Plant Disease Detection Using Federated Learning and Cloud Infrastructure for Scalability and Data Privacy

Preserving user data privacy is paramount for airlines. However, achieving highly accurate predictions of passenger satisfaction while safeguarding the privacy of individual companys data remains a considerable challenge. To achieve this objective, we utilized a privacy-preserving machine learning technique known as Federated Learning (FL). FL allows model training on decentralized devices while ensuring data security and privacy. The FL process comprises client training processes, communication rounds, and weight aggregation. We simulate FL principles using multiple processes to enable distributed learning. Clients preprocess data and train local models, ensuring data privacy. Communication rounds involve clients downloading the global model, local training, and transmitting updates to a central server. Weight aggregation methods like Federated Averaging merge these updates, preserving data privacy. Additionally, we leverage Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as foundational techniques. ANNs consist of input, hidden, and output layers, with weight adjustments based on real value differences to achieve accuracy. Our approach combines FL with ANNs to demonstrate FLs potential in privacy-preserving predictive analytics. We use the Airline Passenger Satisfaction dataset for modeling and evaluate the impact of neural network depth and submodel quantity on prediction accuracy. Our experimental results reveal that neither the depth of neural networks nor the number of submodels significantly affects prediction accuracy. FL emerges as a promising approach to balance data privacy and prediction accuracy effectively.

Artificial intelligence is a bellwether of today’s new technological revolution. As a branch of artificial intelligence, machine learning faces two main problems in practical application: 1) data owned by most enterprises are difficult to aggregate; and, 2) big data owners pay more and more attention to data privacy and security, which leads to the problem of data island. Federated learning (FL), as a distributed FL paradigm, which can enable all parties to achieve the purpose of co-building models while ensuring data privacy and exposure, provides a possible solution to the mentioned problems of machine learning. The FL takes full advantage of participants’ data and computing power and builds a more robust machine learning model without sharing the data. In an environment with strict data regulation, the FL can effectively solve the key problems, such as those related to data privacy and data rights. However, most of the existing FL-based frameworks do not pay attention to the impact of data source distribution on FL training. Therefore, this paper proposed a data-oriented FL framework called the Federated AI Engine(FAE), which can solve FL problems without leaving the data in control. The proposed framework provides a method that can be used to verify FL quickly for researchers who intend to try federal learning.

A privacy-preserving federated learning approach for airline upgrade optimization

FederatedTrust: A solution for trustworthy federated learning

The emerging integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and AI has unlocked numerous opportunities for innovation across diverse industries. However, growing privacy concerns and data isolation issues have inhibited this promising advancement. Unfortunately, traditional centralized Machine Learning (ML) methods have demonstrated their limitations in addressing these hurdles. In response to this ever-evolving landscape, Federated Learning (FL) has surfaced as a cutting-edge ML paradigm, enabling collaborative training across decentralized devices. FL allows users to jointly construct AI models without sharing their local raw data, ensuring data privacy, network scalability, and minimal data transfer. One essential aspect of FL revolves around proficient knowledge aggregation within a heterogeneous environment. Yet, the inherent characteristics of FL have amplified the complexity of its practical implementation compared to centralized ML. This survey delves into three prominent clusters of FL research contributions: personalization, optimization, and robustness. The objective is to provide a well-structured and fine-grained classification scheme related to these research areas through a unique methodology for selecting related work. Unlike other survey papers, we employed a hybrid approach that amalgamates bibliometric analysis and systematic scrutinizing to find the most influential work in the literature. Therefore, we examine challenges and contemporary techniques related to heterogeneity, efficiency, security, and privacy. Another valuable asset of this study is its comprehensive coverage of FL aggregation strategies, encompassing architectural features, synchronization methods, and several federation motivations. To further enrich our investigation, we provide practical insights into evaluating novel FL proposals and conduct experiments to assess and compare aggregation methods under IID and non-IID data distributions. Finally, we present a compelling set of research avenues that call for further exploration to open up a treasure of advancement.

