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In response to the growing emphasis on sustainability in federated learning (FL), this research introduces a dynamic, dual-objective optimization framework called Carbon-Conscious Federated Reinforcement Learning (CCFRL). By leveraging Reinforcement Learning (RL), CCFRL continuously adapts client allocation and resource usage in real-time, optimizing both carbon efficiency and model performance. Unlike static or greedy methods that prioritize short-term carbon constraints, existing approaches often suffer from either degrading model performance by excluding high-quality, energy-intensive clients or failing to adequately balance carbon emissions with long-term efficiency. CCFRL addresses these limitations by taking a more sustainable method, balancing immediate resource needs with long-term sustainability, and ensuring that energy consumption and carbon emissions are minimized without compromising model quality, even with non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) and large-scale datasets. We overcome the shortcomings of existing methods by integrating advanced state representations, adaptive exploration and exploitation transitions, and stagnating detection using t-tests to better manage real-world data heterogeneity and complex, non-linear datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCFRL significantly reduces both energy consumption and carbon emissions while maintaining or enhancing performance. With up to a 61.78% improvement in energy conservation and a 64.23% reduction in carbon emissions, CCFRL proves the viability of aligning resource management with sustainability goals, paving the way for a more environmentally responsible future in cloud computing.

With the rise of ubiquitous networking and distributed computing, integrating robots with cloud-edge infrastructures offers significant potential. However, challenges remain in resource allocation and scheduling across distributed environments to meet robotics applications' performance demands. 

This paper introduces tinyKube, a middleware tailored for dynamic resource management across the cloud-edge platform for large-scale cloud robotics deployments. Leveraging Kubernetes for orchestration and Prometheus for monitoring, tinyKube enables unified monitoring, task dispatching, and resource provisioning across cloud-edge infrastructures.

We evaluate tinyKube using a robotic gripper application on the CloudGripper testbed in a real-world cloud-edge setup. Results demonstrate its ability to automate task dispatching and resource allocation, dynamically adapting to QoS requirements and workload variations.By simplifying resource management, tinyKube accelerates the development, testing, and deployment of large-scale cloud robotics applications, facilitating more efficient real-world implementation.

Deploying federated learning (FL) over wireless mobile networks can be expensive because of the cost of wireless communication resources. Efforts have been made to reduce communication costs by accelerating model convergence, leading to the development of model-driven methods based on feature extraction, model-integrated algorithms, and client selection. However, the resulting performance gains are limited by the dependence of neural network convergence on input data quality. This work, therefore, investigates the use of marginal shared data (e.g., a single data entry) to accelerate model convergence and thereby reduce communication costs in FL. Experimental results show that sharing even a single piece of data can improve performance by 14.6% and reduce communication costs by 61.13% when using the federated averaging algorithm (FedAvg). Marginal data sharing could therefore be an attractive and practical solution in privacy-flexible environments or collaborative operational systems such as fog robotics and vehicles. Moreover, by assigning new labels to the shared data, it is possible to extend the number of classifying labels of an FL model even when the initial input datasets lack the labels in question.

As the demand for intelligent applications at the network edge grows, so does the need for effective federated learning (FL) techniques. However, FL often relies on non-identically and non-independently distributed local datasets across end devices, which could result in considerable performance degradation. Prior solutions, such as model-driven approaches based on knowledge distillation, meta-learning, and transfer learning, have provided some reprieve. However, their performance suffers under heterogeneous local datasets and highly skewed data distributions. To address these challenges, this study introduces the MArginal Data fusion FEDerated Learning (MadFed) approach, a groundbreaking fusion of model- and data-driven methodologies. By utilizing marginal data, MadFed mitigates data distribution skewness, improves the maximum achievable accuracy, and reduces communication costs. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the fusion of marginal data can significantly improve performance even with minimal data entries, such as a single entry. For instance, it provides up to a 15.4% accuracy increase and 70.4% communication cost savings when combined with established model-driven methodologies. Conversely, relying solely on these model-driven methodologies can result in poor performance, especially with highly skewed datasets. Significantly, MadFed extends its effectiveness across various FL algorithms and offers a unique method to augment label sets of end devices, thereby enhancing the utility and applicability of federated learning in real-world scenarios. The proposed approach is not only efficient but also adaptable and versatile, promising broader application and potential for widespread adoption in the field.

