Context and motivation: The development and operation of critical software that contains machine learning (ML) models requires diligence and established processes. Especially the training data used during the development of ML models have major influences on the later behaviour of the system. Runtime monitors are used to provide guarantees for that behaviour. Question / problem: We see major uncertainty in how to specify training data and runtime monitoring for critical ML models and by this specifying the final functionality of the system. In this interview-based study we investigate the underlying challenges for these difficulties. Principal ideas/results: Based on ten interviews with practitioners who develop ML models for critical applications in the automotive and telecommunication sector, we identified 17 underlying challenges in 6 challenge groups that relate to the challenge of specifying training data and runtime monitoring. Contribution: The article provides a list of the identified underlying challenges related to the difficulties practitioners experience when specifying training data and runtime monitoring for ML models. Furthermore, interconnection between the challenges were found and based on these connections recommendation proposed to overcome the root causes for the challenges.

With increasingly more computation being shifted to the edge of the network, monitoring of critical infrastructures, such as intermediate processing nodes in autonomous driving, is further complicated due to the typically resource-constrained environments. In order to reduce the resource overhead on the network link imposed by monitoring, various methods have been discussed that either follow a filtering approach for data-emitting devices or conduct dynamic sampling based on employed prediction models. Still, existing methods are mainly requiring adaptive monitoring on edge devices, which demands device reconfigurations, utilizes additional resources, and limits the sophistication of employed models. In this paper, we propose a sampling-based and cloud-located approach that internally utilizes probabilistic forecasts and hence provides means of quantifying model uncertainties, which can be used for contextualized adaptations of sampling frequencies and consequently relieves constrained network resources. We evaluate our prototype implementation for the monitoring pipeline on a publicly available streaming dataset and demonstrate its positive impact on resource efficiency in a method comparison.

Cellular networks are ubiquitous entities that provide major means of communication all over the world. One major challenge in cellular networks is a dynamic change in the number of users and their usage of telecommunication service which results in overloading at certain base stations. One class of solution to deal with this overloading issue is the deployment of drones that can act as temporary base stations and offload the traffic from the overloaded base station. There are two main challenges in the development of this solution. Firstly, the drone is expected to be present around the base station where an overload would occur in the future thus requiring a prediction of traffic overload. Secondly, drones are highly constrained in their resources and can only fly for a few minutes. If the affected base station is really far, drones can never reach there. This requires the initial placement of drones in sectors where overloading can occur thus again requiring a traffic forecast but at a different spatial scale. It must be noted that the spatial extent of the region that the problem poses and the extremely limited power resources available to the drone pose a great challenge that is hard to overcome without deploying the drones in strategic positions to reduce the time to fly to the required high-demand zone. Moreover, since drone fly at a finite speed, it is important that a predictive solution that can forecast traffic surges is adopted so that drones are available to offload the overload before it actually happens. Both these goals require analysis and forecast of cellular network traffic which is the main goal of this project

Telecommunications company KDDI, map-maker Zenrin and others in Japan launched a drone delivery service using U.S. aerospace company SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet access service in Chichibu, a mountainous city in Saitama Prefecture, on Thursday. By connecting a drone to the Starlink service that provides a stable communication environment even in mountain areas, the new delivery service allows residents in a district of Chichibu affected by a road closure following a mudslide in September last year to receive food and other supplies on a regular basis. According to KDDI, it is the first time that a regular drone delivery service using the Starlink service by SpaceX, officially called Space Exploration Technologies, has been launched in Japan. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Commonly adopted in the manufacturing and aerospace sectors, digital twin (DT) platforms are increasingly seen as a promising paradigm to control and monitor software-based, "open", communication systems, which play the role of the physical twin (PT). In the general framework presented in this work, the DT builds a Bayesian model of the communication system, which is leveraged to enable core DT functionalities such as control via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and monitoring of the PT for anomaly detection. We specifically investigate the application of the proposed framework to a simple case-study system encompassing multiple sensing devices that report to a common receiver. The Bayesian model trained at the DT has the key advantage of capturing epistemic uncertainty regarding the communication system, e.g., regarding current traffic conditions, which arise from limited PT-to-DT data transfer. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed Bayesian framework as compared to standard frequentist model-based solutions.

