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Mohamed Nabil, an Entrepreneur who founded the leading AI communication startup across the MENA region

#artificialintelligence

He overcame surrender and did not despair despite his projects having been rejected, at the beginning of his career, but eventually became an entrepreneur in technology across Middle East-wide through his company "WideBot," which specializes in artificial intelligence "AI" and its influential role in customer relationship management (CRM) and digital business management. He is "Mohamed Nabil," a 35-year-old, from Alexandria who graduated from the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Mansoura University in 2007. Immediately after graduation, he began to think seriously about how to start his own business, he had already set up companies, some companies have failed miserably and some have succeeded, but it was not a great and overwhelming success. During Mohamed's struggle, he supported him and stood by his side, Ahmed was his college friend, and he is also with his technical co-founder. And their work on that idea took about two years, they presented their idea to more than one large supermarket in Egypt and abroad, but unfortunately, it was not successful enough and the idea of their project was very new to the market.


Can SoftBank convince more restaurants to use robots?

#artificialintelligence

SoftBank's vision is one filled with more robots. The Japanese conglomerate has made a string of investments in robotics companies from cleaning to warehouses in the few years. Now it wants to bring robots to restaurants, which are facing a shortage of human workers. SoftBank Robotics America, a subsidiary of SoftBank, has partnered with Gausium, a Chinese robotics startup, to expand its autonomous cleaning and service robots to the US. With the purpose of automating certain tasks, the Scrubber 50 Pro can scrub, sweep, dust, mop, and sanitize.


Indoor Smartphone SLAM with Learned Echoic Location Features

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Indoor self-localization is a highly demanded system function for smartphones. The current solutions based on inertial, radio frequency, and geomagnetic sensing may have degraded performance when their limiting factors take effect. In this paper, we present a new indoor simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system that utilizes the smartphone's built-in audio hardware and inertial measurement unit (IMU). Our system uses a smartphone's loudspeaker to emit near-inaudible chirps and then the microphone to record the acoustic echoes from the indoor environment. Our profiling measurements show that the echoes carry location information with sub-meter granularity. To enable SLAM, we apply contrastive learning to construct an echoic location feature (ELF) extractor, such that the loop closures on the smartphone's trajectory can be accurately detected from the associated ELF trace. The detection results effectively regulate the IMU-based trajectory reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that our ELF-based SLAM achieves median localization errors of $0.1\,\text{m}$, $0.53\,\text{m}$, and $0.4\,\text{m}$ on the reconstructed trajectories in a living room, an office, and a shopping mall, and outperforms the Wi-Fi and geomagnetic SLAM systems.


South Korean Internet Giant Offers Glimpse of a 5G Private Network Future

WSJ.com: WSJD - Technology

SEONGNAM, SOUTH KOREA--At the new headquarters of South Korea's largest internet company, a fleet of self-driving robots whirl around delivering coffee, lunchboxes and mailed packages. More than 100 of these autonomous robots, which look a bit like the droid R2-D2 from the "Star Wars" films and go by the name "Rookie," are operational at Naver high-rise office building. The tower is specifically designed with bump-free flooring and handle-free doors that open via sensors to help the robots move around more easily. Powering the robots is a critical technology: a private 5G network that gives them a stable connection to the cloud, or virtual server, where their computing takes place, and where each unit's learned intelligence is stored and shared. Having the hardware for this in the cloud keeps the robots small and less expensive to build, key requirements for broader adoption.


Detecting Irregular Network Activity with Adversarial Learning and Expert Feedback

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Anomaly detection is a ubiquitous and challenging task relevant across many disciplines. With the vital role communication networks play in our daily lives, the security of these networks is imperative for smooth functioning of society. To this end, we propose a novel self-supervised deep learning framework CAAD for anomaly detection in wireless communication systems. Specifically, CAAD employs contrastive learning in an adversarial setup to learn effective representations of normal and anomalous behavior in wireless networks. We conduct rigorous performance comparisons of CAAD with several state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques and verify that CAAD yields a mean performance improvement of 92.84%. Additionally, we also augment CAAD enabling it to systematically incorporate expert feedback through a novel contrastive learning feedback loop to improve the learned representations and thereby reduce prediction uncertainty (CAAD-EF). We view CAAD-EF as a novel, holistic and widely applicable solution to anomaly detection.


Programmable and Customized Intelligence for Traffic Steering in 5G Networks Using Open RAN Architectures