In the age of data and machine learning, massive amounts of data produced throughout our society can be rapidly delivered to various applications through a broad spectrum of cloud services. However, the spectrum of applications has vastly different data quality requirements and Willingness-To-Pay(WTP), creating a general and complex problem matching consumer quality requirements and budgets with providers’ data quality and price. This paper proposes the Information-Centric Networking(ICN)-based data marketplace to foster quality-data trading service to address the challenge above. We embed a WTP mechanism into an ICN-based data broker service running on cloud computing; therefore, a data consumer can request its desired data with a data name and quality requirement. By specifying nominal WTPs, data consumers can acquire data of the desired quality at the range of maximum nominal WTP. At the same time, a data broker can offer data of a suitable quality based on the profit-optimized price and the proposed service quality using ground-truth accuracy trained by data. We demonstrate that the data broker’s profit can be almost doubled by using the optimal data size and budget determined by considering the one-leader-multiple-followers Stackelberg game. These results show that a value-added data brokering service can profitably facilitate data trading.

Diagnosing COVID-19 infection through the classification of chest images using machine learning techniques faces many controversial problems owing to the intrinsic nature of medical image data and classification architectures. The detection of lesions caused by COVID-19 in the human lung with properties such as location, size, and distribution is more practical and meaningful to medical workers for severity assessment, progress monitoring, and treatment, thus improving patients’ recovery. We proposed a COVID-19-associated lung lesion detector based on an object detection architecture. It correctly learns disease-relevant features by focusing on lung lesion annotation data of medical images. An annotated COVID-19 image dataset is currently nonexistent. We designed our semi-self-supervised method, which can extract knowledge from available annotated pneumonia image data and guide a novice in annotating lesions on COVID-19 images in the absence of a medical specialist. We prepared a sufficient dataset with nearly 8000 lung lesion annotations to train our deep learning model. We comprehensively evaluated our model on a test dataset with nearly 1500 annotations. The results demonstrated that the COVID-19 images annotated by our method significantly enhanced the model’s accuracy by as much as 1.68 times, and our model competes with commercialized solutions. Finally, all experimental data from multiple sources with different annotation data formats are standardized into a unified COCO format and publicly available to the research community to accelerate research on the detection of COVID-19 using deep learning.

Federated learning (FL) has gained significant importance for intelligent applications, following data produced on a massive scale by numerous distributed IoT devices. From an FL perspective, the key aspect is that this data is not identically and independently distributed (IID) across different data sources and locations. This distribution-skewness leads to significant quality degradation. Moreover, an intrinsic consequence of using such non-IID data in decentralized learning is increasing costs that would be mitigated if using IID data. As a remedy, we propose a resource-efficient method for training an FL-based application with non-IID data, effectively minimizing cost through an auction approach and mitigating quality degradation through data sharing. In an experimental evaluation, we investigate the FL performance using real-world non-IID data and use the resulting ground-truth outputs to develop functions for estimating the utility of non-IID data, computation resource costs, and data generation costs. These functions are used to optimize the costs of model training, ensuring resource efficiency. It is further demonstrated that using shared-IID data significantly increases the resource efficiency of FL with local non-IID data. This holds true even when the shared IID data size is less than 1% of the size of the local non-IID data. Moreover, this work demonstrates that the profitability of the stakeholders can be maximized using the proposed auction procedure. The integration of the auction procedure and a resource-efficient training strategy allows FL service providers to create practical trading strategies by minimizing the FL clients’ resources and payments in a machine learning marketplace.

The training of global models using federated learning (FL) strategies is complicated by variations in local model quality arising from variation in data distribution across individual clients. A wide range of training strategies could be created by varying the size and distribution of the training data and the number of training iterations to be performed. All these variables affect both model quality and resource consumption. To facilitate the selection of good training strategies, we propose an auction-based FL method that can identify a training strategy that is optimal in terms of resource management efficiency subject to a given model quality requirement. An auction method is used to dynamically select resource-efficient FL clients and local models to minimize resource usage. This is enabled by using Software-defined Networking (SDN) to support the dynamic management of FL clients. We show that resource-optimal FL strategies can be implemented in the cloud/edge services market; dynamic quality-based model selection can reduce resource costs by up to 17% from the FL server's perspective. Moreover, the client utility function presented herein helps FL clients adopt practical trading strategies to cooperate efficiently with FL servers.