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Edge computing is considered a key paradigm for supporting real-time applications over 5G networks, as hosting applications at the network edge can substantially reduce delays. A significant fraction of real-time applications over 5G are expected to be highly mobile applications. However, one challenge with hosting mobile applications on the network edge is ensuring that users continue to get low latency as they move across different locations. This requires the support to handover clients to different edge sites with negligible application delays. However, many edge applications are stateful and can experience significant downtime during state migration over 5G. This paper addresses the problem of enabling stateful mobile edge applications in 5G networks. We first identify the key architectural issues and then propose a new system design, EdgeWarp, that mitigates delays during mobility through proactive application state migration. To enable this, we extend the existing edge data stores with the design of a novel two-step application state synchronization protocol, that leverages the early prediction of the target edge host. Additionally, EdgeWarp prioritizes the handover of latency-sensitive edge applications by communicating their latency requirements to the 5G control plane at the beginning of a data session. Our evaluation with real edge applications shows up to a 15.4x reduction in application downtime under mobility. We have made our anonymized code publicly accessible here.

Infrastructure construction, often dubbed an "industry of industries," is closely linked with government spending and public procurement, offering significant opportunities for improved efficiency and productivity through better transparency and information access. By leveraging these opportunities, we can achieve notable gains in productivity, cost savings, and broader economic benefits. Our approach introduces an integrated software ecosystem utilizing Data Mesh and Service Mesh architectures. This system includes the largest training dataset for infrastructure and procurement, encompassing over 100 billion tokens, scientific publications, activities, and risk data, all structured by a systematic AI framework. Supported by a Knowledge Graph linked to domain-specific multi-agent tasks and Q&A capabilities, our platform standardizes and ingests diverse data sources, transforming them into structured knowledge. Leveraging large language models (LLMs) and automation, our system revolutionizes data structuring and knowledge creation, aiding decision-making in early-stage project planning, detailed research, market trend analysis, and qualitative assessments. Its web-scalable architecture delivers domain-curated information, enabling AI agents to facilitate reasoning and manage uncertainties, while preparing for future expansions with specialized agents targeting particular challenges. This integration of AI with domain expertise not only boosts efficiency and decision-making in construction and infrastructure but also establishes a framework for enhancing government efficiency and accelerating the transition of traditional industries to digital workflows. This work is poised to significantly influence AI-driven initiatives in this sector and guide best practices in AI Operations.

As AI systems become integral to critical operations across industries and services, ensuring their reliability and safety is essential. We offer a framework that integrates established reliability and resilience engineering principles into AI systems. By applying traditional metrics such as failure rate and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) along with resilience engineering and human reliability analysis, we propose an integrate framework to manage AI system performance, and prevent or efficiently recover from failures. Our work adapts classical engineering methods to AI systems and outlines a research agenda for future technical studies. We apply our framework to a real-world AI system, using system status data from platforms such as openAI, to demonstrate its practical applicability. This framework aligns with emerging global standards and regulatory frameworks, providing a methodology to enhance the trustworthiness of AI systems. Our aim is to guide policy, regulation, and the development of reliable, safe, and adaptable AI technologies capable of consistent performance in real-world environments.

Active learning (AL) optimizes data labeling efficiency by selecting the most informative instances for annotation. A key component in this procedure is an acquisition function that guides the selection process and identifies the suitable instances for labeling from the unlabeled pool. However, these acquisition methods suffer from high computational costs with large unlabeled data pools, posing a roadblock to their applicability on large datasets. To address this challenge and bridge this gap, we introduce a novel plug-and-play unlabeled data pruning strategy, ActivePrune, which leverages language models to prune the unlabeled pool. ActivePrune implements a two-stage pruning process: an initial fast evaluation using perplexity scores from an n-gram language model, followed by a high-quality selection using metrics for data quality computed through a quantized LLM. Additionally, to enhance the diversity in the unlabeled pool, we propose a novel perplexity reweighting method that systematically brings forward underrepresented instances for selection in subsequent labeling iterations. Experiments on translation, sentiment analysis, topic classification, and summarization tasks on four diverse datasets and four active learning strategies demonstrate that ActivePrune outperforms existing data pruning methods. Finally, we compare the selection quality $\leftrightarrow$ efficiency tradeoff of the data pruning methods and demonstrate that ActivePrune is computationally more efficient than other LLM score-based pruning methods, and provides up to 74% reduction in the end-to-end time required for active learning., Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures

The rapid growth of the Internet, driven by social media, web browsing, and video streaming, has made images central to the Web experience, resulting in significant data transfer and increased webpage sizes. Traditional image compression methods, while reducing bandwidth, often degrade image quality. This paper explores a novel approach using generative AI to reconstruct images at the edge or client-side. We develop a framework that leverages text prompts and provides additional conditioning inputs like Canny edges and color palettes to a text-to-image model, achieving up to 99.8% bandwidth savings in the best cases and 92.6% on average, while maintaining high perceptual similarity. Empirical analysis and a user study show that our method preserves image meaning and structure more effectively than traditional compression methods, offering a promising solution for reducing bandwidth usage and improving Internet affordability with minimal degradation in image quality.

