Global Differential Privacy for Distributed Metaverse Healthcare Systems

Metaverse-enabled digital healthcare systems are expected to exploit an unprecedented amount of personal health data, while ensuring that sensitive or private information of individuals are not disclosed. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) techniques can be widely utilized in metaverse healthcare systems, such as virtual clinics and intelligent consultations. In such scenarios, the key challenge is that data privacy laws might not allow virtual clinics to share their medical data with other parties. Moreover, clinical AI/ML models themselves carry extensive information about the medical datasets, such that private attributes can be easily inferred by malicious actors in the metaverse (if not rigorously privatized). In this paper, inspired by the idea of "incognito mode", which has recently been developed as a promising solution to safeguard metaverse users' privacy, we propose global differential privacy for the distributed metaverse healthcare systems. In our scheme, a randomized mechanism in the format of artificial "mix-up" noise is applied to the federated clinical ML/AI models before sharing with other peers. This way, we provide an adjustable level of distributed privacy against both the malicious actors and honest-but curious metaverse servers. Our evaluations on breast cancer Wisconsin dataset (BCWD) highlight the privacy-utility trade-off (PUT) in terms of diagnosis accuracy and loss function for different levels of privacy. We also compare our private scheme with the non-private centralized setup in terms of diagnosis accuracy

Supporting Next-Generation Network Management with Intelligent Moving Devices

The concept of fixed infrastructures capable of fulfilling the requirements of moving devices in terms of connectivity and reliability has been the optimal solution for the past few decades. Today, such a solution is no longer feasible in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. All things are now connected, and a significant number of them are mobile, hence leading to connectivity and reliability issues. Connected and autonomous vehicles, in addition to more contemporary flying and moving devices such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and IoT devices, will play a significant role in next-generation networks (NGNs). Node-to-node communication will also play a key role in NGNs and will provide alternative solutions toward connectivity in many complex environments for applications such as smart transportation. With that said, today\u27s wide availability of smart moving devices provides a wider set of alternatives to autonomy for NGNs. In this article, we discuss some of the existing solutions that use connected vehicles, UAVs, and other moving intelligent devices to not only provide connectivity support, but also perform on-location data collection, anal-ysis, and decision making to enable the management of moving NGNs for intelligent services and applications. We envision a solution that is capa-ble of adapting generalized and decentralized learning on mobile devices, such as federated learning, with the advances in deep learning to support the autonomy and configurability aspects of moving NGNs

Enabling Trustworthiness in Sustainable Energy Infrastructure Through Blockchain and AI-Assisted Solutions

Network trustworthiness is a critical component of network security, as it builds on positive inter-actions, guarantees, transparency, and accountability. And with the growth of smart city services and applications, trustworthiness is becoming more important. Most current network trustworthiness solutions are insufficient, particularly for critical infrastructures where end devices are vulnerable and easily hacked. In terms of the energy sector, blockchain technology transforms all currencies into digital modes, thereby allowing one person to manage and exchange energy with others. This has drawn the attention of experts in many fields as a safe, low-cost platform to track billions of transactions in a distributed energy economy. Security and trust issues are still relatively new in the current centralized energy management scheme. With blockchain technology, a decentralized energy infrastructure enables parties to establish micro- grid trading energy transactions and apply artificial intelligence (AI). Using AI in energy systems enables machines to learn various parameters, such as predicted required amounts, excess amounts, and trusted partners. In this article, we envision a cooperative and distributed framework based on cutting-edge computing, communication, and intelligence capabilities such as AI and blockchain in the energy sector to enable secure energy trading, remote monitoring, and trustworthiness. The proposed framework can also enable secure energy trading at the edge devices and among multiple devices. There are also discussions on difficulties, issues, and design principles, as well as spotlights on some of the more popular solutions

VeNet: Hybrid Stacked Autoencoder Learning for Cooperative Edge Intelligence in IoV

Emerging applications of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) require the wireless transmission of growing amounts of data, e.g., vehicle location and sensor data, over unreliable and increasingly congested wireless links between the mobile vehicles and the Road Side Units (RSUs); also, urban areas are becoming increasingly congested with vehicle road traffic. Road traffic management and data network traffic management to address these challenges require accurate representations of the road and network traffic, which are difficult due to the wide temporal and spatial correlations in the road and network traffic. We address this representation problem by designing, implementing, and evaluating the VeNet deep learning system to exploit the wirelessly transmitted data to predict future vehicle locations and network traffic. We develop the novel VeNet hybrid learning system that employs a stacked autoencoder (AE) consisting of a central AE and multiple local AEs that jointly feed into a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). We propose a new training algorithm for the hybrid VeNet learning system. The novel VeNet hybrid learning system conducts spatial learning that accounts for the spatial and temporal correlations in the dataset gathered from the mobile vehicles. Evaluations that involve measurements with custom-made Raspberry Pi vehicles indicate that the VeNet learning model significantly reduces the required signalling network traffic and prediction errors (down to approx. three quarters) compared to existing prediction models. At the same time, VeNet reduces the energy consumption on the vehicles as well as the learning delay

On the Feasibility of Federated Learning for Neurodevelopmental Disorders: ASD Detection Use-Case

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental syndrome resulting from alterations in the embryological brain pre-birth. This disorder distinguishes its patients by special socially restricted and repetitive behavior, in addition to specific behavioral traits, deteriorating their social behavior and interaction within their community. Moreover, medical research has proved that ASD affects the facial features of its patients, making the syndrome recognizable from distinctive signs within an individual\u27s face. Given that as a motivation behind our work, we propose a novel privacy-preserving FL model, in order to predict ASD in a certain individual based on their behavioral traits or facial features, while respecting patient data privacy, as ASD data is medical and hence sensitive to leakage. After training behavioral and facial image data on Federated Machine Learning (FL) models, promising results are achieved, with 70% accuracy for prediction of ASD according to behavioral traits in a federated learning private environment, and a 62% accuracy is reached for prediction of ASD given an image of the patient\u27s face

