or users). These management policies optimize the performance of the overall network infrastructure with a fair utilization of their resources. This chapter discusses relevant theoretical models that enable cooperation amongst the players in distinct ways through, namely, pricing or reputation. In addition, the authors highlight open problems, such as the lack of proper models for dynamic and incomplete information scenarios. These upcoming scenarios are associated to computing and storage at the network edge, as well as, the deployment of large-scale IoT systems. The chapter finalizes by discussing a business model for future networks.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio