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Sheep Facial Pain Assessment Under Weighted Graph Neural Networks
Authors:
Alam Noor,
Luis Almeida,
Mohamed Daoudi,
Kai Li,
Eduardo Tovar
Abstract:
Accurately recognizing and assessing pain in sheep is key to discern animal health and mitigating harmful situations. However, such accuracy is limited by the ability to manage automatic monitoring of pain in those animals. Facial expression scoring is a widely used and useful method to evaluate pain in both humans and other living beings. Researchers also analyzed the facial expressions of sheep…
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Accurately recognizing and assessing pain in sheep is key to discern animal health and mitigating harmful situations. However, such accuracy is limited by the ability to manage automatic monitoring of pain in those animals. Facial expression scoring is a widely used and useful method to evaluate pain in both humans and other living beings. Researchers also analyzed the facial expressions of sheep to assess their health state and concluded that facial landmark detection and pain level prediction are essential. For this purpose, we propose a novel weighted graph neural network (WGNN) model to link sheep's detected facial landmarks and define pain levels. Furthermore, we propose a new sheep facial landmarks dataset that adheres to the parameters of the Sheep Facial Expression Scale (SPFES). Currently, there is no comprehensive performance benchmark that specifically evaluates the use of graph neural networks (GNNs) on sheep facial landmark data to detect and measure pain levels. The YOLOv8n detector architecture achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 59.30% with the sheep facial landmarks dataset, among seven other detection models. The WGNN framework has an accuracy of 92.71% for tracking multiple facial parts expressions with the YOLOv8n lightweight on-board device deployment-capable model.
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Submitted 2 June, 2025;
originally announced June 2025.
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Fusion Flow-enhanced Graph Pooling Residual Networks for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Surveillance in Day and Night Dual Visions
Authors:
Alam Noor,
Kai Li,
Eduardo Tovar,
Pei Zhang,
Bo Wei
Abstract:
Recognizing unauthorized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) within designated no-fly zones throughout the day and night is of paramount importance, where the unauthorized UAVs pose a substantial threat to both civil and military aviation safety. However, recognizing UAVs day and night with dual-vision cameras is nontrivial, since red-green-blue (RGB) images suffer from a low detection rate under an i…
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Recognizing unauthorized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) within designated no-fly zones throughout the day and night is of paramount importance, where the unauthorized UAVs pose a substantial threat to both civil and military aviation safety. However, recognizing UAVs day and night with dual-vision cameras is nontrivial, since red-green-blue (RGB) images suffer from a low detection rate under an insufficient light condition, such as on cloudy or stormy days, while black-and-white infrared (IR) images struggle to capture UAVs that overlap with the background at night. In this paper, we propose a new optical flow-assisted graph-pooling residual network (OF-GPRN), which significantly enhances the UAV detection rate in day and night dual visions. The proposed OF-GPRN develops a new optical fusion to remove superfluous backgrounds, which improves RGB/IR imaging clarity. Furthermore, OF-GPRN extends optical fusion by incorporating a graph residual split attention network and a feature pyramid, which refines the perception of UAVs, leading to a higher success rate in UAV detection. A comprehensive performance evaluation is conducted using a benchmark UAV catch dataset. The results indicate that the proposed OF-GPRN elevates the UAV mean average precision (mAP) detection rate to 87.8%, marking a 17.9% advancement compared to the residual graph neural network (ResGCN)-based approach.
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Submitted 17 July, 2024;
originally announced July 2024.
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Learning and Motivational Impact of Game-Based Learning: Comparing Face-to-Face and Online Formats on Computer Science Education
Authors:
Daniel López-Fernández,
Aldo Gordillo,
Jennifer Pérez,
Edmundo Tovar
Abstract:
Contribution: This article analyzes the learning and motivational impact of teacher-authored educational video games on computer science education and compares its effectiveness in both face-to-face and online (remote) formats. This work presents comparative data and findings obtained from 217 students who played the game in a face-to-face format (control group) and 104 students who played the gam…
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Contribution: This article analyzes the learning and motivational impact of teacher-authored educational video games on computer science education and compares its effectiveness in both face-to-face and online (remote) formats. This work presents comparative data and findings obtained from 217 students who played the game in a face-to-face format (control group) and 104 students who played the game in an online format (experimental group). Background: Serious video games have been proven effective at computer science education, however, it is still unknown whether the effectiveness of these games is the same regardless of their format, face-to-face or online. Moreover, the usage of games created through authoring tools has barely been explored. Research Questions: Are teacher-authored educational video games effective in terms of learning and motivation for computer science students? Does the effectiveness of teacher-authored educational video games depend on whether they are used in a face-to-face or online format? Methodology: A quasi-experiment has been conducted by using three instruments (pre-test, post-test, and questionnaire) with the purpose of comparing the effectiveness of game-based learning in face-to-face and online formats. A total of 321 computer science students played a teacher-authored educational video game aimed to learn about software design. Findings: The results reveal that teacher-authored educational video games are highly effective in terms of knowledge acquisition and motivation both in face-to-face and online formats. The results also show that some students' perceptions were more positive when a face-to-face format was used.
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Submitted 10 July, 2024;
originally announced July 2024.
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A Novel Defense Against Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning: LayerCAM Augmented with Autoencoder
Authors:
Jingjing Zheng,
Xin Yuan,
Kai Li,
Wei Ni,
Eduardo Tovar,
Jon Crowcroft
Abstract:
Recent attacks on federated learning (FL) can introduce malicious model updates that circumvent widely adopted Euclidean distance-based detection methods. This paper proposes a novel defense strategy, referred to as LayerCAM-AE, designed to counteract model poisoning in federated learning. The LayerCAM-AE puts forth a new Layer Class Activation Mapping (LayerCAM) integrated with an autoencoder (AE…
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Recent attacks on federated learning (FL) can introduce malicious model updates that circumvent widely adopted Euclidean distance-based detection methods. This paper proposes a novel defense strategy, referred to as LayerCAM-AE, designed to counteract model poisoning in federated learning. The LayerCAM-AE puts forth a new Layer Class Activation Mapping (LayerCAM) integrated with an autoencoder (AE), significantly enhancing detection capabilities. Specifically, LayerCAM-AE generates a heat map for each local model update, which is then transformed into a more compact visual format. The autoencoder is designed to process the LayerCAM heat maps from the local model updates, improving their distinctiveness and thereby increasing the accuracy in spotting anomalous maps and malicious local models. To address the risk of misclassifications with LayerCAM-AE, a voting algorithm is developed, where a local model update is flagged as malicious if its heat maps are consistently suspicious over several rounds of communication. Extensive tests of LayerCAM-AE on the SVHN and CIFAR-100 datasets are performed under both Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) and non-IID settings in comparison with existing ResNet-50 and REGNETY-800MF defense models. Experimental results show that LayerCAM-AE increases detection rates (Recall: 1.0, Precision: 1.0, FPR: 0.0, Accuracy: 1.0, F1 score: 1.0, AUC: 1.0) and test accuracy in FL, surpassing the performance of both the ResNet-50 and REGNETY-800MF. Our code is available at: https://github.com/jjzgeeks/LayerCAM-AE
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Submitted 2 June, 2024;
originally announced June 2024.
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Age of Information Minimization using Multi-agent UAVs based on AI-Enhanced Mean Field Resource Allocation
Authors:
Yousef Emami,
Hao Gao,
Kai Li,
Luis Almeida,
Eduardo Tovar,
Zhu Han
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms play an effective role in timely data collection from ground sensors in remote and hostile areas. Optimizing the collective behavior of swarms can improve data collection performance. This paper puts forth a new mean field flight resource allocation optimization to minimize age of information (AoI) of sensory data, where balancing the trade-off between the UAVs…
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Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms play an effective role in timely data collection from ground sensors in remote and hostile areas. Optimizing the collective behavior of swarms can improve data collection performance. This paper puts forth a new mean field flight resource allocation optimization to minimize age of information (AoI) of sensory data, where balancing the trade-off between the UAVs movements and AoI is formulated as a mean field game (MFG). The MFG optimization yields an expansive solution space encompassing continuous state and action, resulting in significant computational complexity. To address practical situations, we propose, a new mean field hybrid proximal policy optimization (MF-HPPO) scheme to minimize the average AoI by optimizing the UAV's trajectories and data collection scheduling of the ground sensors given mixed continuous and discrete actions. Furthermore, a long short term memory (LSTM) is leveraged in MF-HPPO to predict the time-varying network state and stabilize the training. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed MF-HPPO reduces the average AoI by up to 45 percent and 57 percent in the considered simulation setting, as compared to multi-agent deep Q-learning (MADQN) method and non-learning random algorithm, respectively.
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Submitted 2 May, 2024; v1 submitted 24 April, 2024;
originally announced May 2024.
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Exploring Deep Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Federated Learning for Online Resource Allocation in Privacy-Persevering EdgeIoT
Authors:
Jingjing Zheng,
Kai Li,
Naram Mhaisen,
Wei Ni,
Eduardo Tovar,
Mohsen Guizani
Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) has been increasingly considered to preserve data training privacy from eavesdropping attacks in mobile edge computing-based Internet of Thing (EdgeIoT). On the one hand, the learning accuracy of FL can be improved by selecting the IoT devices with large datasets for training, which gives rise to a higher energy consumption. On the other hand, the energy consumption can be…
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Federated learning (FL) has been increasingly considered to preserve data training privacy from eavesdropping attacks in mobile edge computing-based Internet of Thing (EdgeIoT). On the one hand, the learning accuracy of FL can be improved by selecting the IoT devices with large datasets for training, which gives rise to a higher energy consumption. On the other hand, the energy consumption can be reduced by selecting the IoT devices with small datasets for FL, resulting in a falling learning accuracy. In this paper, we formulate a new resource allocation problem for privacy-persevering EdgeIoT to balance the learning accuracy of FL and the energy consumption of the IoT device. We propose a new federated learning-enabled twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (FL-DLT3) framework to achieve the optimal accuracy and energy balance in a continuous domain. Furthermore, long short term memory (LSTM) is leveraged in FL-DLT3 to predict the time-varying network state while FL-DLT3 is trained to select the IoT devices and allocate the transmit power. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed FL-DLT3 achieves fast convergence (less than 100 iterations) while the FL accuracy-to-energy consumption ratio is improved by 51.8% compared to existing state-of-the-art benchmark.
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Submitted 18 May, 2022; v1 submitted 15 February, 2022;
originally announced February 2022.
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Design and Implementation of Secret Key Agreement for Platoon-based Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems
Authors:
Kai Li,
Wei Ni,
Yousef Emami,
Yiran Shen,
Ricardo Severino,
David Pereira,
Eduardo Tovar
Abstract:
In platoon-based vehicular cyber-physical system (PVCPS), a lead vehicle that is responsible for managing the platoon's moving directions and velocity periodically disseminates control messages to the vehicles that follow. Securing wireless transmissions of the messages between the vehicles is critical for privacy and confidentiality of platoon's driving pattern. However, due to the broadcast natu…
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In platoon-based vehicular cyber-physical system (PVCPS), a lead vehicle that is responsible for managing the platoon's moving directions and velocity periodically disseminates control messages to the vehicles that follow. Securing wireless transmissions of the messages between the vehicles is critical for privacy and confidentiality of platoon's driving pattern. However, due to the broadcast nature of radio channels, the transmissions are vulnerable to eavesdropping. In this paper, we propose a cooperative secret key agreement (CoopKey) scheme for encrypting/decrypting the control messages, where the vehicles in PVCPS generate a unified secret key based on the quantized fading channel randomness. Channel quantization intervals are optimized by dynamic programming to minimize the mismatch of keys. A platooning testbed is built with autonomous robotic vehicles, where a TelosB wireless node is used for onboard data processing and multi-hop dissemination. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that CoopKey achieves significantly low secret bit mismatch rate in a variety of settings. Moreover, the standard NIST test suite is employed to verify randomness of the generated keys, where the p-values of our CoopKey pass all the randomness tests. We also evaluate CoopKey with an extended platoon size via simulations to investigate the effect of system scalability on performance.
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Submitted 21 October, 2019;
originally announced November 2019.
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On-board Deep Q-Network for UAV-assisted Online Power Transfer and Data Collection
Authors:
Kai Li,
Wei Ni,
Eduardo Tovar
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Microwave Power Transfer (MPT) capability provide a practical means to deploy a large number of wireless powered sensing devices into areas with no access to persistent power supplies. The UAV can charge the sensing devices remotely and harvest their data. A key challenge is online MPT and data collection in the presence of on-board control of a UAV (e.g., patr…
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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Microwave Power Transfer (MPT) capability provide a practical means to deploy a large number of wireless powered sensing devices into areas with no access to persistent power supplies. The UAV can charge the sensing devices remotely and harvest their data. A key challenge is online MPT and data collection in the presence of on-board control of a UAV (e.g., patrolling velocity) for preventing battery drainage and data queue overflow of the sensing devices, while up-to-date knowledge on battery level and data queue of the devices is not available at the UAV. In this paper, an on-board deep Q-network is developed to minimize the overall data packet loss of the sensing devices, by optimally deciding the device to be charged and interrogated for data collection, and the instantaneous patrolling velocity of the UAV. Specifically, we formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with the states of battery level and data queue length of sensing devices, channel conditions, and waypoints given the trajectory of the UAV; and solve it optimally with Q-learning. Furthermore, we propose the on-board deep Q-network that can enlarge the state space of the MDP, and a deep reinforcement learning based scheduling algorithm that asymptotically derives the optimal solution online, even when the UAV has only outdated knowledge on the MDP states. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed deep reinforcement learning algorithm reduces the packet loss by at least 69.2%, as compared to existing non-learning greedy algorithms.
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Submitted 4 June, 2019;
originally announced June 2019.