A Hybrid Edge-assisted Machine Learning Approach for Detecting Heart Disease

Various resources are provided by cloud computing over the Internet, which enable plenty of applications to be employed to offer different services for industries. However, cloud computing due to the relying on a central server/datacenter has limitations such as high latency and response time, which are so crucial in real time applications like healthcare systems. To solve this, edge computing paradigm paves the way and provides pioneering solutions by moving the computational and storage resources closer to the end users. Edge computing by facilitating the real-time applications becomes more suitable for healthcare systems. This paper uses edge technology for detecting heart disease in patients utilizing a hybrid machine learning method. Although there exist some works in this area, there is still a need for improving the prediction accuracy. To this end, this paper proposes a meta-heuristic-based feature selection method using Black Widow Optimization (BWO) algorithm, and then, applies different classifiers on the selected features. The experimental results show that AdaBoost classifier along with BWO-based feature selection by 90.11 % accuracy outperforms other experimental methods, such as KNN, SVM, DT, and RF

Resource and Heterogeneity-aware Clients Eligibility Protocol in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a new paradigm of Machine Learning (ML) that enables on-device computation via decentralized data training. However, traditional FL algorithms impose strict requirements on the clients\u27 selection and its ratio. Moreover, the data training becomes inefficient when the client\u27s computational resources are limited. Towards this goal, we aim to extend FL, a decentralized learning framework that efficiently works with heterogeneous clients in practical industrial scenarios. To this end, we propose a Clients\u27 Eligibility Protocol (CEP), a resource-aware FL solution, for a heterogeneous environment. To this end, we use a Trusted Authority (TA) between the clients and the cloud server, which calculates the client\u27s eligibility score based on local computing resources such as bandwidth, memory, and battery life and selects the most resourceful clients for training. If a client gives a slow response or infuses an incorrect model, the TA declares that the client is ineligible for future training. Besides, the proposed CEP leverages the asynchronous FL model, which avoids a long delay in a client\u27s response. The empirical results proves that the proposed CEP gains the benefits of resource-aware clients selection and achieves 88 % and 93 % of accuracy on AlexNet and LeNet, respectively

An IoT-Based Non-invasive Diabetics Monitoring System for Crucial Conditions

Diabetes is among the major chronic disease around the world since the Glucose level could change drastically and lead to critical conditions reaching to death sometimes. To avoid this, diabetes patient are always advised to track their glucose level at least three times a day. Fingertip pricking - as the traditional method for glucose level tracking - leads patients to be distress and it might infect the skin. In some cases, tracking the glucose level might be a hard job especially if the patient is a child. In this manuscript, we present an optimum solution to this drawback by adopting the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)-based non-invasive strategies. Near-Infrared (NIR) -as an optical method of the non-invasive technique - has been adopted to help diabetic patients in continuously monitoring their blood without pain. The proposed solution will alert the patients’ parents or guardians of their situation when they about to reach critical conditions specially at night by sending alarms and notifications by Short Messages (SMS) along with the patients current location to up to three people

A Federated Learning Scheme for Neuro-developmental Disorders: Multi-Aspect ASD Detection

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neuro-developmental syndrome resulting from alterations in the embryological brain before birth. This disorder distinguishes its patients by special socially restricted and repetitive behavior in addition to specific behavioral traits. Hence, this would possibly deteriorate their social behavior among other individuals, as well as their overall interaction within their community. Moreover, medical research has proved that ASD also affects the facial characteristics of its patients, making the syndrome recognizable from distinctive signs within an individual's face. Given that as a motivation behind our work, we propose a novel privacy-preserving federated learning scheme to predict ASD in a certain individual based on their behavioral and facial features, embedding a merging process of both data features through facial feature extraction while respecting patient data privacy. After training behavioral and facial image data on federated machine learning models, promising results are achieved, with 70\% accuracy for the prediction of ASD according to behavioral traits in a federated learning environment, and a 62\% accuracy is reached for the prediction of ASD given an image of the patient's face. Then, we test the behavior of regular as well as federated ML on our merged data, behavioral and facial, where a 65\% accuracy is achieved with the regular logistic regression model and 63\% accuracy with the federated learning model

A Comparative Study of AI-Based Intrusion Detection Techniques in Critical Infrastructures

Volunteer computing uses Internet-connected devices (laptops, PCs, smart devices, etc.), in which their owners volunteer them as storage and computing power resources, has become an essential mechanism for resource management in numerous applications. The growth of the volume and variety of data traffic on the Internet leads to concerns on the robustness of cyberphysical systems especially for critical infrastructures. Therefore, the implementation of an efficient Intrusion Detection System for gathering such sensory data has gained vital importance. In this article, we present a comparative study of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven intrusion detection systems for wirelessly connected sensors that track crucial applications. Specifically, we present an in-depth analysis of the use of machine learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning solutions to recognise intrusive behavior in the collected traffic. We evaluate the proposed mechanisms by using KDD\u2799 as real attack dataset in our simulations. Results present the performance metrics for three different IDSs, namely the Adaptively Supervised and Clustered Hybrid IDS (ASCH-IDS), Restricted Boltzmann Machine-based Clustered IDS (RBC-IDS), and Q-learning based IDS (Q-IDS), to detect malicious behaviors. We also present the performance of different reinforcement learning techniques such as State-Action-Reward-State-Action Learning (SARSA) and the Temporal Difference learning (TD). Through simulations, we show that Q-IDS performs with detection rate while SARSA-IDS and TD-IDS perform at the order of