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

5G and beyond mobile networks will support heterogeneous use cases at an unprecedented scale, thus demanding automated control and optimization of network functionalities customized to the needs of individual users. Such fine-grained control of the Radio Access Network (RAN) is not possible with the current cellular architecture. To fill this gap, the Open RAN paradigm and its specification introduce an open architecture with abstractions that enable closed-loop control and provide data-driven, and intelligent optimization of the RAN at the user level. This is obtained through custom RAN control applications (i.e., xApps) deployed on near-real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (near-RT RIC) at the edge of the network. Despite these premises, as of today the research community lacks a sandbox to build data-driven xApps, and create large-scale datasets for effective AI training. In this paper, we address this by introducing ns-O-RAN, a software framework that integrates a real-world, production-grade near-RT RIC with a 3GPP-based simulated environment on ns-3, enabling the development of xApps and automated large-scale data collection and testing of Deep Reinforcement Learning-driven control policies for the optimization at the user-level. In addition, we propose the first user-specific O-RAN Traffic Steering (TS) intelligent handover framework. It uses Random Ensemble Mixture, combined with a state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network architecture, to optimally assign a serving base station to each user in the network. Our TS xApp, trained with more than 40 million data points collected by ns-O-RAN, runs on the near-RT RIC and controls its base stations. We evaluate the performance on a large-scale deployment, showing that the xApp-based handover improves throughput and spectral efficiency by an average of 50% over traditional handover heuristics, with less mobility overhead.


Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning in 5G Networks -- A Comparison of Scientific Impact

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Introduction of fifth generation (5G) wireless network technology has matched the crucial need for high capacity and speed needs of the new generation mobile applications. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) also empowered 5G cellular networks with two mainstreams as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. Our study aims to uncover the differences in scientific impact for these two techniques by the means of statistical bibliometrics. The performed analysis includes citation performance with respect to indexing types, funding availability, journal or conference publishing options together with distributions of these metrics along years to evaluate the popularity trends in a detailed manner. Web of Science (WoS) database host 2245 papers for ML and 1407 papers for DL-related studies. DL studies, starting with 9% rate in 2013, has reached to 45% rate in 2022 among all DL and ML-related studies. Results related to scientific impact indicate that DL studies get slightly more average normalized citation (2.256) compared to ML studies (2.118) in 5G, while SCI-Expanded indexed papers in both sides tend to have similar citation performance (3.165 and 3.162 respectively). ML-related studies those are indexed in ESCI show twice citation performance compared to DL. Conference papers in DL domain and journal papers in ML domain are superior in scientific interest to their counterparts with minor differences. Highest citation performance for ML studies is achieved for year 2014, while this peak is observed for 2017 for DL studies. We can conclude that both publication and citation rate for DL-related papers tend to increase and outperform ML-based studies in 5G domain by the means of citation metrics.


SoftBank Robotics partners with Gausium to deploy 2 robotic solutions - The Robot Report

#artificialintelligence

SoftBank Robotics America (SBRA), the North American arm of SoftBank, and Gausium, a provider of autonomous cleaning and service robots, announced a new partnership to deploy indoor automated robots in the US. SBRA and Gausium will work to help companies adopt, integrate and scale robotic solutions within their organizations. The partnership will focus on two solutions: X1, a running and bussing solution for the food service industry, and Scrubber 50 Pro (S50), a robotic floor scrubber powered by artificial intelligence. "SBRA is the right partner to bring our products to market throughout the U.S.," said Allen Zhang, Chief of Overseas Business of Gausium. "Their holistic customer support continues after the point of sale and ensures all adopters are receiving the expected return on experience and investment when utilizing our robots."


Constrained Deployment Optimization in Integrated Access and Backhaul Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) is one of the promising techniques for 5G networks and beyond (6G), in which the same node/hardware is used to provide both backhaul and cellular services in a multi-hop fashion. Due to the sensitivity of the backhaul links with high rate/reliability demands, proper network planning is needed to make the IAB network performing appropriately and as good as possible. In this paper, we study the effect of deployment optimization on the coverage of IAB networks. We concentrate on the cases where, due to either geographical or interference management limitations, unconstrained IAB node placement is not feasible in some areas. To that end, we propose various millimeter wave (mmWave) blocking-aware constrained deployment optimization approaches. Our results indicate that, even with limitations on deployment optimization, network planning boosts the coverage of IAB networks considerably.


Multi-Content Time-Series Popularity Prediction with Multiple-Model Transformers in MEC Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Coded/uncoded content placement in Mobile Edge Caching (MEC) has evolved as an efficient solution to meet the significant growth of global mobile data traffic by boosting the content diversity in the storage of caching nodes. To meet the dynamic nature of the historical request pattern of multimedia contents, the main focus of recent researches has been shifted to develop data-driven and real-time caching schemes. In this regard and with the assumption that users' preferences remain unchanged over a short horizon, the Top-K popular contents are identified as the output of the learning model. Most existing datadriven popularity prediction models, however, are not suitable for the coded/uncoded content placement frameworks. On the one hand, in coded/uncoded content placement, in addition to classifying contents into two groups, i.e., popular and nonpopular, the probability of content request is required to identify which content should be stored partially/completely, where this information is not provided by existing data-driven popularity prediction models. On the other hand, the assumption that users' preferences remain unchanged over a short horizon only works for content with a smooth request pattern. To tackle these challenges, we develop a Multiple-model (hybrid) Transformer-based Edge Caching (MTEC) framework with higher generalization ability, suitable for various types of content with different time-varying behavior, that can be adapted with coded/uncoded content placement frameworks. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed MTEC caching framework in comparison to its counterparts in terms of the cache-hit ratio, classification accuracy, and the transferred byte volume.