Paddy leaf diseases encompass a range of ailments affecting rice plants’ leaves, arising from factors like bacteria, fungi, viruses, and environmental stress. Precision agriculture leverages technologies for enhanced crop production, with disease detection being a vital element. Prompt identification of diseases in paddy leaves is critical for curtailing their propagation and reducing crop damage. However, manually diagnosing paddy diseases in regions with vast agricultural areas and limited experts proves immensely difficult. The utilization of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) for diagnosing diseases in agricultural crops appears to be effective and well-suited for widespread application. These ML/DL methods cannot ensure data privacy, as they involve sharing training data with a central server, overlooking competitive and regulatory considerations. As a solution, federated learning (FL) aims to facilitate decentralized training to tackle the identified limitations of centralized training. This paper utilizes the FL approach for the classification of rice-leaf diseases. The manuscript presents an effective approach for rice-leaf disease classification with a federated architecture, ensuring data privacy. We have compiled an unbalanced dataset of rice-leaf disease images, categorized into four diseases with their respective image counts: bacterial blight (1584), brown spot (1440), blast (1600), and tungro (1308). The proposed method, called federated transfer learning (F-TL), maintains privacy for all connected devices using a decentralized client-server setup. Both IID (independent and identically distributed) and non-IID datasets were utilized for testing the F-TL framework after preprocessing. Initially, we conducted an effectiveness analysis of CNN and eight transfer learning models for rice-leaf disease classification. Among them, MobileNetV2 and EfficientNetB3 outperformed the other transfer-learned models. Subsequently, we trained these models using both IID and non-IID datasets in a federated learning environment. The framework’s performance was assessed through diverse scenarios, comparing it with traditional and federated learning models. The evaluation considered metrics like validation accuracy, loss as well as resource utilization such as CPU and RAM. EfficientNetB3 excelled in training, achieving 99% accuracy with 0.1 loss for both IID and non-IID datasets. MobilenetV2 showed slightly lower training accuracy at 98% (IID) and 90% (non-IID) with losses of 0.4 and 0.6, respectively. In evaluation, EfficientNetB3 maintained 99% accuracy with 0.1 loss for both datasets, while MobilenetV2 achieved 90% (IID) and 97% (non-IID) accuracy with losses of 0.6 and 0.2, respectively. Results indicated the F-TL framework’s superiority over traditional distributed deep-learning classifiers, demonstrating its effectiveness in both single and multiclient instances. Notably, the framework’s strengths lie in its cost-effectiveness and data-privacy assurance for resource-constrained edge devices, positioning it as a valuable alternative for rice-leaf disease classification compared to existing tools.

Edge computing is widely recognized as a crucial technology for the upcoming generation of communication networks and has garnered significant interest from both industry and academia. Compared to other offloading models like cloud computing, it provides faster data processing capabilities, enhanced security measures, and lower costs by leveraging the proximity of the edge servers to the end devices. This helps mitigate the privacy concerns associated with data transfer in edge computing, by reducing the distance between the data source and the server. Raw data in typical edge computing scenarios still need to be sent to the edge server, leading to data leakage and privacy breaches. Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed model training paradigm that preserves end devices’ data privacy. Therefore, it is crucial to incorporate FL into edge computing to protect data privacy. However, the high training overhead of FL makes it impractical for edge computing. In this study, we propose to facilitate the integration of FL and edge computing by optimizing FL hyper-parameters, which can significantly reduce FL’s training overhead and make it more affordable for edge computing.

Intrusion detection in Internet of Things (IoT)-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is essential due to their widespread use and inherent vulnerability to security breaches. Traditional centralized intrusion detection systems (IDS) face significant challenges in data privacy, computational efficiency, and scalability, particularly in resource-constrained IoT environments. This study aims to create and assess a federated learning (FL) framework that integrates with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for efficient intrusion detection in IoT-based WSNs. We design the framework to enhance detection accuracy, minimize false positive rates (FPR), and ensure data privacy, while maintaining system scalability. Using an FL approach, multiple IoT nodes collaboratively train a global LSTM model without exchanging raw data, thereby addressing privacy concerns and improving detection capabilities. The proposed model was tested on three widely used datasets: WSN-DS, CIC-IDS-2017, and UNSW-NB15. The evaluation metrics for its performance included accuracy, F1 score, FPR, and root mean square error (RMSE). We evaluated the performance of the FL-based LSTM model against traditional centralized models, finding significant improvements in intrusion detection. The FL-based LSTM model achieved higher accuracy and a lower FPR across all datasets than centralized models. It effectively managed sequential data in WSNs, ensuring data privacy while maintaining competitive performance, particularly in complex attack scenarios. FL and LSTM networks work well together to make a strong way to find intrusions in IoT-based WSNs, which improves both privacy and detection. This study underscores the potential of FL-based systems to address key challenges in IoT security, including data privacy, scalability, and performance, making the proposed framework suitable for real-world IoT applications.

Edge Computing (EC) is a new architecture that extends Cloud Computing (CC) services closer to data sources. EC combined with Deep Learning (DL) is a promising technology and is widely used in several applications. However, in conventional DL architectures with EC enabled, data producers must frequently send and share data with third parties, edge or cloud servers, to train their models. This architecture is often impractical due to the high bandwidth requirements, legalization, and privacy vulnerabilities. The Federated Learning (FL) concept has recently emerged as a promising solution for mitigating the problems of unwanted bandwidth loss, data privacy, and legalization. FL can co-train models across distributed clients, such as mobile phones, automobiles, hospitals, and more, through a centralized server, while maintaining data localization. FL can therefore be viewed as a stimulating factor in the EC paradigm as it enables collaborative learning and model optimization. Although the existing surveys have taken into account applications of FL in EC environments, there has not been any systematic survey discussing FL implementation and challenges in the EC paradigm. This paper aims to provide a systematic survey of the literature on the implementation of FL in EC environments with a taxonomy to identify advanced solutions and other open problems. In this survey, we review the fundamentals of EC and FL, then we review the existing related works in FL in EC. Furthermore, we describe the protocols, architecture, framework, and hardware requirements for FL implementation in the EC environment. Moreover, we discuss the applications, challenges, and related existing solutions in the edge FL. Finally, we detail two relevant case studies of applying FL in EC, and we identify open issues and potential directions for future research. We believe this survey will help researchers better understand the connection between FL and EC enabling technologies and concepts.

