A vital ingredient for making quantum computers truly useful just might be conventional computers. That was the message from a gathering of researchers this month, which explained that classical computers are vital for controlling quantum computers, decoding the results of their calculations and even developing new techniques for manufacturing quantum computers in future. Quantum computers are made from qubits - quantum objects that may come in the form of extremely cold atoms or tiny superconducting circuits. The more qubits that a quantum computer has, the more computationally powerful it gets. But qubits are fragile, so they must be carefully calibrated, monitored and controlled.

As graphs grow larger, full-batch GNN training becomes hard for single GPU memory. Therefore, to enhance the scalability of GNN training, some studies have proposed sampling-based mini-batch training and distributed graph learning. However, these methods still have drawbacks, such as performance degradation and heavy communication. This paper introduces SliceGCN, a feature-sliced distributed large-scale graph learning method. SliceGCN slices the node features, with each computing device, i.e., GPU, handling partial features. After each GPU processes its share, partial representations are obtained and concatenated to form complete representations, enabling a single GPU's memory to handle the entire graph structure. This aims to avoid the accuracy loss typically associated with mini-batch training (due to incomplete graph structures) and to reduce inter-GPU communication during message passing (the forward propagation process of GNNs). To study and mitigate potential accuracy reductions due to slicing features, this paper proposes feature fusion and slice encoding. Experiments were conducted on six node classification datasets, yielding some interesting analytical results. These results indicate that while SliceGCN does not enhance efficiency on smaller datasets, it does improve efficiency on larger datasets. Additionally, we found that SliceGCN and its variants have better convergence, feature fusion and slice encoding can make training more stable, reduce accuracy fluctuations, and this study also discovered that the design of SliceGCN has a potentially parameter-efficient nature.

Deep Learning Architectures employ heavy computations and bulk of the computational energy is taken up by the convolution operations in the Convolutional Neural Networks. The objective of our proposed work is to reduce the energy consumption and size of CNN for using machine learning techniques in edge computing on ubiquitous computing devices. We propose Systematic Quality Scalable Design Methodology consisting of Quality Scalable Quantization on a higher abstraction level and Quality Scalable Multipliers at lower abstraction level. The first component consists of parameter compression where we approximate representation of values in filters of deep learning models by encoding in 3 bits. A shift and scale based on-chip decoding hardware is proposed which can decode these 3-bit representations to recover approximate filter values. The size of the DNN model is reduced this way and can be sent over a communication channel to be decoded on the edge computing devices. This way power is reduced by limiting data bits by approximation. In the second component we propose a quality scalable multiplier which reduces the number of partial products by converting numbers in canonic sign digit representations and further approximating the number by reducing least significant bits. These quantized CNNs provide almost same ac-curacy as network with original weights with little or no fine-tuning. The hardware for the adaptive multipliers utilize gate clocking for reducing energy consumption during multiplications. The proposed methodology greatly reduces the memory and power requirements of DNN models making it a feasible approach to deploy Deep Learning on edge computing. The experiments done on LeNet and ConvNets show an increase upto 6% of zeros and memory savings upto 82.4919% while keeping the accuracy near the state of the art.

The carbon footprint associated with large language models (LLMs) is a significant concern, encompassing emissions from their training, inference, experimentation, and storage processes, including operational and embodied carbon emissions. An essential aspect is accurately estimating the carbon impact of emerging LLMs even before their training, which heavily relies on GPU usage. Existing studies have reported the carbon footprint of LLM training, but only one tool, mlco2, can predict the carbon footprint of new neural networks prior to physical training. However, mlco2 has several serious limitations. It cannot extend its estimation to dense or mixture-of-experts (MoE) LLMs, disregards critical architectural parameters, focuses solely on GPUs, and cannot model embodied carbon footprints. Addressing these gaps, we introduce LLMCarbon, an end-to-end carbon footprint projection model designed for both dense and MoE LLMs. Compared to mlco2, LLMCarbon significantly enhances the accuracy of carbon footprint estimations for various LLMs. Large language models (LLMs) have established their supremacy in addressing a wide spectrum of natural language processing tasks (Brown et al., 2020). However, the proliferation of these models, coupled with increasingly expansive datasets (Sanderson, 2023; Anil et al., 2023), has woven LLM inferences into the fabric of everyday life (Campello de Souza et al., 2023).

