Mobile Crowd Sensing in Edge Computing Environment

158008-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The mobile crowdsensing (MCS) applications leverage the user data to derive useful information by data-driven evaluation of innovative user contexts and gathering of information at a high data rate. Such access to context-rich data can potentially enable computationally intensive crowd-sourcing

The mobile crowdsensing (MCS) applications leverage the user data to derive useful information by data-driven evaluation of innovative user contexts and gathering of information at a high data rate. Such access to context-rich data can potentially enable computationally intensive crowd-sourcing applications such as tracking a missing person or capturing a highlight video of an event. Using snippets and pictures captured from multiple mobile phone cameras with specific contexts can improve the data acquired in such applications. These MCS applications require efficient processing and analysis to generate results in real time. A human user, mobile device and their interactions cause a change in context on the mobile device affecting the quality contextual data that is gathered. Usage of MCS data in real-time mobile applications is challenging due to the complex inter-relationship between: a) availability of context, context is available with the mobile phones and not with the cloud, b) cost of data transfer to remote cloud servers, both in terms of communication time and energy, and c) availability of local computational resources on the mobile phone, computation may lead to rapid battery drain or increased response time. The resource-constrained mobile devices need to offload some of their computation.



This thesis proposes ContextAiDe an end-end architecture for data-driven distributed applications aware of human mobile interactions using Edge computing. Edge processing supports real-time applications by reducing communication costs. The goal is to optimize the quality and the cost of acquiring the data using a) modeling and prediction of mobile user contexts, b) efficient strategies of scheduling application tasks on heterogeneous devices including multi-core devices such as GPU c) power-aware scheduling of virtual machine (VM) applications in cloud infrastructure e.g. elastic VMs. ContextAiDe middleware is integrated into the mobile application via Android API. The evaluation consists of overheads and costs analysis in the scenario of ``perpetrator tracking" application on the cloud, fog servers, and mobile devices. LifeMap data sets containing actual sensor data traces from mobile devices are used to simulate the application run for large scale evaluation.
Date Created
2019
Agent

Evaluation of a Guided Machine Learning Approach for Pharmacokinetic Modeling

155869-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
A medical control system, a real-time controller, uses a predictive model of human physiology for estimation and controlling of drug concentration in the human body. Artificial Pancreas (AP) is an example of the control system which regulates blood glucose in

A medical control system, a real-time controller, uses a predictive model of human physiology for estimation and controlling of drug concentration in the human body. Artificial Pancreas (AP) is an example of the control system which regulates blood glucose in T1D patients. The predictive model in the control system such as Bergman Minimal Model (BMM) is based on physiological modeling technique which separates the body into the number of anatomical compartments and each compartment's effect on body system is determined by their physiological parameters. These models are less accurate due to unaccounted physiological factors effecting target values. Estimation of a large number of physiological parameters through optimization algorithm is computationally expensive and stuck in local minima. This work evaluates a machine learning(ML) framework which has an ML model guided through physiological models. A support vector regression model guided through modified BMM is implemented for estimation of blood glucose levels. Physical activity and Endogenous glucose production are key factors that contribute in the increased hypoglycemia events thus, this work modifies Bergman Minimal Model ( Bergman et al. 1981) for more accurate estimation of blood glucose levels. Results show that the SVR outperformed BMM by 0.164 average RMSE for 7 different patients in the free-living scenario. This computationally inexpensive data driven model can potentially learn parameters more accurately with time. In conclusion, advised prediction model is promising in modeling the physiology elements in living systems.
Date Created
2017
Agent

Evidence-based development of trustworthy mobile medical apps

154187-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Widespread adoption of smartphone based Mobile Medical Apps (MMAs) is opening new avenues for innovation, bringing MMAs to the forefront of low cost healthcare delivery. These apps often control human physiology and work on sensitive data. Thus it is necessary

Widespread adoption of smartphone based Mobile Medical Apps (MMAs) is opening new avenues for innovation, bringing MMAs to the forefront of low cost healthcare delivery. These apps often control human physiology and work on sensitive data. Thus it is necessary to have evidences of their trustworthiness i.e. maintaining privacy of health data, long term operation of wearable sensors and ensuring no harm to the user before actual marketing. Traditionally, clinical studies are used to validate the trustworthiness of medical systems. However, they can take long time and could potentially harm the user. Such evidences can be generated using simulations and mathematical analysis. These methods involve estimating the MMA interactions with human physiology. However, the nonlinear nature of human physiology makes the estimation challenging.

