Edge inference is a technology that enables real-time data processing and analysis on clients near the data source. To ensure compliance with the Service-Level Objectives (SLOs), such as a 30% latency reduction target, caching is usually adopted to reduce redundant computations in inference tasks on stream data. Due to task and data correlations, sharing cache information among clients can improve the inference performance. However, the non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) nature of data across different clients and the long-tail distributions, where some classes have significantly more samples than others, will reduce cache hit ratios and increase latency. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose an efficient inference framework, CoCa, which leverages a multi-client collaborative caching mechanism to accelerate edge inference. On the client side, the model is pre-set with multiple cache layers to achieve a quick inference. During inference, the model performs sequential lookups at cache layers activated by the edge server. On the server side, CoCa uses a two-dimensional global cache to periodically aggregate information from clients, mitigating the effects of non-IID data. For client cache allocation, CoCa first evaluates the importance of classes based on how frequently and recently their samples have been accessed. CoCa then selects frequently recurring classes to address long-tail distribution challenges. Finally, CoCa dynamically activates cache layers to balance lookup overhead and accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoCa reduces inference latency by 23.0% to 45.2% on the VGG, ResNet and AST models with a slight loss of accuracy.

Data generated at the network edge can be processed locally by leveraging the emerging technology of Federated Learning (FL). However, non-IID local data will lead to degradation of model accuracy and the heterogeneity of edge nodes inevitably slows down model training efficiency. Moreover, to avoid the potential communication bottleneck in the parameter-server-based FL, we concentrate on the Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) that performs distributed model training in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) manner. To address these challenges, we propose an asynchronous DFL system by incorporating neighbor selection and gradient push, termed AsyNG. Specifically, we require each edge node to push gradients only to a subset of neighbors for resource efficiency. Herein, we first give a theoretical convergence analysis of AsyNG under the complicated non-IID and heterogeneous scenario, and further design a priority-based algorithm to dynamically select neighbors for each edge node so as to achieve the trade-off between communication cost and model performance. We evaluate the performance of AsyNG through extensive experiments on a physical platform. Evaluation results show that AsyNG can reduce the communication cost by 60% and the completion time by about 30% for achieving the same test accuracy, compared to the baselines.

Federated learning (FL) has been widely applied to collaboratively train deep learning (DL) models on massive end devices (i.e., clients). Due to the limited storage capacity and high labeling cost, there are always insufficient data stored and annotated on each client. Conversely, in cloud datacenters, there exist large-scale unlabeled data, which are easy to collect from public access (e.g., social media). Herein, upon the federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) technology, we propose the Ada-FedSemi system, which leverages both on-device labeled data and in-cloud unlabeled data to boost the performance of DL models. Given the limited communication and massive quantity of the clients, in each training round, we decide to select partial clients to participate in FL, and their local models are aggregated by the parameter server (PS) to produce pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data, which are utilized to enhance the global model. Considering that the number of participating clients and the quality of pseudo-labels will have a significant impact on the training performance (e.g., efficiency and accuracy), we introduce a multi-armed bandit (MAB) based online algorithm to adaptively determine the participating fraction and confidence threshold during federated model training. Extensive experiments on benchmark models and datasets show that, given the same resource budget, the model trained by Ada-FedSemi achieves 3%-14.8 % higher test accuracy than that of the baseline methods. Besides, when achieving the same test accuracy, Ada-FedSemi saves up to 48% training cost, compared with the baselines.

Cloud computing is motivating data owners to outsource their databases to the cloud. However, for privacy concerns, the sensitive data has to be encrypted before outsourcing, which inevitably posts a challenging task for effective data utilization. Existing work either focuses on keyword searches, or suffers from inadequate security guarantees or inefficiency. In this paper, we concentrate on multi-dimensional range queries over dynamic encrypted cloud data. We first propose a tree-based private range query scheme over dynamic encrypted cloud data (TRQED), which supports faster-than-linear range queries and protects single-dimensional privacy. Then, we discuss the defects of TRQED in terms of privacy-preservation. We modify the framework of the system by adopting a two-server model and put forward a safer range query scheme, called TRQED$^{+}$. By newly designed secure node query (SNQ) and secure point query (SPQ), we propose the perturbation-based oblivious R-tree traversal (ORT) operation to preserve both path pattern and stronger single-dimensional privacy. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets and perform comparisons with existing works to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes. Experimental results show that our TRQED and TRQED$^+$surpass the state-of-the-art methods in privacy-preservation level and efficiency.

Most user-generated data in online services are presented as set-valued data, e.g., visited website URLs, recently used Apps by a person, and etc. These data are of great value to service providers, but also bring privacy concerns if collected and analyzed directly. To tackle potential privacy threatens, local differential privacy (LDP) attracts increasing attention nowadays. However, existing approaches only provide sub-optimal error bound for set-valued data distribution estimation with LDP. Besides, it is computational expensive and communication expensive to use for high dimensional set-valued data, considering large domains in real scenarios. Thus, existing approaches are unpractical to use on resource-constrained user-side devices (e.g., smartphones and wearable devices). In this paper, we propose a utility-optimal and efficient set-valued data publication method (i.e., wheel mechanism ). On the user side, each user contributes only one numerical value to represent their privatized data. The computational complexity is O (min{ m log m , me ɛ }) and communication cost is O (log( me ɛ )) bits, while existing approaches usually depend on O ( d ) or O (log d ), where m is the number of items in the set-valued data ( m ≡ 1 for categorical data), d is the domain size (usually d ≫ m ) and ɛ is the privacy budget. On the server side, the estimator takes numerical values from users as input and derives an unbiased distribution estimation. Theoretical results show that estimation error bounds are improved from previously known [EQUATION] to the optimal rate [EQUATION]. Results on extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed wheel mechanism is 3-100× faster than existing approaches, meanwhile has optimal statistical efficiency.