Graphs are widely used to represent the relations among entities. When one owns the complete data, an entire graph can be easily built, therefore performing analysis on the graph is straightforward. However, in many scenarios, it is impractical to centralize the data due to data privacy concerns. An organization or party only keeps a part of the whole graph data, i.e., graph data is isolated from different parties. Recently, Federated Learning (FL) has been proposed to solve the data isolation issue, mainly for Euclidean data. It is still a challenge to apply FL on graph data because graphs contain topological information which is notorious for its non-IID nature and is hard to partition. In this work, we propose a novel FL framework for graph data, FedCog, to efficiently handle coupled graphs that are a kind of distributed graph data, but widely exist in a variety of real-world applications such as mobile carriers' communication networks and banks' transaction networks. We theoretically prove the correctness and security of FedCog. Experimental results demonstrate that our method FedCog significantly outperforms traditional FL methods on graphs. Remarkably, our FedCog improves the accuracy of node classification tasks by up to 14.7%.

Innovation and the Pandemic Propelled Performance The 2022 TMT Value Creators Report February 28, 2022 By Simon Bamberger, Hady Farag, Derek Kennedy, Franck Luisada, Michaela Novakov, Vaishali Rastogi, and Neal Zuckerman The outsized role that technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) companies play in modern life has made the sector a leader in creating shareholder value. From 2016 to 2021, TMT companies collectively outperformed those in many other industries in total shareholder return (TSR), according to BCG's 2022 Value Creators Report. Among our findings: The lion's share of TMT value creation came from tech players, which from 2016 to 2021 had a median annual TSR performance of 30%, more than double the median overall return of 13% for the 33 industries we studied. Of the 232 TMT companies in our sample, 70% posted a higher TSR during the period that included the peak of the pandemic, the 21 months from March 2020 to November 2021, than during the prior 21 months. Continuing on the same growth trajectory may be a challenge given recent investor anxieties about inflation, monetary policy, and moderating earnings growth.

The last decade, (2012 - 2022), saw an unprecedented advance in machine learning (ML) techniques, particularly deep learning (DL). As a result of the proven capabilities of DL, a large amount of work has been presented and studied in almost every field. Since 2012, when the convolution neural networks have been reintroduced in the context of \textit{ImagNet} competition, DL continued to achieve superior performance in many challenging tasks and problems. Wireless communications, in general, and medium access control (MAC) techniques, in particular, were among the fields that were heavily affected by this improvement. MAC protocols play a critical role in defining the performance of wireless communication systems. At the same time, the community lacks a comprehensive survey that collects, analyses, and categorizes the recent work in ML-inspired MAC techniques. In this work, we fill this gap by surveying a long line of work in this era. We solidify the impact of machine learning on wireless MAC protocols. We provide a comprehensive background to the widely adopted MAC techniques, their design issues, and their taxonomy, in connection with the famous application domains. Furthermore, we provide an overview of the ML techniques that have been considered in this context. Finally, we augment our work by proposing some promising future research directions and open research questions that are worth further investigation.

The paper proposes Resource Allocation (RA) schemes for a closed loop feedback control system by analysing the control-communication dependencies. We consider an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) that communicates with a controller located in an edge-cloud over a wireless fading channel. The control commands are transmitted to an AGV and the position state is feedback to the controller at every time-instant. A control stability based scheduling metric 'Probability of Instability' is evaluated for the resource allocation. The performance of stability based RA scheme is compared with the maximum SNR based RA scheme and control error first approach in an overloaded and non-overloaded scenario. The RA scheme with the stability constraints significantly reduces the resource utilization and is able to schedule more number of AGVs while maintaining its stability. Moreover, the proposed RA scheme is independent of control state and depends upon consecutive packet errors, the control parameters like sampling time and AGV velocity. Furthermore, we also analyse the impact of RA schemes on the AGV's stability and error performance, and evaluated the number of unstable AGVs.

Individuals are also eager to learn about its capabilities and how it differs from previous networks. Many service providers are already rolling out 5G across countries like the U.S., U.K. and China. Since its initial adoption in 2019, 5G has already revolutionized the efficiency and reliability of broadband communication for consumers and enterprises. According to the Columbia Climate School, 5G will create a notable impact in the new year on various fronts, including broadband, sustainability and machine-to-machine communication. While we know this to a certain extent, we still look forward to the features that make it stand out.