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning (ML) technology that enables collaborative training and learning of a global ML model based on aggregating distributed local model updates. However, security and privacy guarantees could be compromised due to malicious participants and the centralized FL server. This article proposed a bi-level blockchained architecture for secure federated learning-based traffic prediction. The bottom and top layer blockchain store the local model and global aggregated parameters accordingly, and the distributed homomorphic-encrypted federated averaging (DHFA) scheme addresses the secure computation problems. We propose the partial private key distribution protocol and a partially homomorphic encryption/decryption scheme to achieve the distributed privacy-preserving federated averaging model. We conduct extensive experiments to measure the running time of DHFA operations, quantify the read and write performance of the blockchain network, and elucidate the impacts of varying regional group sizes and model complexities on the resulting prediction accuracy for the online traffic flow prediction task. The results indicate that the proposed system can facilitate secure and decentralized federated learning for real-world traffic prediction tasks.

Current research on users` perspectives of cyber security and privacy related to traditional and smart devices at home is very active, but the focus is often more on specific modern devices such as mobile and smart IoT devices in a home context. In addition, most were based on smaller-scale empirical studies such as online surveys and interviews. We endeavour to fill these research gaps by conducting a larger-scale study based on a real-world dataset of 413,985 tweets posted by non-expert users on Twitter in six months of three consecutive years (January and February in 2019, 2020 and 2021). Two machine learning-based classifiers were developed to identify the 413,985 tweets. We analysed this dataset to understand non-expert users` cyber security and privacy perspectives, including the yearly trend and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We applied topic modelling, sentiment analysis and qualitative analysis of selected tweets in the dataset, leading to various interesting findings. For instance, we observed a 54% increase in non-expert users` tweets on cyber security and/or privacy related topics in 2021, compared to before the start of global COVID-19 lockdowns (January 2019 to February 2020). We also observed an increased level of help-seeking tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis revealed a diverse range of topics discussed by non-expert users across the three years, including VPNs, Wi-Fi, smartphones, laptops, smart home devices, financial security, and security and privacy issues involving different stakeholders. Overall negative sentiment was observed across almost all topics non-expert users discussed on Twitter in all the three years. Our results confirm the multi-faceted nature of non-expert users` perspectives on cyber security and privacy and call for more holistic, comprehensive and nuanced research on different facets of such perspectives.

The growth of IoT (Internet of Things) technologies and applications requires a new look at how to collect, process, and respond to incoming data. Connected vehicles, industrial robots, traffic control systems, space exploration vehicles, hypersonic missiles, drones, and many others collect enormous amounts of data that affect the real-time behavior of those autonomous machines. The traditional approach of sending all data to a cloud for computing is no longer an effective way of handling the data in real-time. Faster networks are something to consider, but high frequencies require direct visibility of communicating parties, which is not always possible. Also, massive growth in networked devices would choke networks sooner or later, anyway.

The relationship between brains and computers is often taken to be merely metaphorical. However, genuine computational systems can be implemented in virtually any media; thus, one can take seriously the view that brains literally compute. But without empirical criteria for what makes a physical system genuinely a computational one, computation remains a matter of perspective, especially for natural systems (e.g., brains) that were not explicitly designed and engineered to be computers. Considerations from real examples of physical computers-both analog and digital, contemporary and historical-make clear what those empirical criteria must be. Finally, applying those criteria to the brain shows how we can view the brain as a computer (probably an analog one at that), which, in turn, illuminates how that claim is both informative and falsifiable.

Our RhythmEdge system is portable and easily deployable for reliable HR estimation in moderately controlled indoor or outdoor environments. RhythmEdge measures HR via detecting changes in blood volume from facial videos (Remote Photoplethysmography; rPPG) and provides instant assessment using off-the-shelf commercially available resource-constrained edge platforms and video cameras. We demonstrate the scalability, flexibility, and compatibility of the RhythmEdge by deploying it on three resource-constrained platforms of differing architectures (NVIDIA Jetson Nano, Google Coral Development Board, Raspberry Pi) and three heterogeneous cameras of differing sensitivity, resolution, properties (web camera, action camera, and DSLR). RhythmEdge further stores longitudinal cardiovascular information and provides instant notification to the users. We thoroughly test the prototype stability, latency, and feasibility for three edge computing platforms by profiling their runtime, memory, and power usage.

Technology zoomed ahead in 2020 and 2021, spurred in large part by the global pandemic. Companies embraced digital transformation and AI, driven by a need to connect remote workers, improve efficiency, and offer new online services. This surge of adoption has also added renewed focus on a variety of technologies including augmented and virtual reality, blockchain, and the rollout of 5G communication networks. We have indeed entered an age of acceleration. In turn, these developments are leading to new innovations such as the metaverse. First envisioned in the 1990s, the same underlying technologies to make the metaverse concept a fully immersive and seamless experience are now approaching maturity.