Federated Learning (FL), a novel distributed interactive AI paradigm, holds particular promise for smart healthcare since it enables many clients including hospitals to take part in AI training while ensuring data privacy. Each participant's data that is sent to the server is really a trained sub-model rather than original data. FL benefits from better privacy features and dispersed data processing. Analysis of very sensitive data has substantially improved because to the combination of Federated Learning with healthcare data informatics. By utilizing the advantages of FL, the clients' data is preserved safely with their own model, and data leakage is avoided to prevent any malicious data modification in the system. Horizontal FL takes data from all devices with a comparable trait space suggests that Clients A and B are using the same features. Vertical Federated Learning uses a number of datasets from various feature domains to train a global model. A successful FL implementation could thus hold a significant potential for enabling precision medicine on a large scale.

Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning approach whereby each device is allowed to train local models, eliminating the requirement for centralized data collecting and ensuring data privacy. Unlike typical typical centralized machine learning, collaborative model training in FL involves aggregating updates from various devices without sending raw data. This ensures data privacy and security while collecting a collective learning from distributed data sources. These devices in FL models exhibit high efficacy in terms of privacy protection, scalability, and robustness, which is contingent upon the success of communication and collaboration. This paper explore the various topologies of both decentralized or centralized in the context of FL. In this respect, we investigated and explored in detail the evaluation of four widly used end-to-end FL frameworks: FedML, Flower, Flute, and PySyft. We specifically focused on vertical and horizontal FL systems using a logistic regression model that aggregated by the FedAvg algorithm. specifically, we conducted experiments on two images datasets, MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, to evaluate their efficiency and performance. Our paper provides initial findings on how to effectively combine horizontal and vertical solutions to address common difficulties, such as managing model synchronization and communication overhead. Our research indicates the trade-offs that exist in the performance of several simulation frameworks for federated learning.

Health data comprise data from different aspects of healthcare including administrative, digital health, and research-oriented data. Together, health data contribute to and inform healthcare operations, patient care, and research. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare requires understanding these data infrastructures and addressing challenges such as data availability, privacy, and governance. Federated learning (FL), a decentralized AI training approach, addresses these challenges by allowing models to learn from diverse datasets without data leaving its source, thus ensuring privacy and security are maintained. This report introduces FL and discusses its potential in transfusion medicine and blood supply chain management. FL can offer significant benefits in transfusion medicine by enhancing predictive analytics, personalized medicine, and operational efficiency. Predictive models trained on diverse datasets by FL can improve accuracy in forecasting blood transfusion demands. Personalized treatment plans can be refined by aggregating patient data from multiple institutions using FL, reducing adverse reactions and improving outcomes. Operational efficiency can also be achieved through precise demand forecasting and optimized logistics. Despite its advantages, FL faces challenges such as data standardization, governance, and bias. Harmonizing diverse data sources and ensuring fair, unbiased models require advanced analytical solutions. Robust IT infrastructure and specialized expertise are needed for successful FL implementation. FL represents a transformative approach to AI development in healthcare, particularly in transfusion medicine. By leveraging diverse datasets while maintaining data privacy, FL has the potential to enhance predictions, support personalized treatments, and optimize resource management, ultimately improving patient care and healthcare efficiency.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems play a critical role in maintaining the safety and operational efficiency of infrastructure such as miter gates managed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). These gates, integral to navigation and flood control systems, demand robust and efficient monitoring techniques to predict failures and thus optimize maintenance schedules. Any unexpected shutdown costs nearly three million dollars per day to the US economy. The existing traditional data centralized machine learning approaches for SHM often face challenges, including data privacy concerns, high communication costs, and computational limitations. This study mainly explores the application of Federated Learning (FL) techniques to SHM systems using three finite element miter gate models for the loss-of-contact damage detection problem. This approach addresses these challenges by enabling decentralized training of machine learning models across multiple assets. FL ensures data privacy by keeping sensitive information local while leveraging shared global models through aggregation methods. Our results demonstrate that FL can achieve comparable prediction accuracy to centralized methods while maintaining data privacy and reducing communication overhead. This framework improves model accuracy by incorporating diverse data distributions from different gates and their operational conditions. The study also highlights the scalability of FL in handling large-scale SHM systems, making it a viable solution for USACE to extend the lifespan of their critical assets.

Language models (LMs) such as BERT and GPT have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP). However, the medical field faces challenges in training LMs due to limited data access and privacy constraints imposed by regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized solution that enables collaborative learning while ensuring data privacy. In this study, we evaluated FL on 2 biomedical NLP tasks encompassing 8 corpora using 6 LMs. Our results show that: (1) FL models consistently outperformed models trained on individual clients’ data and sometimes performed comparably with models trained with polled data; (2) with the fixed number of total data, FL models training with more clients produced inferior performance but pre-trained transformer-based models exhibited great resilience. (3) FL models significantly outperformed pre-trained LLMs with few-shot prompting.

Elastic Federated Learning with Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler for edge computing