The advent of artificial intelligence applications demands for massive amount of data to supplement the training of machine learning models. Traditional machine learning schemes require central processing of large volumes of data that may contain sensitive patterns such as user location, personal information, or transactions history. Federated Learning (FL) has been proposed to complement the traditional centralized methods where multiple local models are trained and aggregated over a centralized cloud server. However, the performance of FL needs to be further improved, since its accuracy is not on par with traditional centralized machine learning approaches. Furthermore, due to the possibility of privacy information leakage, there are not enough clients willing to participate in FL training process. Common practice for the uploaded local models is an evenly weighted aggregation, assuming that each node of the network contributes to advancing the global model equally, which is unfair with higher contribution model owners. This thesis focuses on three aspects of improving a whole federated learning pipeline: client selection; reputation enabled weight aggregation; and incentive mechanism. For client selection, a reputation score consists of evaluation metrics is introduced to eliminate poor performing model contributions. This scheme enhances the original implementation by up to 10% for non-IID datasets. We also reduce the training time of selection scheme by roughly 27.7% compared to the baseline implementation. Then, a reputation-enabled weighted aggregation of the local models for distributed learning is proposed. Thus, the contribution of a local model and its aggregation weight is evaluated and determined by its reputation score, which is formulated as same above. Numerical comparison of the proposed methodology that assigns different aggregation weights based on the accuracy of each model to a baseline that utilizes standard average aggregation weight shows an accuracy improvement of 17.175% over the standard baseline for not independent and identically distributed (non-IID) scenarios for an FL network of 100 participants. Last but not least, for incentive mechanism, we can reward participants based on data quality, data quantity, reputation and resource allocation of participants. In this thesis, we adopt a reputation-aware reverse auction that was earlier proposed to recruit dependable participants for mobile crowdsensing campaigns, and modify that incentive to adapt it to a FL setting where user utility is defined as a function of the assigned payment from the central server and the user’s service cost, such as battery and processor usage. Through numerical results, we show that: 1) the proposed incentive can improve the user utilities when compared to the baseline approaches, 2) platform utility can be maintained at a close value to that under the baselines, 3) the overall test accuracy of the aggregated global model can even slightly improve.

Federated information retrieval is a technique for searching multiple text collections simultaneously. Queries are submitted to a subset of collections that are most likely to return relevant answers. The results returned by selected collections are integrated and merged into a single list. Federated search is preferred over centralized search alternatives in many environments. For example, commercial search engines such as Google cannot index uncrawlable hidden web collections; federated information retrieval systems can search the contents of hidden web collections without crawling. In enterprise environments, where each organization maintains an independent search engine, federated search techniques can provide parallel search over multiple collections. There are three major challenges in federated search. For each query, a subset of collections that are most likely to return relevant documents are selected. This creates the collection selection problem. To be able to select suitable collections, federated information retrieval systems acquire some knowledge about the contents of each collection, creating the collection representation problem. The results returned from the selected collections are merged before the final presentation to the user. This final step is the result merging problem. In this thesis, we propose new approaches for each of these problems. Our suggested methods, for collection representation, collection selection, and result merging, outperform state-of-the-art techniques in most cases. We also propose novel methods for estimating the number of documents in collections, and for pruning unnecessary information from collection representations sets. Although management of document duplication has been cited as one of the major problems in federated search, prior research in this area often assumes that collections are free of overlap. We investigate the effectiveness of federated search on overlapped collections, and propose new methods for maximizing the number of distinct relevant documents in the final merged results. In summary, this thesis introduces several new contributions to the field of federated information retrieval, including practical solutions to some historically unsolved problems in federated search, such as document duplication management. We test our techniques on multiple testbeds that simulate both hidden web and enterprise search environments.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-100). / xi, 100 leaves, bound ill., map 29 cm

The rapid development of Machine Learning algorithms and a growing range of its applications, as well as an increasing number of Edge Computing devices, created a need for a new paradigm that would benefit from both fields. Federated Learning, which emerged as an answer to this need, is a technique that also solves privacy-related issues arising when large amounts of information are collected on many individual devices and being used for a Machine Learning model by sending only the local updates and keeping the data. At the same time, Federated Learning heavily relies on the computational and communicational capabilities of the devices that calculate the updates and send them to the main server to be integrated into a global model using one or the other Aggregation Scheme, which is one of the most important aspects of the Federated Learning. Carefully choosing how to aggregate local updates can diminish the impacts present from a huge variety of devices. Therefore, this thesis work presents a thorough investigation of the Aggregation Schemes and analyzes their behaviors in heterogeneous Federated Learning scenarios. It provides an extensive description of the main features of schemes studied, defines the evaluation criteria, presents the resource costs associated with computational and communicational resources of the devices, and shows a fair assessment.