We study the min-cost seed selection problem in online social networks for viral marketing, where the goal is to select a set of seed nodes with the minimum total cost such that the expected number of influenced nodes in the network exceeds a predefined threshold. We propose several algorithms that outperform the previous studies both on the theoretical approximation ratio and on the experimental performance. In the case where the nodes have heterogeneous costs, our algorithms are the first bi-criteria approximation algorithms with polynomial running time and provable approximation ratio. In the case where the users have uniform costs, our algorithms achieve logarithmic approximation ratio and provable time complexity which is smaller than that of the existing algorithms in orders of magnitude. We conduct extensive experiments using real social networks. The experimental results show that, our algorithms significantly outperform the existing algorithms both on the total cost and on the running time, and also scale well to billion-scale networks.

Local differential privacy (LDP), as a strong and practical notion, has been applied to deal with privacy issues in data collection. However, existing LDP-based strategies mainly focus on utility optimization at a single privacy level while ignoring various privacy preferences of data providers and multilevel privacy demands for statistics. In this poster, we for the first time propose a framework to optimize the utility of histogram estimation with these two privacy requirements. To clarify the goal of privacy protection, we personalize the traditional definition of LDP. We design two independent approaches to minimize the utility loss: Advanced Combination, which composes multilevel results for utility optimization, and Data Recycle with Personalized Privacy, which enlarges sample size for an estimation. We demonstrate their effectiveness on privacy and utility. Moreover, we embed these approaches within a Recycle and Combination Framework and prove that the framework stably achieves the optimal utility by quantifying its error bounds. On real-world datasets, our approaches are experimentally validated and remarkably outperform baseline methods.

Recently, local differential privacy (LDP), as a strong and practical notion, has been applied to deal with privacy issues in data collection. However, existing LDP-based strategies mainly focus on utility optimization at a single privacy level while ignoring various privacy preferences of data providers and multilevel privacy demands for statistics. In this paper, we for the first time propose a framework to optimize the utility of histogram estimation with these two privacy requirements. To clarify the goal of privacy protection, we personalize the traditional definition of LDP. We design two independent approaches to minimize the utility loss: Advanced Combination, which composes multilevel results for utility optimization, and Data Recycle with Personalized Privacy, which enlarges the sample size for an estimation. We demonstrate their effectiveness on privacy and utility, respectively. Moreover, we embed these approaches within a Recycle and Combination Framework and prove that the framework stably achieves the optimal utility by quantifying its error bounds. On real-world datasets, our approaches are experimentally validated and remarkably outperform baseline methods.

Recent advances in vehicular networks, GPS and smartphone technologies have changed the paradigm of intelligent taxicab systems. Indeed, taxicab trajectories and online calling information have enabled us to provide more efficient and personalized services. However, existing approaches are not sufficient in exploiting cooperative scheduling techniques and utilizing real time calling information. To this end, in this paper, we model the time-varying regularities of traffic flows, activity ratios of passengers, and unoccupied taxicabs of road segments by mining statistical data on taxicab trajectories. Along this line, we propose a novel approach to calculate the expected revenue of possible routes for individual taxicabs while considering the influence of others, and at the same time, advance a dynamic taxicab scheduling mechanism with online taxicab calling information. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm on real-world taxicab data. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing alternative solutions in terms of average revenue of taxi drivers.

As the size of smartphone touchscreens becomes larger and larger in recent years, operability with single hand is getting worse especially for female users. We envision that user experience can be significantly improved if smartphones are able to detect the current operating hand and adjust the UI subsequently. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that leverages user-generated touchscreen traces to recognize current operating hand accurately, with the help of a supervised classifier constructed from twelve different kinds of touchscreen trace features. As opposed to existing solutions that all require users to select the current operating hand or dominant hand manually, our scheme follows a more convenient and practical manner, and allows users to change operating hand frequently without any harm to user experience. We conduct a series of real-world experiments on Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphones, and evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves 94.1% accuracy when deciding with a single trace only, and the false positive rate is as low as 2.6%.

In this paper, we propose differentially private protocols for Naive Bayes classification over distributed data. Compared with existing works, the privacy and security models in the proposed protocols are stronger: firstly, both the miner and parties can be arbitrarily malicious and can collude with each other to violate the remaining honest parties privacy; secondly, all communication channels between them can be assumed to be insecure. Specifically, we build a guarantee of differential privacy into the cryptographic construction so that the proposed protocols can tolerate collusions and resist eavesdropping attacks which are caused by insecure communication channels. Additionally, the proposed protocols can be implemented at lower computation and communication costs, and some extensions to our protocols (e.g. supporting parties dynamic joins or leaves) are also proposed in this paper. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed privacy-preserving protocols for Naive Bayes have strong security and better classification performance than the standard one.

QoS-aware Web services composition has recently received much attention. While most work focused on service selection, we study QoS in another stage of the life cycle of composite services, namely, scheduling. An interesting problem is whether we can obtain better QoS via scheduling even when the component services have been fixed. In this paper, we propose an approach to find an optimal (near-optimal) schedule with the least cancellation cost, which can further improve the overall QoS of composite services. An approach to analyze the expected cancellation cost of a schedule of a composite service is proposed and QoS-Aware service scheduling is formalized as a Constraint Satisfaction Optimization Problem (CoSOP). Two algorithms - heuristic back tracking and genetic algorithm - are presented to find an optimal (near-optimal) schedule, and their performance is studied by simulations. Preliminary experimental results show that our approach is effective.