With the rapid advancement of intelligent driving technologies, many advanced driving applications require deterministic, low-latency, and high-bandwidth transmissions. Data Distribution Service (DDS) and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) are the core technologies to meet the low-latency requirements of in-vehicle systems due to their real-time and deterministic trans-mission characteristics. However, the deep integration of DDS and TSN introduces new challenges for end-to-end application-level coordinated scheduling. To address these challenges in architectures where distributed sensor networks coexist with centralized computing resources, this paper proposes a joint task and network scheduling framework based on a multi-core Central Computing Platform (CCP). By constructing a time-dependency chain model spanning sensors, computing units, and actuators, we model application and communication tasks as a task tree compatible with the DDS publish–subscribe mechanism. Scheduling constraints from both application end systems and TSN are formulated and solved using Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), thereby ensuring full-link Quality of Service (QoS) from environmental perception to execution control. Simulation experiments conducted under different optimization objectives demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the scheduling problem of time-dependent chains while satisfying strict QoS requirements.

Drones are sophisticated machines that can hover over extreme locations, conduct aerial surveillance, collect surveillance data, and disseminate it to the distributed edge for processing and analysis. The distributed edge deploys advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models to detect any unwarranted activity or object based on surveillance data. However, these lightweight and low-power unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may experience faults due to unprecedented workload when deployed in extreme surveillance domains. In this article, we have designed an AI framework to detect any safety concerns with drones deployed for aerial surveillance in extreme locations based on real-time drone critical parameters. We also propose a MapReduce-based object recognition and classification module to process large-scale images captured by drones efficiently. However, conventional AI systems behave like black box systems, leading to a lack of trust and transparency. Thus, we convert the traditional framework of AI into an explainable edge AI framework using Shapley additive explanations (SHAPs) that opens Pandora’s black box. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in detecting drone safety concerns through explainable health status tracking alongside ensuring an effective object detection mechanism.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promotes the deep integration of new-generation communication technologies and industrial ecology. However, the popularity of computing and the proliferation of equipment scale make it a meaningful challenge to provide reasonable resource allocation for task offloading. Therefore, this article proposes a novel two-stage coordinated, distributed, and online multidomain virtual network embedding algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-assisted federated learning (FL) for task offloading in the IIoT. We model the IIoT as a dynamic multidomain structure and deploy local DRL servers in each factory domain combined with the distributed paradigm of FL to reduce the local resource fragmentation. Through local and global cooperation, the IIoT environment is controlled in a fine and macroscopic manner. In addition, the mechanisms of FL ensure the privacy of participant data. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation demonstrates the clear superiority of the proposed algorithm, which improves the long-term offloading revenue, resource utilization, and task offloading success rate by average 17.66%, 5.97%, and 4.52% compared to baselines, respectively.

Microwave Power Transfer (MPT) is a promising technology to charge sensor devices (SDs) wirelessly in wireless sensor networks, and Cloud Computing (CC) can significantly promote task processing capacity of SDs. However, the propagation loss can dramatically influence the harvested energy and computation performance. So, for wireless sensor networks, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted cloud wireless charging system with the cooperation of the cloud server and the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). First, the UAV acts as the energy transmitter, and we design a quantitative charging scheme according to the energy-aware of SDs’ battery capacity. Second, the cloud server processes the tasks uploaded by SDs with the cooperation of the UAV, and we consider the communication connection between the cloud server and the UAV. Third, we propose the joint resource-trajectory optimization to reduce the energy consumption of UAVs. We put forward the Chaotically Adaptive Beetle Swarm Optimization Based on Cauchy Mutation (CABSOC) assisted block coordinate descent algorithm for addressing this non-convex problem. Numerical results indicate that the proposed solution can significantly improve the energy performance of the UAV. And the energy consumption is reduced by 11% compared with the solution with network function virtualization (NFV).

