A unified framework for data integrity protection in people-centric smart cities

© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. With the rapid increase in urbanisation, the concept of smart cities has attracted considerable attention. By leveraging emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and cloud computing, smart cities have the potential to improve various indicators of residents’ quality of life. However, threats to data integrity may affect the delivery of such benefits, especially in the IoT environment where most devices are inherently dynamic and have limited resources. Prior work has focused on ensuring integrity of data in a piecemeal manner and covering only some parts of the smart city ecosystem. In this paper, we address integrity of data from an end-to-end perspective, i.e., from the data source to the data consumer. We propose a holistic framework for ensuring integrity of data in smart cities that covers the entire data lifecycle. Our framework is founded on three fundamental concepts, namely, secret sharing, fog computing and blockchain. We provide a detailed description of various components of the framework and also utilize smart healthcare as use case

Spatio-temporal graph convolutional and recurrent networks for citywide passenger demand prediction

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. Online ride-sharing platforms have become a critical part of the urban transportation system. Accurately recommending hotspots to drivers in such platforms is essential to help drivers find passengers and improve users' experience, which calls for efficient passenger demand prediction strategy. However, predicting multi-step passenger demand is challenging due to its high dynamicity, complex dependencies along spatial and temporal dimensions, and sensitivity to external factors (meteorological data and time meta). We propose an end-to-end deep learning framework to address the above problems. Our model comprises three components in pipeline: 1) a cascade graph convolutional recurrent neural network to accurately extract the spatial-temporal correlations within citywide historical passenger demand data; 2) two multi-layer LSTM networks to represent the external meteorological data and time meta, respectively; 3) an encoder-decoder module to fuse the above two parts and decode the representation to predict over multi-steps into the future. The experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model can achieve accurate prediction and outperform the most discriminative state-of-the-art methods

Modern computing: Vision and challenges

Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by technological advancements, computer systems, far from being static, have been continuously evolving and adapting to cover multifaceted societal niches. This has led to new paradigms such as cloud, fog, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), which offer fresh economic and creative opportunities. Nevertheless, this rapid change poses complex research challenges, especially in maximizing potential and enhancing functionality. As such, to maintain an economical level of performance that meets ever-tighter requirements, one must understand the drivers of new model emergence and expansion, and how contemporary challenges differ from past ones. To that end, this article investigates and assesses the factors influencing the evolution of computing systems, covering established systems and architectures as well as newer developments, such as serverless computing, quantum computing, and on-device AI on edge devices. Trends emerge when one traces technological trajectory, which includes the rapid obsolescence of frameworks due to business and technical constraints, a move towards specialized systems and models, and varying approaches to centralized and decentralized control. This comprehensive review of modern computing systems looks ahead to the future of research in the field, highlighting key challenges and emerging trends, and underscoring their importance in cost-effectively driving technological progress

Genome-Wide Identification of Transcription Start Sites, Promoters and Transcription Factor Binding Sites in E. coli

Despite almost 40 years of molecular genetics research in Escherichia coli a major fraction of its Transcription Start Sites (TSSs) are still unknown, limiting therefore our understanding of the regulatory circuits that control gene expression in this model organism. RegulonDB (http://regulondb.ccg.unam.mx/) is aimed at integrating the genetic regulatory network of E. coli K12 as an entirely bioinformatic project up till now. In this work, we extended its aims by generating experimental data at a genome scale on TSSs, promoters and regulatory regions. We implemented a modified 5′ RACE protocol and an unbiased High Throughput Pyrosequencing Strategy (HTPS) that allowed us to map more than 1700 TSSs with high precision. From this collection, about 230 corresponded to previously reported TSSs, which helped us to benchmark both our methodologies and the accuracy of the previous mapping experiments. The other ca 1500 TSSs mapped belong to about 1000 different genes, many of them with no assigned function. We identified promoter sequences and type of σ factors that control the expression of about 80% of these genes. As expected, the housekeeping σ70 was the most common type of promoter, followed by σ38. The majority of the putative TSSs were located between 20 to 40 nucleotides from the translational start site. Putative regulatory binding sites for transcription factors were detected upstream of many TSSs. For a few transcripts, riboswitches and small RNAs were found. Several genes also had additional TSSs within the coding region. Unexpectedly, the HTPS experiments revealed extensive antisense transcription, probably for regulatory functions. The new information in RegulonDB, now with more than 2400 experimentally determined TSSs, strengthens the accuracy of promoter prediction, operon structure, and regulatory networks and provides valuable new information that will facilitate the understanding from a global perspective the complex and intricate regulatory network that operates in E. coli

Long non-coding RNAs: spatial amplifiers that control nuclear structure and gene expression

Over the past decade, it has become clear that mammalian genomes encode thousands of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), many of which are now implicated in diverse biological processes. Recent work studying the molecular mechanisms of several key examples — including Xist, which orchestrates X chromosome inactivation — has provided new insights into how lncRNAs can control cellular functions by acting in the nucleus. Here we discuss emerging mechanistic insights into how lncRNAs can regulate gene expression by coordinating regulatory proteins, localizing to target loci and shaping three-dimensional (3D) nuclear organization. We explore these principles to highlight biological challenges in gene regulation, in which lncRNAs are well-suited to perform roles that cannot be carried out by DNA elements or protein regulators alone, such as acting as spatial amplifiers of regulatory signals in the nucleus

StG2seq: Spatial-temporal graph to sequence model for multi-step passenger demand forecasting

© 2019 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. Multi-step passenger demand forecasting is a crucial task in on-demand vehicle sharing services. However, predicting passenger demand over multiple time horizons is generally challenging due to the nonlinear and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies. In this work, we propose to model multi-step citywide passenger demand prediction based on a graph and use a hierarchical graph convolutional structure to capture both spatial and temporal correlations simultaneously. Our model consists of three parts: 1) a long-term encoder to encode historical passenger demands; 2) a short-term encoder to derive the next-step prediction for generating multi-step prediction; 3) an attention-based output module to model the dynamic temporal and channel-wise information. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our model consistently outperforms many baseline methods and state-of-the-art models