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Towards a Realistic Simulation Framework for Vehicular Platooning Applications
Authors:
Bruno Vieira,
Ricardo Severino,
Anis Koubaa,
Eduardo Tovar
Abstract:
Cooperative vehicle platooning applications increasingly demand realistic simulation tools to ease their validation and to bridge the gap between development and real-world deployment. However, their complexity and cost often hinder its validation in the real world. In this paper, we propose a realistic simulation framework for vehicular platoons that integrates Gazebo with OMNeT++ over Robot Oper…
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Cooperative vehicle platooning applications increasingly demand realistic simulation tools to ease their validation and to bridge the gap between development and real-world deployment. However, their complexity and cost often hinder its validation in the real world. In this paper, we propose a realistic simulation framework for vehicular platoons that integrates Gazebo with OMNeT++ over Robot Operating System (ROS) to support the simulation of realistic scenarios of autonomous vehicular platoons and their cooperative control.
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Submitted 5 April, 2019;
originally announced April 2019.
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LCD: Low Latency Command Dissemination for A Platoon of Vehicles
Authors:
Kai Li,
Wei Ni,
Eduardo Tovar,
Mohsen Guizani
Abstract:
In a vehicular platoon, a lead vehicle that is responsible for managing the platoon's moving directions and velocity periodically disseminates control commands to following vehicles based on vehicle-to-vehicle communications. However, reducing command dissemination latency with multiple vehicles while ensuring successful message delivery to the tail vehicle is challenging. We propose a new linear…
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In a vehicular platoon, a lead vehicle that is responsible for managing the platoon's moving directions and velocity periodically disseminates control commands to following vehicles based on vehicle-to-vehicle communications. However, reducing command dissemination latency with multiple vehicles while ensuring successful message delivery to the tail vehicle is challenging. We propose a new linear dynamic programming algorithm using backward induction and interchange arguments to minimize the dissemination latency of the vehicles. Furthermore, a closed form of dissemination latency in vehicular platoon is obtained by utilizing Markov chain with M/M/1 queuing model. Simulation results confirm that the proposed dynamic programming algorithm improves the dissemination rate by at least 50.9%, compared to similar algorithms in the literature. Moreover, it also approximates the best performance with the maximum gap of up to 0.2 second in terms of latency.
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Submitted 18 January, 2018;
originally announced January 2018.
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Discovery of potential collaboration networks from open knowledge sources
Authors:
Nelson Piedra,
Janneth Chicaiza,
Jorge Lopez-Vargas,
Edmundo Tovar
Abstract:
Scientific publishing conveys the outputs of an academic or research activity, in this sense; it also reflects the efforts and issues in which people engage. To identify potential collaborative networks one of the simplest approaches is to leverage the co-authorship relations. In this approach, semantic and hierarchic relationships defined by a Knowledge Organization System are used in order to im…
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Scientific publishing conveys the outputs of an academic or research activity, in this sense; it also reflects the efforts and issues in which people engage. To identify potential collaborative networks one of the simplest approaches is to leverage the co-authorship relations. In this approach, semantic and hierarchic relationships defined by a Knowledge Organization System are used in order to improve the system's ability to recommend potential networks beyond the lexical or syntactic analysis of the topics or concepts that are of interest to academics.
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Submitted 8 November, 2017;
originally announced November 2017.
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Mixed-criticality Scheduling with Dynamic Redistribution of Shared Cache
Authors:
Muhammad Ali Awan,
Konstantinos Bletsas,
Pedro F. Souto,
Benny Akesson,
Eduardo Tovar
Abstract:
The design of mixed-criticality systems often involvespainful tradeoffs between safety guarantees and performance.However, the use of more detailed architectural modelsin the design and analysis of scheduling arrangements for mixedcriticalitysystems can provide greater confidence in the analysis,but also opportunities for better performance. Motivated by thisview, we propose an extension of Vestal…
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The design of mixed-criticality systems often involvespainful tradeoffs between safety guarantees and performance.However, the use of more detailed architectural modelsin the design and analysis of scheduling arrangements for mixedcriticalitysystems can provide greater confidence in the analysis,but also opportunities for better performance. Motivated by thisview, we propose an extension of Vestal 19s model for mixedcriticalitymulticore systems that (i) accounts for the per-taskpartitioning of the last-level cache and (ii) supports the dynamicreassignment, for better schedulability, of cache portions initiallyreserved for lower-criticality tasks to the higher-criticalitytasks, when the system switches to high-criticality mode. Tothis model, we apply partitioned EDF scheduling with Ekbergand Yi 19s deadline-scaling technique. Our schedulability analysisand scalefactor calculation is cognisant of the cache resourcesassigned to each task, by using WCET estimates that take intoaccount these resources. It is hence able to leverage the dynamicreconfiguration of the cache partitioning, at mode change, forbetter performance, in terms of provable schedulability. We alsopropose heuristics for partitioning the cache in low- and highcriticalitymode, that promote schedulability. Our experimentswith synthetic task sets, indicate tangible improvements inschedulability compared to a baseline cache-aware arrangementwhere there is no redistribution of cache resources from low- tohigh-criticality tasks in the event of a mode change.
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Submitted 28 April, 2017;
originally announced April 2017.