Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a practice of using collective intelligence of a group in order to achieve a common goal to solve complex problems in an innovative way. It involves obtaining information and opinions from a group of participants who submit their data (i.e., solutions) via the Internet using some applications. The application domains, where crowdsourcing can be used, include, but not limited to, healthcare, environment, public safety, disaster management, and transportation. Despite the unprecedented advantages of crowdsourcing, security and privacy are rising concerns that need to be addressed. Therefore, it is crucially important to provide effective solutions that address the security and privacy issues in crowdsourcing systems. To this end, the salient features of blockchain technology such as immutability, decentralization, transparency and resiliency can play a pivotal role to address the afore-mentioned security challenges. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we propose a new blockchain-based user authentication and key agreement scheme for crowdsourcing (BUAKA-CS) through lightweight cryptographic techniques. The security of the BUAKA-CS is proved through the formal method and also through other mathematical methods that depict the resilience of BUAKA-CS against various types of possible attacks. Moreover, the robustness of BUAKA-CS against possible attacks is proved through widelyrecognized automated software validation tools. We also compare BUAKA-CS with other existing schemes and prove its out performance in terms of security, functionality, computation and communication costs. Finally, we conduct the extensive blockchain-based simulations to measure the impact of BUAKA-CS on the performance of the system.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a cellular-based Internet of things (IoT) network consisting of IoT devices that can communicate directly with each other in a device-to-device (D2D) fashion as well as send real-time status updates about some underlying physical processes observed by them. We assume that such real-time applications are supported by cellular networks (owing to their ubiquity) where cellular base stations (BSs) collect status updates over time from some subset of the IoT devices in their vicinity. For this setup, we characterize two performance metrics: i) the network throughput which quantifies the performance of D2D communications, and ii) the Age of Information (AoI) which quantifies the performance of the realtime IoT-enabled applications. Concrete analytical results are derived using stochastic geometry by modeling the locations of IoT devices as a bipolar Poisson Point process (PPP) and that of the BSs as another Independent PPP. Our results provide useful design guidelines on the efficient deployment of future IoT networks that will jointly support D2D communications and several cellular network-enabled real-time applications.

Abstract

— This paper considers a large-scale wireless network consisting of source-destination (SD) pairs, where the sources send time-sensitive information, termed status updates, to their corresponding destinations in a time-slotted fashion. We employ age of information (AoI) for quantifying the freshness of the status updates measured at the destination nodes under the preemptive and non-preemptive queueing disciplines with no storage facility. The non-preemptive queue drops the newly arriving updates until the update in service is successfully delivered, whereas the preemptive queue replaces the current update in service with the newly arriving update, if any. As the update delivery rate for a given link is a function of the interference field seen from the receiver, the temporal mean AoI can be treated as a random variable over space. Our goal in this paper is to characterize the spatial distribution of the mean AoI observed by the SD pairs by modeling them as a bipolar Poisson point process (PPP). Towards this objective, we first derive accurate bounds on the moments of success probability while efficiently capturing the interference-induced coupling in the activities of the SD pairs. Using this result, we then derive tight bounds on the moments as well as the spatial distribution of peak AoI (PAoI). Our numerical results verify our analytical findings and demonstrate the impact of various system design parameters on the mean PAoI.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a large-scale wireless network consisting of source-destination (SD) pairs where the source nodes frequently send status updates about some underlying physical processes (observed by them) to their corresponding destination nodes. For this setup, we employ age of information (AoI) as a performance metric to quantify freshness of the status updates when they reach the destination nodes. While most of the existing works are focused on the analysis of the temporal mean AoI in deterministic network topologies, we aim to characterize the spatial AoI performance disparity that is inherently present in wireless networks. In particular, we treat the temporal mean AoI as a random variable over space as the update delivery rate of a wireless link is a function of the interference field observed by its receiver. Our objective is to characterize the spatial distribution of the temporal mean AoI observed by the SD pairs by modeling them as a Poisson bipolar process. We first derive accurate bounds on the moments of the successful transmission probability of a status update which are then used to derive tight bounds on the moments as well as the spatial distribution of the temporal mean peak AoI. Our results provide useful design guidelines on the appropriate selection of different system parameters to minimize the mean peak AoI.

Abstract

— This paper studies the interplay between device-todevice (D2D) communications and real-time monitoring systems in a cellular-based Internet of Things (IoT) network. In particular, besides the possibility that the IoT devices communicate directly with each other in a D2D fashion, we consider that they frequently send time-sensitive information/status updates (about some underlying physical processes observed by them) to their nearest cellular base stations (BSs). Specifically, we model the locations of the IoT devices as a bipolar Poisson Point Process (PPP) and that of the BSs as another independent PPP. For this setup, we characterize the performance of D2D communications using the average network throughput metric whereas the performance of the real-time applications is quantified by the Age of Information (AoI) metric. The IoT devices are considered to employ a distance-proportional fractional power control scheme while sending status updates to their serving BSs. Hence, depending upon the maximum transmission power available, the IoT devices located within a certain distance from the BSs can only send status updates. This association strategy, in turn, forms the Johnson-Mehl (JM) tessellation, such that the IoT devices located in the JM cells are allowed to send status updates. The average network throughput is obtained by deriving the mean success probability for the D2D links. On the other hand, the temporal mean AoI of a given status update link can be treated as a random variable over space since its success delivery rate is a function of the interference field seen from its receiver. Thus, in order to capture the spatial disparity in the AoI performance, we characterize the spatial moments of the temporal mean AoI. In particular, we obtain these spatial moments by deriving the moments of both the conditional success probability and the conditional scheduling probability for status update links. Our results provide useful design guidelines on the efficient deployment of future massive IoT networks that will jointly support D2D communications and several cellular network-enabled real-time applications.