Regression analysis is one of the most popularly used statistical technique which only measures the direct effect of independent variables on dependent variable. Path analysis looks for both direct and indirect effects of independent variables and may overcome several hurdles allied with regression models. It utilizes one or more structural regression equations in the model which are used to estimate the unknown parameters. The aim of this work is to study the path analysis models when the endogenous (dependent) variable and exogenous (independent) variables are linked through the elliptical copulas. Using well-organized numerical schemes, we investigate the performance of path models when direct and indirect effects are estimated applying classical ordinary least squares and copula-based regression approaches in different scenarios. Finally, two real data applications are also presented to demonstrate the performance of path analysis using copula approach., Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, 11 tables

The growing interest in satellite imagery has triggered the need for efficient mechanisms to extract valuable information from these vast data sources, providing deeper insights. Even though deep learning has shown significant progress in satellite image classification. Nevertheless, in the literature, only a few results can be found on weight initialization techniques. These techniques traditionally involve initializing the networks' weights before training on extensive datasets, distinct from fine-tuning the weights of pre-trained networks. In this study, a novel weight initialization method is proposed in the context of satellite image classification. The proposed weight initialization method is mathematically detailed during the forward and backward passes of the convolutional neural network (CNN) model. Extensive experiments are carried out using six real-world datasets. Comparative analyses with existing weight initialization techniques made on various well-known CNN models reveal that the proposed weight initialization technique outperforms the previous competitive techniques in classification accuracy. The complete code of the proposed technique, along with the obtained results, is available at https://github.com/WadiiBoulila/Weight-Initialization

Addressing uncertainty in Deep Learning (DL) is essential, as it enables the development of models that can make reliable predictions and informed decisions in complex, real-world environments where data may be incomplete or ambiguous. This paper introduces a novel algorithm leveraging Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) to integrate multiple pre-trained models to form an ensemble capable of providing more reliable and enhanced classifications. The main steps of the proposed method include feature extraction, mass function calculation, fusion, and expected utility calculation. Several experiments have been conducted on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, demonstrating superior classification accuracy of the proposed DST-based method, achieving improvements of 5.4% and 8.4%, respectively, compared to the best individual pre-trained models. Results highlight the potential of DST as a robust framework for managing uncertainties related to data when applying DL in real-world scenarios.

Active learning (AL) techniques reduce labeling costs for training neural machine translation (NMT) models by selecting smaller representative subsets from unlabeled data for annotation. Diversity sampling techniques select heterogeneous instances, while uncertainty sampling methods select instances with the highest model uncertainty. Both approaches have limitations - diversity methods may extract varied but trivial examples, while uncertainty sampling can yield repetitive, uninformative instances. To bridge this gap, we propose Hybrid Uncertainty and Diversity Sampling (HUDS), an AL strategy for domain adaptation in NMT that combines uncertainty and diversity for sentence selection. HUDS computes uncertainty scores for unlabeled sentences and subsequently stratifies them. It then clusters sentence embeddings within each stratum and computes diversity scores by distance to the centroid. A weighted hybrid score that combines uncertainty and diversity is then used to select the top instances for annotation in each AL iteration. Experiments on multi-domain German-English and French-English datasets demonstrate the better performance of HUDS over other strong AL baselines. We analyze the sentence selection with HUDS and show that it prioritizes diverse instances having high model uncertainty for annotation in early AL iterations., Comment: The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025)

The Red Palm Weevil (RPW), also known as the palm weevil, is considered among the world's most damaging insect pests of palms. Current detection techniques include the detection of symptoms of RPW using visual or sound inspection and chemical detection of volatile signatures generated by infested palm trees. However, efficient detection of RPW diseases at an early stage is considered one of the most challenging issues for cultivating date palms. In this paper, an efficient approach to the early detection of RPW is proposed. The proposed approach is based on RPW sound activities being recorded and analyzed. The first step involves the conversion of sound data into images based on a selected set of features. The second step involves the combination of images from the same sound file but computed by different features into a single image. The third step involves the application of different Deep Learning (DL) techniques to classify resulting images into two classes: infested and not infested. Experimental results show good performances of the proposed approach for RPW detection using different DL techniques, namely MobileNetV2, ResNet50V2, ResNet152V2, VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, DenseNet201, Xception, and InceptionV3. The proposed approach outperformed existing techniques for public datasets.