Recent technological advances have opened many new possibilities for health appli- cations. Next generation of networks allows real-time monitoring, collaboration, and diagnosis. Machine Learning and Deep Learning enable modeling and understanding complex and enormous datasets. Yet all the innovations also pose new challenges to application designers and maintainers. To deliver high standard e-health services while following regulations, Quality of Service requirements need to be fulfilled, high accuracy needs to be archived, let along all the security defenses to protect sensitive data from leaking. In this thesis, we present a collection of works towards a progressive framework for building secure, responsive, and intelligent e-health applications, focusing on three major components, Analyze, Acquire, and Authenticate. The framework is progres- sive, as it can be applied to various architectures, growing with the project and adapting to its needs. For newer decentralized applications that perform data anal- ysis locally on users’ devices, powerful models outperforming existing solutions can be built using Deep Learning, while Federated Learning provides further privacy guarantee against data leakage, as shown in the case of sleep stage prediction task using smart watch data. For traditional centralized applications performing com- plex computations on the cloud or on-premise clusters, to provide Quality of Service guarantees for the data acquisition process in a sensor network, a delay estimation model based on queueing theory is proposed and verified using simulation. We also explore the novel idea of using molecular communication for authentication, named Molecular Key, enabling the incorporation of environmental information into security policy. We envision this framework can provide stepping stones for future e-health applications.

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1978. / Bibliography: leaves 176-185. / Microfiche. / vi, 185 leaves, bound maps 29 cm

An information technology that can combine the physical world and virtual world is desired. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept system that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), WSN and barcode scanners to sense and to detect physical objects and events. This information is shared with people on the Internet. With the announcement of the Smarter Planet concept by IBM, the problem of how to share this data was raised. However, the original design of WSN aims to provide environment monitoring and control within a small scale local network. It cannot meet the demands of the IoT because there is a lack of multi-connection functionality with other WSNs and upper level applications. As various standards of WSNs provide information for different purposes, a hybrid system that gives a complete answer by combining all of them could be promising for future IoT applications. This thesis is on the subject of `Federated Sensor Network' design and architectural development for the Internet of Things. A Federated Sensor Network (FSN) is a system that integrates WSNs and the Internet. Currently, methods of integrating WSNs and the Internet can follow one of three main directions: a Front-End Proxy solution, a Gateway solution or a TCP/IP Overlay solution. Architectures based on the ideas from all three directions are presented in this thesis; this forms a comprehensive body of research on possible Federated Sensor Network architecture designs. In addition, a fully compatible technology for the sensor network application, namely the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), has been reviewed and embedded into our FSN systems. The IoT as a new concept is also comprehensively described and the major technical issues discussed. Finally, a case study of the IoT in logistic management for emergency response is given. Proposed FSN architectures based on the Gateway solution are demonstrated through hardware implementation and lab tests. A demonstration of the 6LoWPAN enabled federated sensor network based on the TCP/IP Overlay solution presents a good result for the iNET localization and tracking project. All the tests of the designs have verified feasibility and achieve the target of the IoT concept.

Typescript. / Thesis (D.P.H.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1987. / Bibliography: leaves 149-151. / vii, 151 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Many recent successes of machine learning went hand in hand with advances in optimization. The exchange of ideas between these fields has worked both ways, with ' learning building on standard optimization procedures such as gradient descent, as well as with new directions in the optimization theory stemming from machine learning applications. In this thesis, we discuss new developments in optimization inspired by the needs and practice of machine learning, federated learning, and data science. In particular, we consider seven key challenges of mathematical optimization that are relevant to modern machine learning applications, and develop a solution to each. Our first contribution is the resolution of a key open problem in Federated Learning: we establish the first theoretical guarantees for the famous Local SGD algorithm in the crucially important heterogeneous data regime. As the second challenge, we close the gap between the upper and lower bounds for the theory of two incremental algorithms known as Random Reshuffling (RR) and Shuffle-Once that are widely used in practice, and in fact set as the default data selection strategies for SGD in modern machine learning software. Our third contribution can be seen as a combination of our new theory for proximal RR and Local SGD yielding a new algorithm, which we call FedRR. Unlike Local SGD, FedRR is the first local first-order method that can provably beat gradient descent in communication complexity in the heterogeneous data regime. The fourth challenge is related to the class of adaptive methods. In particular, we present the first parameter-free stepsize rule for gradient descent that provably works for any locally smooth convex objective. The fifth challenge we resolve in the affirmative is the development of an algorithm for distributed optimization with quantized updates that preserves global linear convergence of gradient descent. Finally, in our sixth and seventh challenges, we develop new VR mechanisms applicable to the non-smooth setting based on proximal operators and matrix splitting. In all cases, our theory is simpler, tighter and uses fewer assumptions than the prior literature. We accompany each chapter with numerical experiments to show the tightness of the proposed theoretical results.