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is proposed in recent years to satisfy the strict performance requirements of time-sensitive traffic in a growing number of emerging applications. Even though several traffic scheduling algorithms have been standardized for TSN to pursue this goal, time-sensitive flows may not be forwarded as planned and thus fail to achieve the expected performance in real networks. The fundamental cause lies in the fact that static offline planning cannot adapt to the intrinsic dynamic factors in TSN (e.g., time-synchronization error) at runtime. Hence, next-generation TSN will benefit from a closed-loop design where a performance monitoring system provides feedback of real-time packet-forwarding information. In our research, TSN-Peeper, a light-weight, fast-response and full-coverage TSN performance monitoring system, is designed and evaluated. This paper describes its architecture design and data collection mechanisms that enable timely identification and collection of packet-forwarding misbehavior at low-cost in TSN. TSN-Peeper offloads the misbehavior identification in the switch to relieve the burden on the controller and network bandwidth. To reduce the interruption frequency to the controller, it uses probe packets to collect misbehavior information in aggregation with optimized path planning. To realize controllable reporting delays, it optimizes the sending moments of probe packets according to the flow settings. Experimental results verify that TSN-Peeper offers fast response with low cost while providing full coverage and being scalable.

Human parsing is for pixel-wise human semantic understanding. As human bodies are underlying hierarchically structured, how to model human structures is the central theme in this task. Focusing on this, we seek to simultaneously exploit the representational capacity of deep graph networks and the hierarchical human structures. In particular, we provide following two contributions. First, three kinds of part relations, i.e., decomposition, composition, and dependency, are, for the first time, completely and precisely described by three distinct relation networks. This is in stark contrast to previous parsers, which only focus on a portion of the relations and adopt a type-agnostic relation modeling strategy. More expressive relation information can be captured by explicitly imposing the parameters in the relation networks to satisfy the specific characteristics of different relations. Second, previous parsers largely ignore the need for an approximation algorithm over the loopy human hierarchy, while we instead address an iterative reasoning process, by assimilating generic message-passing networks with their edge-typed, convolutional counterparts. With these efforts, our parser lays the foundation for more sophisticated and flexible human relation patterns of reasoning. Comprehensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that our parser sets a new state-of-the-art on each.

The State-of-charge (SOC) is a critical parameter for the battery, which is a hot research in areas such as new energy vehicles, but the research on lead-acid batteries as backup power in Uninterrupted Power System in data center has rarely been done. In this paper, for the first time, a model named Poly-Nernst, which is a combination of polynomial model and Nernst battery model, is proposed to estimate the SOC of the battery working in data center. Extended Kalman Filtering method is adopted for SOC online simulation, whose estimating results are compared with traditional Ah method. The simulation on the real UPS shows that the EKF estimating error is much smaller than that of Ah method with no accumulated integral error. To improve the adaptive capability of established the Poly-Nernst model, multi-model adaptive estimation based on EKF algorithm is designed and the experimental results show the MMAE model estimation is much better than any one of a single EKF estimation. To balance the model complexity and estimating accuracy, the experimental results show that a 3-model EKF estimation model is suggested to be appropriate. This SOC estimating method provides technical instructions for the maintenance of the battery system in data center.

Determining the biological functions of proteins is one of the key challenges in the post-genomic era. The rapidly accumulated large volumes of proteomic and genomic data drives to develop computational models for automatically predicting protein function in large scale. Recent approaches focus on integrating multiple heterogeneous data sources and they often get better results than methods that use single data source alone. In this paper, we investigate how to integrate multiple biological data sources with the biological knowledge, i.e., Gene Ontology (GO), for protein function prediction. We propose a method, called SimNet, to Semantically integrate multiple functional association Networks derived from heterogenous data sources. SimNet firstly utilizes GO annotations of proteins to capture the semantic similarity between proteins and introduces a semantic kernel based on the similarity. Next, SimNet constructs a composite network, obtained as a weighted summation of individual networks, and aligns the network with the kernel to get the weights assigned to individual networks. Then, it applies a network-based classifier on the composite network to predict protein function. Experiment results on heterogenous proteomic data sources of Yeast, Human, Mouse, and Fly show that, SimNet not only achieves better (or comparable) results than other related competitive approaches, but also takes much less time. The Matlab codes of SimNet are available at https://sites.google.com/site/guoxian85/simnet.

Blur detection in a single image is challenging especially when the blur is spatially-varying. Developing discriminative blur features is an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new kernel-specific feature vector consisting of the information of a blur kernel and the information of an image patch. Specifically, the kernel specific-feature is composed of the multiplication of the variance of filtered kernel and the variance of filtered patch gradients. The feature origins from a blur-classification theorem and its discrimination can also be intuitively explained. To make the kernel-specific features useful for real applications, we build a pool of kernels consisting of motion-blur kernels, defocus-blur (out-of-focus) kernels, and their combinations. By extracting such features followed by the classifiers, the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art blur detection method. Experimental results on public databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

BACKGROUND: Protein function prediction is to assign biological or biochemical functions to proteins, and it is a challenging computational problem characterized by several factors: (1) the number of function labels (annotations) is large; (2) a protein may be associated with multiple labels; (3) the function labels are structured in a hierarchy; and (4) the labels are incomplete. Current predictive models often assume that the labels of the labeled proteins are complete, i.e. no label is missing. But in real scenarios, we may be aware of only some hierarchical labels of a protein, and we may not know whether additional ones are actually present. The scenario of incomplete hierarchical labels, a challenging and practical problem, is seldom studied in protein function prediction. RESULTS: In this paper, we propose an algorithm to Predict protein functions using Incomplete hierarchical LabeLs (PILL in short). PILL takes into account the hierarchical and the flat taxonomy similarity between function labels, and defines a Combined Similarity (ComSim) to measure the correlation between labels. PILL estimates the missing labels for a protein based on ComSim and the known labels of the protein, and uses a regularization to exploit the interactions between proteins for function prediction. PILL is shown to outperform other related techniques in replenishing the missing labels and in predicting the functions of completely unlabeled proteins on publicly available PPI datasets annotated with MIPS Functional Catalogue and Gene Ontology labels. CONCLUSION: The empirical study shows that it is important to consider the incomplete annotation for protein function prediction. The proposed method (PILL) can serve as a valuable tool for protein function prediction using incomplete labels. The Matlab code of PILL is available upon request.

BACKGROUND: High-throughput bio-techniques accumulate ever-increasing amount of genomic and proteomic data. These data are far from being functionally characterized, despite the advances in gene (or gene's product proteins) functional annotations. Due to experimental techniques and to the research bias in biology, the regularly updated functional annotation databases, i.e., the Gene Ontology (GO), are far from being complete. Given the importance of protein functions for biological studies and drug design, proteins should be more comprehensively and precisely annotated. RESULTS: We proposed downward Random Walks (dRW) to predict missing (or new) functions of partially annotated proteins. Particularly, we apply downward random walks with restart on the GO directed acyclic graph, along with the available functions of a protein, to estimate the probability of missing functions. To further boost the prediction accuracy, we extend dRW to dRW-kNN. dRW-kNN computes the semantic similarity between proteins based on the functional annotations of proteins; it then predicts functions based on the functions estimated by dRW, together with the functions associated with the k nearest proteins. Our proposed models can predict two kinds of missing functions: (i) the ones that are missing for a protein but associated with other proteins of interest; (ii) the ones that are not available for any protein of interest, but exist in the GO hierarchy. Experimental results on the proteins of Yeast and Human show that dRW and dRW-kNN can replenish functions more accurately than other related approaches, especially for sparse functions associated with no more than 10 proteins. CONCLUSION: The empirical study shows that the semantic similarity between GO terms and the ontology hierarchy play important roles in predicting protein function. The proposed dRW and dRW-kNN can serve as tools for replenishing functions of partially annotated proteins.

In this paper, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm (HEA) based on the approaches of the evolutionary algorithm and a local search (LS) is proposed to determine the gene signatures for predicting histologic response of chemotherapy on osteosarcoma patients, which is one of the most common malignant bone tumor in children. The HEA consists of a population of individuals but the evolution of individuals is conducted by a LS, rather than the crossover and mutation used in the traditional evolutionary algorithms. The proposed HEA can simultaneously optimize the feature subset and the classifier through a common solution coding mechanism. Experimental results indicate that HEA can obtain more accurate signatures than the other existing approaches in determining chemoresponse for osteosarcoma.

A number of different approaches based on high-throughput data have been developed for cancer classification. However, these methods often ignore the underlying correlation between the expression levels of different biomarkers which are related to cancer. From a biological viewpoint, the modeling of these abnormal associations between biomarkers will play an important role in cancer classification. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the concept of Biomarker Association Networks (BAN) for cancer classification. The BAN is modeled as a neural network, which can capture the associations between the biomarkers by minimizing an energy function. Based on the BAN, a new cancer classification approach is developed. We validate the proposed approach on four publicly available biomarker expression datasets. The derived Biomarker Association Networks are observed to be significantly different for different cancer classes, which help reveal the underlying deviant biomarker association patterns responsible for different cancer types. Extensive comparisons show the superior performance of the BAN-based classification approach over several conventional classification methods.