The Red Palm Weevil (RPW) is a highly destructive insect causing economic losses and impacting palm tree farming worldwide. This paper proposes an innovative approach for sustainable palm tree farming by utilizing advanced technologies for the early detection and management of RPW. Our approach combines computer vision, deep learning (DL), the Internet of Things (IoT), and geospatial data to detect and classify RPW-infested palm trees effectively. The main phases include; (1) DL classification using sound data from IoT devices, (2) palm tree detection using YOLOv8 on UAV images, and (3) RPW mapping using geospatial data. Our custom DL model achieves 100% precision and recall in detecting and localizing infested palm trees. Integrating geospatial data enables the creation of a comprehensive RPW distribution map for efficient monitoring and targeted management strategies. This technology-driven approach benefits agricultural authorities, farmers, and researchers in managing RPW infestations and safeguarding palm tree plantations' productivity.

Medical imaging is an essential tool for diagnosing various healthcare diseases and conditions. However, analyzing medical images is a complex and time-consuming task that requires expertise and experience. This article aims to design a decision support system to assist healthcare providers and patients in making decisions about diagnosing, treating, and managing health conditions. The proposed architecture contains three stages: 1) data collection and labeling, 2) model training, and 3) diagnosis report generation. The key idea is to train a deep learning model on a medical image dataset to extract four types of information: the type of image scan, the body part, the test image, and the results. This information is then fed into ChatGPT to generate automatic diagnostics. The proposed system has the potential to enhance decision-making, reduce costs, and improve the capabilities of healthcare providers. The efficacy of the proposed system is analyzed by conducting extensive experiments on a large medical image dataset. The experimental outcomes exhibited promising performance for automatic diagnosis through medical images.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning technique that trains a shared model over distributed data in a privacy-preserving manner. Unfortunately, FL's performance degrades when there is (i) variability in client characteristics in terms of computational and memory resources (system heterogeneity) and (ii) non-IID data distribution across clients (statistical heterogeneity). For example, slow clients get dropped in FL schemes, such as Federated Averaging (FedAvg), which not only limits overall learning but also biases results towards fast clients. We propose FedPrune; a system that tackles this challenge by pruning the global model for slow clients based on their device characteristics. By doing so, slow clients can train a small model quickly and participate in FL which increases test accuracy as well as fairness. By using insights from Central Limit Theorem, FedPrune incorporates a new aggregation technique that achieves robust performance over non-IID data. Experimental evaluation shows that Fed- Prune provides robust convergence and better fairness compared to Federated Averaging.

Self-supervised speech recognition models require considerable labeled training data for learning high-fidelity representations for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which is computationally demanding and time-consuming. We consider the task of identifying an optimal subset of data for efficient fine-tuning in self-supervised speech models for ASR. We discover that the dataset pruning strategies used in vision tasks for sampling the most informative examples do not perform better than random subset selection on fine-tuning self-supervised ASR. We then present the COWERAGE algorithm for representative subset selection in self-supervised ASR. COWERAGE is based on our finding that ensuring the coverage of examples based on training Word Error Rate (WER) in the early training epochs leads to better generalization performance. Extensive experiments with the wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT model on TIMIT, Librispeech, and LJSpeech datasets show the effectiveness of COWERAGE and its transferability across models, with up to 17% relative WER improvement over existing dataset pruning methods and random sampling. We also demonstrate that the coverage of training instances in terms of WER values ensures the inclusion of phonemically diverse examples, leading to better test accuracy in self-supervised speech recognition models., Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a global health crisis. Public spaces need to be safeguarded from the adverse effects of this pandemic. Wearing a facemask becomes one of the effective protection solutions adopted by many governments. Manual real-time monitoring of facemask wearing for a large group of people is becoming a difficult task. The goal of this paper is to use deep learning (DL), which has shown excellent results in many real-life applications, to ensure efficient real-time facemask detection. The proposed approach is based on two steps. An off-line step aiming to create a DL model that is able to detect and locate facemasks and whether they are appropriately worn. An online step that deploys the DL model at edge computing in order to detect masks in real-time. In this study, we propose to use MobileNetV2 to detect facemask in real-time. Several experiments are conducted and show good performances of the proposed approach (99% for training and testing accuracy). In addition, several comparisons with many state-of-the-art models namely ResNet50, DenseNet, and VGG16 show good performance of the MobileNetV2 in terms of training time and accuracy.