Abstract

—Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology is envisioned to enable a variety of real-time applications by interconnecting billions of sensors/devices. These IoT devices rely on low-power wide-area wireless connectivity for transmitting, mostly fixed- but small-size, status updates of the random processes observed by them. Owing to their ubiquity, cellular networks are seen as a natural candidate for providing reliable wireless connectivity to IoT devices. Given the massive number of IoT devices, enabling non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for the mobile users and IoT devices is appealing in terms of the efficient utilization of spectrum compared to the orthogonal multiple access (OMA). For instance, the uplink NOMA can also be configured such that the mobile users adapt their transmission rates depending upon the channel conditions while the IoT devices transmit at a fixed rate. For this setting, we analyze the ergodic capacity of the mobile users and the mean local delay of IoT devices using stochastic geometry. Our analysis demonstrates that the aforementioned NOMA configuration provides better ergodic capacity for mobile users compared to OMA when delay constraint of IoT devices is strict. We also show that NOMA supports a larger packet size at IoT devices than OMA under the same delay constraint.

Abstract

Pattern mining from graph transactional data (GTD) is an active area of research with applications in the domains of bioinformatics, chemical informatics and social networks. Existing works address the problem of mining frequent subgraphs from GTD. However, the knowledge concerning the coverage aspect of a set of subgraphs is also valuable for improving the performance of several applications. In this regard, we introduce the notion of subgraph coverage patterns (SCPs). Given a GTD, a subgraph coverage pattern is a set of subgraphs subject to relative frequency, coverage and overlap constraints provided by the user. We propose the Subgraph ID-based Flat Transactional (SIFT) framework for the efficient extraction of SCPs from a given GTD. Our performance evaluation using three real datasets demonstrates that our proposed SIFT framework is indeed capable of efficiently extracting SCPs from GTD. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SIFT through a case study in computer-aided drug design.

Abstract

Uber drivers in India are witnessing a slow emergence of everyday work formalization predominantly through their engagement with the Uber platform. If a vast segment of the informal employment sector in a country resembles gig work, can companies like Uber bring organisational ability and wage regularity to employment? Despite Uber’s economic model being challenged on several labour fronts in scholarship from the global North, we argue everyday interactions with the Uber platform are ushering organised work practices and improved financial stability for drivers who formerly hail from the informal employment sector in India. The everyday driving for Uber is filtered through a conceptual and practical work model drivers gain with due experience of Uber’s platform features. Our study uncovers the relationship between the controlling demands of the Uber platform and ensuing driver work adaptations. We present findings from a qualitative investigation of Uber ride-hailing services impacting drivers to 1. optimize earnings, 2. link work effort to wages, and 3. converge towards platform compliance. We posit engaged and persistent interactions with the Uber platform bring structure and formality to the profession of driving for Indian Uber drivers

Abstract

It is critical for aerial robots flying in city scale urban environments to make very quick estimates of a building depth with respect to itself. It should be done in a matter of few views to navigate itself, avoiding collisions with such a towering structure. As such, no one has attacked this problem. We bring together several modules combining deep learning and 3D vision to showcase a quick reconstruction in a few views. We exploit the inherent planar structure in the buildings (facades, windows) for this purpose. We evaluate the efficacy of our pipeline with various constraints and errors from multi-view geometry using ablation studies. We then retrieve the skyline of the buildings in synthetic as well as real-world scenes.

Abstract

Surface normal estimation is an essential component of several computer and robot vision pipelines. While this problem has been extensively studied, most approaches are geared towards indoor scenes and often rely on multiple modalities (depth, multiple views) for accurate estimation of normal maps. Outdoor scenes pose a greater challenge as they exhibit significant lighting variation, often contain occluders, and structures like building facades are often ridden with numerous windows and protrusions. Conventional supervised learning schemes excel in indoor scenes, but do not exhibit competitive performance when trained and deployed in outdoor environments. Furthermore, they involve complex network architectures and require many more trainable parameters. To tackle these challenges, we present an adversarial learning scheme that regularizes the output normal maps from a neural network to appear more realistic, by using a small number of precisely annotated examples. Our method presents a lightweight and simpler architecture, while improving performance by at least 1.5x across most metrics. We evaluate our approaches against the state-of-the-art on normal map estimation, on a synthetic and a real outdoor dataset, and observe significant performance enhancements.