Generative AI and large language models hold great promise in enhancing programming education by generating individualized feedback and hints for learners. Recent works have primarily focused on improving the quality of generated feedback to achieve human tutors' quality. While quality is an important performance criterion, it is not the only criterion to optimize for real-world educational deployments.

Class-incremental learning (CIL) learns a classification model with training data of different classes arising progressively. Existing CIL either suffers from serious accuracy loss due to catastrophic forgetting, or invades data privacy by revisiting used exemplars. Inspired by learning of linear problems, we propose an analytic class-incremental learning (ACIL) with absolute memorization of past knowledge while avoiding breaching of data privacy (i.e., without storing historical data). The absolute memorization is demonstrated in the sense that the CIL using ACIL given present data would give identical results to that from its joint-learning counterpart that consumes both present and historical samples. This equality is theoretically validated. The data privacy is ensured by showing that no historical data are involved during the learning process. Empirical validations demonstrate ACIL's competitive accuracy performance with near-identical results for various incremental task settings (e.g., 5-50 phases). This also allows ACIL to outperform the state-of-the-art methods for large-phase scenarios (e.g., 25 and 50 phases).

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into mobile and software development workflows faces a persistent tension among three demands: semantic awareness, developer productivity, and data privacy. Traditional cloud-based tools offer strong reasoning but risk data exposure and latency, while on-device solutions lack full-context understanding across codebase and developer tooling. We introduce SolidGPT, an open-source, edge-cloud hybrid developer assistant built on GitHub, designed to enhance code and workspace semantic search. SolidGPT enables developers to: talk to your codebase: interactively query code and project structure, discovering the right methods and modules without manual searching. Automate software project workflows: generate PRDs, task breakdowns, Kanban boards, and even scaffold web app beginnings, with deep integration via VSCode and Notion. Configure private, extensible agents: onboard private code folders (up to approximately 500 files), connect Notion, customize AI agent personas via embedding and in-context training, and deploy via Docker, CLI, or VSCode extension. In practice, SolidGPT empowers developer productivity through: Semantic-rich code navigation: no more hunting through files or wondering where a feature lives. Integrated documentation and task management: seamlessly sync generated PRD content and task boards into developer workflows. Privacy-first design: running locally via Docker or VSCode, with full control over code and data, while optionally reaching out to LLM APIs as needed. By combining interactive code querying, automated project scaffolding, and human-AI collaboration, SolidGPT provides a practical, privacy-respecting edge assistant that accelerates real-world development workflows, ideal for intelligent mobile and software engineering contexts.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in student-facing educational tools, their potential to directly support educators through locally deployable and customizable solutions remains underexplored. Many existing approaches rely on proprietary, cloud-based systems that raise significant cost, privacy, and control concerns for educational institutions. To address these barriers, we introduce an end-to-end, open-source framework that empowers educators using small (3B-7B parameter), locally deployable LLMs. Our system is designed for comprehensive teacher support, including customized teaching material generation and AI-assisted assessment. The framework synergistically combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Context-Augmented Generation (CAG) to produce factually accurate, pedagogically-styled content. A core feature is an interactive refinement loop, a teacher-in-the-loop mechanism that ensures educator agency and precise alignment of the final output. To enhance reliability and safety, an auxiliary verifier LLM inspects all generated content. We validate our framework through a rigorous evaluation of its content generation capabilities and report on a successful technical deployment in a college physics course, which confirms its feasibility on standard institutional hardware. Our findings demonstrate that carefully engineered, self-hosted systems built on small LLMs can provide robust, affordable, and private support for educators, achieving practical utility comparable to much larger models for targeted instructional tasks. This work presents a practical blueprint for the development of sovereign AI tools tailored to the real-world needs of educational institutions.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed training paradigm wherein participants collaborate to build a global model while ensuring the privacy of the involved data, which remains stored on participant devices. However, proposals aiming to ensure such privacy also make it challenging to protect against potential attackers seeking to compromise the training outcome. In this context, we present Fast, Private, and Protected (FPP), a novel approach that aims to safeguard federated training while enabling secure aggregation to preserve data privacy. This is accomplished by evaluating rounds using participants' assessments and enabling training recovery after an attack. FPP also employs a reputation-based mechanism to mitigate the participation of attackers. We created a dockerized environment to validate the performance of FPP compared to other approaches in the literature (FedAvg, Power-of-Choice, and aggregation via Trimmed Mean and Median). Our experiments demonstrate that FPP achieves a rapid convergence rate and can converge even in the presence of malicious participants performing model poisoning attacks.

