We propose a novel approach to effectively detect cloned identities of social-sensor cloud service providers (i.e. social media users) in the face of incomplete non-privacy-sensitive profile data. Named ICD-IPD, the proposed approach first extracts account pairs with similar usernames or screen names from a given set of user accounts collected from a social media. It then learns a multi-view representation associated with a given account and extracts two categories of features for every single account. These two categories of features include profile and Weighted Generalised Canonical Correlation Analysis (WGCCA)-based features that may potentially contain missing values. To counter the impact of such missing values, a missing value imputer will next impute the missing values of the aforementioned profile and WGCCA-based features. After that, the proposed approach further extracts two categories of augmented features for each account pair identified previously, namely, 1) similarity and 2) differences-based features. Finally, these features are concatenated and fed into a Light Gradient Boosting Machine classifier to detect identity cloning. We evaluated and compared the proposed approach against the existing state-of-the-art identity cloning approaches and other machine or deep learning models atop a real-world dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and models in terms of Precision, Recall and F1-score.

We propose a data-driven distributed machine learning approach to scalably predict the trustworthiness of homogeneous IoT services in heterogeneous Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-based IoT systems. The proposed approach formulates training distributed trust prediction models within an MEC-based IoT system as a Network Lasso problem. We then introduce a variant of Stochastic Alternating Method of Multipliers framework (S-ADMM) enriched with the ability for feature selection at each MEC layer. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we carried out a comprehensive evaluation on three real-world datasets adjusted to exhibit the context-dependent trust information accumulated in MEC environments within a given MEC topology. The experimental results affirmed the effectiveness of our approach and its suitability to predict trustworthiness of IoT services in MEC-based IoT systems.

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems generate trust information in a real-time and distributed manner. Predicting trustworthiness of IoT services in such an MEC environment requires new prediction strategies that cater for the aforementioned characteristics of trust information. More importantly, it is imperative to investigate how the real-time trust information could be effectively integrated into trust prediction strategies in order to capture the ever-evolving nature of trustworthiness of IoT services. In turn, such a strategy allows IoT service consumers to derive more relevant and accurate trust-based decisions. To that end, our work models trust prediction in MEC-based IoT systems as an online regularized finite-sum problem in a distributed MEC environment with a given MEC topology. We then adopt the Online Alternating Direction Method (OADM) to effectively train trust prediction models in parallel over the distributed MEC environment. OADM allows splitting the aforementioned finite-sum problem into multiple sub-problems that correspond to different local MEC environments. These sub-problems can then be solved iteratively within each local MEC environment by using the local trust data therein. This can avoid the movement of data across the core networks of mobile network providers. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed method.

Social sensing is a paradigm that allows crowd-sourcing data from humans and devices. This sensed data (e.g. social network posts) can be hosted in social-sensor clouds (i.e. social networks) and delivered as social-sensor cloud services (SocSen services). These services can be identified by their providers' social network accounts. Attackers intrude social-sensor clouds by cloning SocSen service providers' user profiles to deceive social-sensor cloud users. We propose a novel unsupervised SocSen service provider identity cloning detection approach, NPS-AntiClone, to prevent the detrimental outcomes caused by such identity deception. This approach leverages non-privacy-sensitive user profile data gathered from social networks to perform cloned identity detection. It consists of three main components: 1) a multi-view account representation model, 2) an embedding learning model and 3) a prediction model. The multi-view account representation model forms three different views for a given identity, namely a post view, a network view and a profile attribute view. The embedding learning model learns a single embedding from the generated multi-view representation using Weighted Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis. Finally, NPS-AntiClone calculates the cosine similarity between two accounts' embedding to predict whether these two accounts contain a cloned account and its victim. We evaluated our proposed approach using a real-world dataset. The results showed that NPS-AntiClone significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art identity cloning detection techniques and machine learning approaches.

Predictive analytics in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) based Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a high demand in many real-world applications. A prediction problem in an MEC-based IoT environment typically corresponds to a collection of tasks with each task solved in a specific MEC environment based on the data accumulated locally, which can be regarded as a Multi-task Learning (MTL) problem. However, the heterogeneity of the data (non-IIDness) accumulated across different MEC environments challenges the application of general MTL techniques in such a setting. Federated MTL (FMTL) has recently emerged as an attempt to address this issue. Besides FMTL, there exists another powerful but under-exploited distributed machine learning technique, called Network Lasso (NL), which is inherently related to FMTL but has its own unique features. In this paper, we made an in-depth evaluation and comparison of these two techniques on three distinct IoT datasets representing real-world application scenarios. Experimental results revealed that NL outperformed FMTL in MEC-based IoT environments in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency.

We propose a distributed machine-learning architecture to predict trustworthiness of sensor services in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) based Internet of Things (IoT) services, which aligns well with the goals of MEC and requirements of modern IoT systems. The proposed machine-learning architecture models training a distributed trust prediction model over a topology of MEC-environments as a Network Lasso problem, which allows simultaneous clustering and optimization on large-scale networked-graphs. We then attempt to solve it using Alternate Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) in a way that makes it suitable for MEC-based IoT systems. We present analytical and simulation results to show the validity and efficiency of the proposed solution.