Fake news is a growing problem in developing countries with potentially far-reaching consequences. We conduct a randomized experiment in urban Pakistan to evaluate the effectiveness of two educational interventions to counter misinformation among low-digital literacy populations. We do not find a significant effect of video-based general educational messages about misinformation. However, when such messages are augmented with personalized feedback based on individuals' past engagement with fake news, we find an improvement of 0.14 standard deviations in identifying fake news. We also find negative but insignificant effects on identifying true news, driven by female respondents. Our results suggest that educational interventions can enable information discernment but their effectiveness critically depends on how well their features and delivery are customized for the population of interest.

Fake news and misinformation are one of the most significant challenges brought about by advances in communication technologies. We chose to research the spread of fake news in Pakistan because of some unfortunate incidents that took place during 2020. These included the downplaying of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, and protests by right-wing political movements. We observed that fake news and misinformation contributed significantly to these events and especially affected low-literate and low-income populations. We conducted a cross-platform comparison of misinformation on WhatsApp, Twitter and YouTube with a primary focus on messages shared in public WhatsApp groups, and analysed the characteristics of misinformation, techniques used to make is believable, and how users respond to it. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to compare misinformation on all three platforms in Pakistan. Data collected over a span of eight months helped us identify fake news and misinformation related to politics, religion and health, among other categories. Common elements which were used by fake news creators in Pakistan to make false content seem believable included: appeals to emotion, conspiracy theories, political and religious polarization, incorrect facts and impersonation of credible sources., Comment: i want to further work on it

Duplication can be a powerful strategy for overcoming stragglers in cloud services, but is often used conservatively because of the risk of overloading the system. We present duplicate-aware scheduling or DAS, which makes duplication safe and easy to use, by leveraging the two well-known primitives of prioritization and purging. To support DAS across diverse layers of a cloud system (e.g., network, storage, etc), we propose the D-Stage abstraction, which decouples the duplication policy from the mechanism, and facilitates working with legacy layers of a system. Using this abstraction, we evaluate the benefits of DAS for two data parallel applications (HDFS, an in-memory workload generator) and a network function (snort-based IDS cluster). Our experiments on the public cloud and Emulab show that DAS is safe to use, and the tail latency improvement holds across a wide range of workloads

The present paper reviews selected aspects of the Guliyev's hypothesis about the massive celestial body at a distance of 250-400 AU from the Sun as well as the factor of comets transfer. It is shown, that the conjecture of the point around which cometary perihelia might be concentrated, is not consistent. On the issue of perihelia distribution, priority should be given to the assumption that there is a plane or planes around which the concentration takes place. A total of 24 comet groups were investigated. In almost all cases there are detected two types of planes or zones: the first one is very close to the ecliptic, another one is about perpendicular to it and has the parameters: ip = 86{\deg}, {\Omega}p = 271.7{\deg}. The existence of the first area appears to be related to the influence of giant planets. The Guliyev's hypothesis says that there is a massive perturber in the second zone, at a distance of 250-400 AU. It shows that number of aphelia and distant nodes of cometary orbits in this interval significantly exceeds the expected background. Analysis of the angular parameters of the comets, calculated relative to the second plane (reference point is the ascending node of a large circle) displays clear patterns: shortage of comets near i' = 180{\deg}, excess of them near B'= 0{\deg} (ecliptic latitude of perihelion) and shortage near B'=-90{\deg}. The analysis also shows irregularity of distant nodes, overpopulation of perihelion longitudes in the range 350{\deg}-20{\deg}. Plotted distributions of aphelia N(Q) and distant cometary nodes clearly indicate a perturbation of the natural course near 300 AU. On the basis of collected cometary data, we have estimated orbital elements of the hypothetical planetary body: a = 337 AU; e = 0.14; {\omega} = 57{\deg}; {\Omega} = 272.7{\deg}; i = 86{\deg}.

Vehicular WiFi is different from conventional WiFi access. Firstly, as the connections arise opportunistically, they are short lived and intermittent. Secondly, at vehicular speeds channel conditions change rapidly. Under these conditions, the MAC bit rate adaptation plays a critical role to ensure that devices can maximize throughput performance. The goal of this work is to gain a deeper understanding of current MAC bit rate adaptation algorithms and their interaction with higher layer protocols under vehicular settings. Towards this end, we evaluate the performance of four MAC bit rate adaptation algorithms; SampleRate, AMRR, Minstrel, and RRAA, and their interactions with transport layer protocols such as TCP in real world vehicular settings. Our experimental study reveals that in general these algorithm perform poorly in vehicular settings, and can have an extremely adverse impact on TCP performance., Comment: This is an undergrad research project manuscript (January 2010), prepared under the supervision of Dr. Zartash Afzal Uzmi. Institution: School of Science and Engineering (SSE), Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan