Artificial Intelligence Meets Flexible Sensors:Emerging Smart Flexible Sensing Systems Driven by Machine Learning and Artificial Synapses

The recent wave of the artificial intelligence(AI)revolution has aroused unprecedented interest in the intelligentialize of human society.As an essential component that bridges the physical world and digital signals,flexible sensors are evolving from a single sensing element to a smarter system,which is capable of highly efficient acquisition,analysis,and even perception of vast,multifaceted data.While challenging from a manual perspective,the development of intelligent flexible sensing has been remarkably facilitated owing to the rapid advances of brain-inspired AI innovations from both the algorithm(machine learning)and the framework(artificial synapses)level.This review presents the recent progress of the emerging AI-driven,intelligent flexible sensing systems.The basic concept of machine learning and artificial synapses are introduced.The new enabling features induced by the fusion of AI and flexible sensing are comprehensively reviewed,which significantly advances the applications such as flexible sensory systems,soft/humanoid robotics,and human activity monitoring.As two of the most profound innovations in the twenty-first century,the deep incorporation of flexible sensing and AI technology holds tremendous potential for creating a smarter world for human beings.

Flood Velocity Prediction Using Deep Learning Approach

Floods are one of the most serious natural disasters that can cause huge societal and economic losses.Extensive research has been conducted on topics like flood monitoring,prediction,and loss estimation.In these research fields,flood velocity plays a crucial role and is an important factor that influences the reliability of the outcomes.Traditional methods rely on physical models for flood simulation and prediction and could generate accurate results but often take a long time.Deep learning technology has recently shown significant potential in the same field,especially in terms of efficiency,helping to overcome the time-consuming associated with traditional methods.This study explores the potential of deep learning models in predicting flood velocity.More specifically,we use a Multi-Layer Perceptron(MLP)model,a specific type of Artificial Neural Networks(ANNs),to predict the velocity in the test area of the Lundesokna River in Norway with diverse terrain conditions.Geographic data and flood velocity simulated based on the physical hydraulic model are used in the study for the pre-training,optimization,and testing of the MLP model.Our experiment indicates that the MLP model has the potential to predict flood velocity in diverse terrain conditions of the river with acceptable accuracy against simulated velocity results but with a significant decrease in training time and testing time.Meanwhile,we discuss the limitations for the improvement in future work.

Monitoring seismicity in the southern Sichuan Basin using a machine learning workflow

Monitoring seismicity in real time provides significant benefits for timely earthquake warning and analyses.In this study,we propose an automatic workflow based on machine learning(ML)to monitor seismicity in the southern Sichuan Basin of China.This workflow includes coherent event detection,phase picking,and earthquake location using three-component data from a seismic network.By combining Phase Net,we develop an ML-based earthquake location model called Phase Loc,to conduct real-time monitoring of the local seismicity.The approach allows us to use synthetic samples covering the entire study area to train Phase Loc,addressing the problems of insufficient data samples,imbalanced data distribution,and unreliable labels when training with observed data.We apply the trained model to observed data recorded in the southern Sichuan Basin,China,between September 2018 and March 2019.The results show that the average differences in latitude,longitude,and depth are 5.7 km,6.1 km,and 2 km,respectively,compared to the reference catalog.Phase Loc combines all available phase information to make fast and reliable predictions,even if only a few phases are detected and picked.The proposed workflow may help real-time seismic monitoring in other regions as well.

A spatiotemporal deep learning method for excavation-induced wall deflections

Data-driven approaches such as neural networks are increasingly used for deep excavations due to the growing amount of available monitoring data in practical projects.However,most neural network models only use the data from a single monitoring point and neglect the spatial relationships between multiple monitoring points.Besides,most models lack flexibility in providing predictions for multiple days after monitoring activity.This study proposes a sequence-to-sequence(seq2seq)two-dimensional(2D)convolutional long short-term memory neural network(S2SCL2D)for predicting the spatiotemporal wall deflections induced by deep excavations.The model utilizes the data from all monitoring points on the entire wall and extracts spatiotemporal features from data by combining the 2D convolutional layers and long short-term memory(LSTM)layers.The S2SCL2D model achieves a long-term prediction of wall deflections through a recursive seq2seq structure.The excavation depth,which has a significant impact on wall deflections,is also considered using a feature fusion method.An excavation project in Hangzhou,China,is used to illustrate the proposed model.The results demonstrate that the S2SCL2D model has superior prediction accuracy and robustness than that of the LSTM and S2SCL1D(one-dimensional)models.The prediction model demonstrates a strong generalizability when applied to an adjacent excavation.Based on the long-term prediction results,practitioners can plan and allocate resources in advance to address the potential engineering issues.

WebFLex:A Framework for Web Browsers-Based Peer-to-Peer Federated Learning Systems Using WebRTC

Scalability and information personal privacy are vital for training and deploying large-scale deep learning models.Federated learning trains models on exclusive information by aggregating weights from various devices and taking advantage of the device-agnostic environment of web browsers.Nevertheless,relying on a main central server for internet browser-based federated systems can prohibit scalability and interfere with the training process as a result of growing client numbers.Additionally,information relating to the training dataset can possibly be extracted from the distributed weights,potentially reducing the privacy of the local data used for training.In this research paper,we aim to investigate the challenges of scalability and data privacy to increase the efficiency of distributed training models.As a result,we propose a web-federated learning exchange(WebFLex)framework,which intends to improve the decentralization of the federated learning process.WebFLex is additionally developed to secure distributed and scalable federated learning systems that operate in web browsers across heterogeneous devices.Furthermore,WebFLex utilizes peer-to-peer interactions and secure weight exchanges utilizing browser-to-browser web real-time communication(WebRTC),efficiently preventing the need for a main central server.WebFLex has actually been measured in various setups using the MNIST dataset.Experimental results show WebFLex’s ability to improve the scalability of federated learning systems,allowing a smooth increase in the number of participating devices without central data aggregation.In addition,WebFLex can maintain a durable federated learning procedure even when faced with device disconnections and network variability.Additionally,it improves data privacy by utilizing artificial noise,which accomplishes an appropriate balance between accuracy and privacy preservation.

An active learning workflow for predicting hydrogen atom adsorption energies on binary oxides based on local electronic transfer features

Machine learning combined with density functional theory(DFT)enables rapid exploration of catalyst descriptors space such as adsorption energy,facilitating rapid and effective catalyst screening.However,there is still a lack of models for predicting adsorption energies on oxides,due to the complexity of elemental species and the ambiguous coordination environment.This work proposes an active learning workflow(LeNN)founded on local electronic transfer features(e)and the principle of coordinate rotation invariance.By accurately characterizing the electron transfer to adsorption site atoms and their surrounding geometric structures,LeNN mitigates abrupt feature changes due to different element types and clarifies coordination environments.As a result,it enables the prediction of^(*)H adsorption energy on binary oxide surfaces with a mean absolute error(MAE)below 0.18 eV.Moreover,we incorporate local coverage(θ_(l))and leverage neutral network ensemble to establish an active learning workflow,attaining a prediction MAE below 0.2 eV for 5419 multi-^(*)H adsorption structures.These findings validate the universality and capability of the proposed features in predicting^(*)H adsorption energy on binary oxide surfaces.

Physics-informed machine learning model for prediction of ground reflected wave peak overpressure

The accurate prediction of peak overpressure of explosion shockwaves is significant in fields such as explosion hazard assessment and structural protection, where explosion shockwaves serve as typical destructive elements. Aiming at the problem of insufficient accuracy of the existing physical models for predicting the peak overpressure of ground reflected waves, two physics-informed machine learning models are constructed. The results demonstrate that the machine learning models, which incorporate physical information by predicting the deviation between the physical model and actual values and adding a physical loss term in the loss function, can accurately predict both the training and out-oftraining dataset. Compared to existing physical models, the average relative error in the predicted training domain is reduced from 17.459%-48.588% to 2%, and the proportion of average relative error less than 20% increased from 0% to 59.4% to more than 99%. In addition, the relative average error outside the prediction training set range is reduced from 14.496%-29.389% to 5%, and the proportion of relative average error less than 20% increased from 0% to 71.39% to more than 99%. The inclusion of a physical loss term enforcing monotonicity in the loss function effectively improves the extrapolation performance of machine learning. The findings of this study provide valuable reference for explosion hazard assessment and anti-explosion structural design in various fields.

Ada-FFL:Adaptive computing fairness federated learning

As the scale of federated learning expands,solving the Non-IID data problem of federated learning has become a key challenge of interest.Most existing solutions generally aim to solve the overall performance improvement of all clients;however,the overall performance improvement often sacrifices the performance of certain clients,such as clients with less data.Ignoring fairness may greatly reduce the willingness of some clients to participate in federated learning.In order to solve the above problem,the authors propose Ada-FFL,an adaptive fairness federated aggregation learning algorithm,which can dynamically adjust the fairness coefficient according to the update of the local models,ensuring the convergence performance of the global model and the fairness between federated learning clients.By integrating coarse-grained and fine-grained equity solutions,the authors evaluate the deviation of local models by considering both global equity and individual equity,then the weight ratio will be dynamically allocated for each client based on the evaluated deviation value,which can ensure that the update differences of local models are fully considered in each round of training.Finally,by combining a regularisation term to limit the local model update to be closer to the global model,the sensitivity of the model to input perturbations can be reduced,and the generalisation ability of the global model can be improved.Through numerous experiments on several federal data sets,the authors show that our method has more advantages in convergence effect and fairness than the existing baselines.

CCM-FL:Covert communication mechanisms for federated learning in crowd sensing IoT

The past decades have witnessed a wide application of federated learning in crowd sensing,to handle the numerous data collected by the sensors and provide the users with precise and customized services.Meanwhile,how to protect the private information of users in federated learning has become an important research topic.Compared with the differential privacy(DP)technique and secure multiparty computation(SMC)strategy,the covert communication mechanism in federated learning is more efficient and energy-saving in training the ma-chine learning models.In this paper,we study the covert communication problem for federated learning in crowd sensing Internet-of-Things networks.Different from the previous works about covert communication in federated learning,most of which are considered in a centralized framework and experimental-based,we firstly proposes a centralized covert communication mechanism for federated learning among n learning agents,the time complexity of which is O(log n),approximating to the optimal solution.Secondly,for the federated learning without parameter server,which is a harder case,we show that solving such a problem is NP-hard and prove the existence of a distributed covert communication mechanism with O(log logΔlog n)times,approximating to the optimal solution.Δis the maximum distance between any pair of learning agents.Theoretical analysis and nu-merical simulations are presented to show the performance of our covert communication mechanisms.We hope that our covert communication work can shed some light on how to protect the privacy of federated learning in crowd sensing from the view of communications.

FL-EASGD:Federated Learning Privacy Security Method Based on Homomorphic Encryption

Federated learning ensures data privacy and security by sharing models among multiple computing nodes instead of plaintext data.However,there is still a potential risk of privacy leakage,for example,attackers can obtain the original data through model inference attacks.Therefore,safeguarding the privacy of model parameters becomes crucial.One proposed solution involves incorporating homomorphic encryption algorithms into the federated learning process.However,the existing federated learning privacy protection scheme based on homomorphic encryption will greatly reduce the efficiency and robustness when there are performance differences between parties or abnormal nodes.To solve the above problems,this paper proposes a privacy protection scheme named Federated Learning-Elastic Averaging Stochastic Gradient Descent(FL-EASGD)based on a fully homomorphic encryption algorithm.First,this paper introduces the homomorphic encryption algorithm into the FL-EASGD scheme to preventmodel plaintext leakage and realize privacy security in the process ofmodel aggregation.Second,this paper designs a robust model aggregation algorithm by adding time variables and constraint coefficients,which ensures the accuracy of model prediction while solving performance differences such as computation speed and node anomalies such as downtime of each participant.In addition,the scheme in this paper preserves the independent exploration of the local model by the nodes of each party,making the model more applicable to the local data distribution.Finally,experimental analysis shows that when there are abnormalities in the participants,the efficiency and accuracy of the whole protocol are not significantly affected.

Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in NOMA-VEC:A Multi-Agent Deep Graph Reinforcement Learning Algorithm

Vehicular edge computing(VEC)is emerging as a promising solution paradigm to meet the requirements of compute-intensive applications in internet of vehicle(IoV).Non-orthogonal multiple access(NOMA)has advantages in improving spectrum efficiency and dealing with bandwidth scarcity and cost.It is an encouraging progress combining VEC and NOMA.In this paper,we jointly optimize task offloading decision and resource allocation to maximize the service utility of the NOMA-VEC system.To solve the optimization problem,we propose a multiagent deep graph reinforcement learning algorithm.The algorithm extracts the topological features and relationship information between agents from the system state as observations,outputs task offloading decision and resource allocation simultaneously with local policy network,which is updated by a local learner.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a 1.52%∼5.80%improvement compared with the benchmark algorithms in system service utility.

A Deep Learning Approach to Shape Optimization Problems for Flexoelectric Materials Using the Isogeometric Finite Element Method

A new approach for flexoelectricmaterial shape optimization is proposed in this study.In this work,a proxymodel based on artificial neural network(ANN)is used to solve the parameter optimization and shape optimization problems.To improve the fitting ability of the neural network,we use the idea of pre-training to determine the structure of the neural network and combine different optimizers for training.The isogeometric analysis-finite element method(IGA-FEM)is used to discretize the flexural theoretical formulas and obtain samples,which helps ANN to build a proxy model from the model shape to the target value.The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through two numerical examples of parameter optimization and one numerical example of shape optimization.

2P3FL:A Novel Approach for Privacy Preserving in Financial Sectors Using Flower Federated Learning

The increasing data pool in finance sectors forces machine learning(ML)to step into new complications.Banking data has significant financial implications and is confidential.Combining users data from several organizations for various banking services may result in various intrusions and privacy leakages.As a result,this study employs federated learning(FL)using a flower paradigm to preserve each organization’s privacy while collaborating to build a robust shared global model.However,diverse data distributions in the collaborative training process might result in inadequate model learning and a lack of privacy.To address this issue,the present paper proposes the imple-mentation of Federated Averaging(FedAvg)and Federated Proximal(FedProx)methods in the flower framework,which take advantage of the data locality while training and guaranteeing global convergence.Resultantly improves the privacy of the local models.This analysis used the credit card and Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity Intrusion Detection Evaluation(CICIDS)datasets.Precision,recall,and accuracy as performance indicators to show the efficacy of the proposed strategy using FedAvg and FedProx.The experimental findings suggest that the proposed approach helps to safely use banking data from diverse sources to enhance customer banking services by obtaining accuracy of 99.55%and 83.72%for FedAvg and 99.57%,and 84.63%for FedProx.

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Task Offloading and Service Migrating Policies in Service Caching-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing

Emerging mobile edge computing(MEC)is considered a feasible solution for offloading the computation-intensive request tasks generated from mobile wireless equipment(MWE)with limited computational resources and energy.Due to the homogeneity of request tasks from one MWE during a longterm time period,it is vital to predeploy the particular service cachings required by the request tasks at the MEC server.In this paper,we model a service caching-assisted MEC framework that takes into account the constraint on the number of service cachings hosted by each edge server and the migration of request tasks from the current edge server to another edge server with service caching required by tasks.Furthermore,we propose a multiagent deep reinforcement learning-based computation offloading and task migrating decision-making scheme(MBOMS)to minimize the long-term average weighted cost.The proposed MBOMS can learn the near-optimal offloading and migrating decision-making policy by centralized training and decentralized execution.Systematic and comprehensive simulation results reveal that our proposed MBOMS can converge well after training and outperforms the other five baseline algorithms.

Policy Network-Based Dual-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Resource Task Offloading in Multi-Access Edge Cloud Networks

The Multi-access Edge Cloud(MEC) networks extend cloud computing services and capabilities to the edge of the networks. By bringing computation and storage capabilities closer to end-users and connected devices, MEC networks can support a wide range of applications. MEC networks can also leverage various types of resources, including computation resources, network resources, radio resources,and location-based resources, to provide multidimensional resources for intelligent applications in 5/6G.However, tasks generated by users often consist of multiple subtasks that require different types of resources. It is a challenging problem to offload multiresource task requests to the edge cloud aiming at maximizing benefits due to the heterogeneity of resources provided by devices. To address this issue,we mathematically model the task requests with multiple subtasks. Then, the problem of task offloading of multi-resource task requests is proved to be NP-hard. Furthermore, we propose a novel Dual-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm with Node First and Link features(NF_L_DA_DRL) based on the policy network, to optimize the benefits generated by offloading multi-resource task requests in MEC networks. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the benefit of task offloading with higher resource utilization compared with baseline algorithms.

A Novel Graph Structure Learning Based Semi-Supervised Framework for Anomaly Identification in Fluctuating IoT Environment

With the rapid development of Internet of Things(IoT)technology,IoT systems have been widely applied in health-care,transportation,home,and other fields.However,with the continuous expansion of the scale and increasing complexity of IoT systems,the stability and security issues of IoT systems have become increasingly prominent.Thus,it is crucial to detect anomalies in the collected IoT time series from various sensors.Recently,deep learning models have been leveraged for IoT anomaly detection.However,owing to the challenges associated with data labeling,most IoT anomaly detection methods resort to unsupervised learning techniques.Nevertheless,the absence of accurate abnormal information in unsupervised learning methods limits their performance.To address these problems,we propose AS-GCN-MTM,an adaptive structural Graph Convolutional Networks(GCN)-based framework using a mean-teacher mechanism(AS-GCN-MTM)for anomaly identification.It performs better than unsupervised methods using only a small amount of labeled data.Mean Teachers is an effective semi-supervised learning method that utilizes unlabeled data for training to improve the generalization ability and performance of the model.However,the dependencies between data are often unknown in time series data.To solve this problem,we designed a graph structure adaptive learning layer based on neural networks,which can automatically learn the graph structure from time series data.It not only better captures the relationships between nodes but also enhances the model’s performance by augmenting key data.Experiments have demonstrated that our method improves the baseline model with the highest F1 value by 10.4%,36.1%,and 5.6%,respectively,on three real datasets with a 10%data labeling rate.

Surveying on English Mobile Learning Among University Students: Current State and Influencing Factors

Mobile learning integrates mobile technology with digital learning,offering flexible,personalized content and portable equipment.It enables access to rich content and enhances learning efficiency.Therefore,it has become mainstream to utilize mobile devices for English learning among university students’English learning.The current study aims to examine the current situation and influencing factors of university students’English mobile learning.98 university students in one university of Shanghai participated the study and the questionnaire was used to collect the data.The results indicated that most university students already have electronic devices to support mobile learning.Personal factors,environmental factors,digital literacy,and technological capabilities are the main factors affecting university students’English mobile learning.The current study has implications for learners,teachers,and software developers.Learners should adjust their learning motivation,play an active role,and fully utilize the mobile platform to obtain resources and improve learning efficiency.Teachers should incorporate the advantages of mobile teaching and promote categorized and tiered teaching.Software developers should add new functions on the basis of meeting the basic needs of learners and continuously innovate the mobile learning platform.

Floating Waste Discovery by Request via Object-Centric Learning

Discovering floating wastes,especially bottles on water,is a crucial research problem in environmental hygiene.Nevertheless,real-world applications often face challenges such as interference from irrelevant objects and the high cost associated with data collection.Consequently,devising algorithms capable of accurately localizing specific objects within a scene in scenarios where annotated data is limited remains a formidable challenge.To solve this problem,this paper proposes an object discovery by request problem setting and a corresponding algorithmic framework.The proposed problem setting aims to identify specified objects in scenes,and the associated algorithmic framework comprises pseudo data generation and object discovery by request network.Pseudo-data generation generates images resembling natural scenes through various data augmentation rules,using a small number of object samples and scene images.The network structure of object discovery by request utilizes the pre-trained Vision Transformer(ViT)model as the backbone,employs object-centric methods to learn the latent representations of foreground objects,and applies patch-level reconstruction constraints to the model.During the validation phase,we use the generated pseudo datasets as training sets and evaluate the performance of our model on the original test sets.Experiments have proved that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Bottle Detection(UAV-BD)dataset and self-constructed dataset Bottle,especially in multi-object scenarios.

PEPFL:A framework for a practical and efficient privacy-preserving federated learning

As an emerging joint learning model,federated learning is a promising way to combine model parameters of different users for training and inference without collecting users’original data.However,a practical and efficient solution has not been established in previous work due to the absence of efficient matrix computation and cryptography schemes in the privacy-preserving federated learning model,especially in partially homomorphic cryptosystems.In this paper,we propose a Practical and Efficient Privacy-preserving Federated Learning(PEPFL)framework.First,we present a lifted distributed ElGamal cryptosystem for federated learning,which can solve the multi-key problem in federated learning.Secondly,we develop a Practical Partially Single Instruction Multiple Data(PSIMD)parallelism scheme that can encode a plaintext matrix into single plaintext for encryption,improving the encryption efficiency and reducing the communication cost in partially homomorphic cryptosystem.In addition,based on the Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)and the designed cryptosystem,a novel privacy-preserving federated learning framework is designed by using Momentum Gradient Descent(MGD).Finally,we evaluate the security and performance of PEPFL.The experiment results demonstrate that the scheme is practicable,effective,and secure with low communication and computation costs.

Implicit policy constraint for offline reinforcement learning

Offline reinforcement learning(RL)aims to learn policies entirely from passively collected datasets,making it a data‐driven decision method.One of the main challenges in offline RL is the distribution shift problem,which causes the algorithm to visit out‐of‐distribution(OOD)samples.The distribution shift can be mitigated by constraining the divergence between the target policy and the behaviour policy.However,this method can overly constrain the target policy and impair the algorithm's performance,as it does not directly distinguish between in‐distribution and OOD samples.In addition,it is difficult to learn and represent multi‐modal behaviour policy when the datasets are collected by several different behaviour policies.To overcome these drawbacks,the au-thors address the distribution shift problem by implicit policy constraints with energy‐based models(EBMs)rather than explicitly modelling the behaviour policy.The EBM is powerful for representing complex multi‐modal distributions as well as the ability to distinguish in‐distribution samples and OODs.Experimental results show that their method significantly outperforms the explicit policy constraint method and other base-lines.In addition,the learnt energy model can be used to indicate OOD visits and alert the possible failure.