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has expanded opportunities for innovation but also increased exposure to botnet-driven cyberattacks. Conventional detection methods often struggle with scalability, privacy, and adaptability in resource-constrained IoT environments. To address these challenges, we present a lightweight and privacy-preserving botnet detection framework based on federated learning. This approach enables distributed devices to collaboratively train models without exchanging raw data, thus maintaining user privacy while preserving detection accuracy. A communication-efficient aggregation strategy is introduced to reduce overhead, ensuring suitability for constrained IoT networks. Experiments on benchmark IoT botnet datasets demonstrate that the framework achieves high detection accuracy while substantially reducing communication costs. These findings highlight federated learning as a practical path toward scalable, secure, and privacy-aware intrusion detection for IoT ecosystems.

The growing reliance on large-scale data centers to run resource-intensive workloads has significantly increased the global carbon footprint, underscoring the need for sustainable computing solutions. While container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes help optimize workload scheduling to reduce carbon emissions, existing methods often depend on centralized machine learning models that raise privacy concerns and struggle to generalize across diverse environments. In this paper, we propose a federated learning approach for energy consumption prediction that preserves data privacy by keeping sensitive operational data within individual enterprises. By extending the Kubernetes Efficient Power Level Exporter (Kepler), our framework trains XGBoost models collaboratively across distributed clients using Flower's FedXgbBagging aggregation using a bagging strategy, eliminating the need for centralized data sharing. Experimental results on the SPECPower benchmark dataset show that our FL-based approach achieves 11.7 percent lower Mean Absolute Error compared to a centralized baseline. This work addresses the unresolved trade-off between data privacy and energy prediction efficiency in prior systems such as Kepler and CASPER and offers enterprises a viable pathway toward sustainable cloud computing without compromising operational privacy.

CPU-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) and differential privacy (DP) have gained wide applications for private inference. Due to high inference latency in TEEs, researchers use partition-based approaches that offload linear model components to GPUs. However, dense nonlinear layers of large language models (LLMs) result in significant communication overhead between TEEs and GPUs. DP-based approaches apply random noise to protect data privacy, but this compromises LLM performance and semantic understanding. To overcome the above drawbacks, this paper proposes CMIF, a Confidential and efficient Model Inference Framework. CMIF confidentially deploys the embedding layer in the client-side TEE and subsequent layers on GPU servers. Meanwhile, it optimizes the Report-Noisy-Max mechanism to protect sensitive inputs with a slight decrease in model performance. Extensive experiments on Llama-series models demonstrate that CMIF reduces additional inference overhead in TEEs while preserving user data privacy.

The primary goal of traditional federated learning is to protect data privacy by enabling distributed edge devices to collaboratively train a shared global model while keeping raw data decentralized at local clients. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced new challenges in distributed systems, as their substantial computational requirements and the need for specialized expertise raise critical concerns about protecting intellectual property (IP). This highlights the need for a federated learning approach that can safeguard both sensitive data and proprietary models. To tackle this challenge, we propose FedQSN, a federated learning approach that leverages random masking to obscure a subnetwork of model parameters and applies quantization to the remaining parameters. Consequently, the server transmits only a privacy-preserving proxy of the global model to clients during each communication round, thus enhancing the model's confidentiality. Experimental results across various models and tasks demonstrate that our approach not only maintains strong model performance in federated learning settings but also achieves enhanced protection of model parameters compared to baseline methods.