This research analyzes and develops MMA software while considering its interactions with human physiology to assure trustworthiness. A novel app development methodology is used to objectively evaluate trustworthiness of a MMA by generating evidences using automatic techniques. It involves developing the Health-Dev β tool to generate a) evidences of trustworthiness of MMAs and b) requirements assured code generation for vulnerable components of the MMA without hindering the app development process. In this method, all requests from MMAs pass through a trustworthy entity, Trustworthy Data Manager which checks if the app request satisfies the MMA requirements. This method is intended to expedite the design to marketing process of MMAs. The objectives of this research is to develop models, tools and theory for evidence generation and can be divided into the following themes:

• Sustainable design configuration estimation of MMAs: Developing an optimization framework which can generate sustainable and safe sensor configuration while considering interactions of the MMA with the environment.

• Evidence generation using simulation and formal methods: Developing models and tools to verify safety properties of the MMA design to ensure no harm to the human physiology.

• Automatic code generation for MMAs: Investigating methods for automatically

• Performance analysis of trustworthy data manager: Evaluating response time generating trustworthy software for vulnerable components of a MMA and evidences.performance of trustworthy data manager under interactions from non-MMA smartphone apps.
Date Created
2015
Agent

Sustainable cloud computing

153220-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Energy consumption of the data centers worldwide is rapidly growing fueled by ever-increasing demand for Cloud computing applications ranging from social networking to e-commerce. Understandably, ensuring energy-efficiency and sustainability of Cloud data centers without compromising performance is important for both

Energy consumption of the data centers worldwide is rapidly growing fueled by ever-increasing demand for Cloud computing applications ranging from social networking to e-commerce. Understandably, ensuring energy-efficiency and sustainability of Cloud data centers without compromising performance is important for both economic and environmental reasons. This dissertation develops a cyber-physical multi-tier server and workload management architecture which operates at the local and the global (geo-distributed) data center level. We devise optimization frameworks for each tier to optimize energy consumption, energy cost and carbon footprint of the data centers. The proposed solutions are aware of various energy management tradeoffs that manifest due to the cyber-physical interactions in data centers, while providing provable guarantee on the solutions' computation efficiency and energy/cost efficiency. The local data center level energy management takes into account the impact of server consolidation on the cooling energy, avoids cooling-computing power tradeoff, and optimizes the total energy (computing and cooling energy) considering the data centers' technology trends (servers' power proportionality and cooling system power efficiency). The global data center level cost management explores the diversity of the data centers to minimize the utility cost while satisfying the carbon cap requirement of the Cloud and while dealing with the adversity of the prediction error on the data center parameters. Finally, the synergy of the local and the global data center energy and cost optimization is shown to help towards achieving carbon neutrality (net-zero) in a cost efficient manner.
Date Created
2014
Agent

Collaboration of mobile and pervasive devices for embedded networked systems

149518-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Embedded Networked Systems (ENS) consist of various devices, which are embedded into physical objects (e.g., home appliances, vehicles, buidlings, people). With rapid advances in processing and networking technologies, these devices can be fully connected and pervasive in the environment. The

Embedded Networked Systems (ENS) consist of various devices, which are embedded into physical objects (e.g., home appliances, vehicles, buidlings, people). With rapid advances in processing and networking technologies, these devices can be fully connected and pervasive in the environment. The devices can interact with the physical world, collaborate to share resources, and provide context-aware services. This dissertation focuses on collaboration in ENS to provide smart services. However, there are several challenges because the system must be - scalable to a huge number of devices; robust against noise, loss and failure; and secure despite communicating with strangers. To address these challenges, first, the dissertation focuses on designing a mobile gateway called Mobile Edge Computing Device (MECD) for Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN), a type of ENS. In order to reduce communication overhead with the server, an MECD is designed to provide local and distributed management of a network and data associated with a moving object (e.g., a person, car, pet). Furthermore, it supports collaboration with neighboring MECDs. The MECD is developed and tested for monitoring containers during shipment from Singapore to Taiwan and reachability to the remote server was a problem because of variance in connectivity (caused by high temperature variance) and high interference. The unreachability problem is addressed by using a mesh networking approach for collaboration of MECDs in sending data to a server. A hierarchical architecture is proposed in this regard to provide multi-level collaboration using dynamic mesh networks of MECDs at one layer. The mesh network is evaluated for an intelligent container scenario and results show complete connectivity with the server for temperature range from 25°C to 65°C. Finally, the authentication of mobile and pervasive devices in ENS for secure collaboration is investigated. This is a challenging problem because mutually unknown devices must be verified without knowledge of each other's identity. A self-organizing region-based authentication technique is proposed that uses environmental sound to autonomously verify if two devices are within the same region. The experimental results show sound could accurately authenticate devices within a small region.
Date Created
2010
Agent