Distributed Intelligence Approach Research Articles

Distributed Intelligence in the Internet of Things: Challenges and Opportunities

Widespread adoption of smart IoT devices is accelerating research for new techniques to make IoT applications secure, scalable, energy-efficient, and capable of working in mission-critical use cases, which require an ability to function offline. In this context, the novel combination of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and distributed intelligence (DI) is seen as a practical route towards the decentralisation of IoT architectures. This paper surveys DI techniques in IoT and commences by briefly explaining the need for DI, by proposing a comprehensive taxonomy of DI in IoT. This taxonomy is then used to review existing techniques and to investigate current challenges that require careful attention and consideration. Based on the taxonomy, IoT DI techniques can be classified into five categories based on the factors that support distributed functionality and data acquisition: cloud-computing, mist-computing, distributed-ledger-technology, service-oriented-computing and hybrid. Existing techniques are compared and categorized mainly based on related challenges, and the level of intelligence supported. We evaluate more than thirty current research efforts in this area. We define many significant functionalities that should be supported by DI frameworks and solutions. Our work assists system architects and developers to select the correct low-level communication techniques in an integrated IoT-to-DLT-to-cloud system architecture. The benefits and shortcomings of different DI approaches are presented, which will inspire future work into automatic hybridization and adaptation of DI mechanisms. Finally, open research issues for distributed intelligence in IoT are discussed.

A Distributed Intelligence Approach to Multidisciplinarity: Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Complex Science Issues in Society

The scientific issues that face society today are increasingly complex, open-ended and tentative (Sadler, 2004). Finding solutions to these issues, not only requires an understanding of the science, but also, concurrently dealing with political, social, and economic dimensions that exist (Hodson, 2003). For example, 40 years after the first congressional hearing on climate change held by Al Gore in 1976, the 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report states that climate change is still getting worse, despite efforts by governments, businesses, social actors such as Non-Government Organizations, and scientists. With the top minds in the world, across all disciplines, backed with government and corporate funding pursuing the same goal of resolving human impact on climate change, why haven’t we resolved the situation? What strategies might be employed to increase effective action? Author/Artist Bio Jarod Kawasaki is currently a doctoral student at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, his dissertation focuses on teachers' beliefs about the purpose of science education and their relationship to teachers' instructional practice. Kawasaki's research interests focus on ways that K-12 education builds the capacity of students to engage with science in their everyday lives. Kawasaki is interested in the design of learning environments that encourage students to creativity to address controversial and public science issues. Before graduate school, Kawasaki was a science teacher at an urban high school in Los Angeles and completed a MA in Educational Technology from Cal State Northridge. Currently, Kawasaki is working for the Teacher Education Program at UCLA, conducting research with a 5-year US Department of Education grant investigating the effectiveness of an urban teacher residency program in preparing pre-service teachers and evaluating teaching quality. Previously, Kawasaki worked on a Spencer Foundation grant that examined the use of student data by teachers to inform instructional decisions in small pilot school in Los Angeles and at the UCLA National Center for Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) developing assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Kawasaki currently lives in Culver City, CA with his wife and two daughters (5 years old & 6 months old). Dai Toyofuku was born and raised in Los Angeles, where he also lives and works. He has a profound interest in the cultures of animal and plant communities that share the Los Angeles urban landscape. The artist received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from the Claremont Graduate University. Dai has collaborated with biologists and other artists in order to explore the relationship between art and science. In 2011, he had his first solo show at Steve Turner Contemporary. In 2012, He and seven other artists collaborated with a biologist to create an exhibition supporting endangered species at the College Art Association's 100th annual Convention. He is currently working on a body of work combining the four seasons and the Japanese tea ceremony, growing an indoor California-native Bonsai garden, and cultivating plants to feed caterpillars endemic to Los Angeles. In the near future, he hopes to breed Neurergus kaiseri, a newt that is now extinct in the wild

New Design Concepts for Direct Reader Measurement Electronics

A dual-processor, distributed-intelligence approach toward the computerization of a direct-reading polychromator for atomic emission spectrometry is described. Emphasis is placed on a “zero based design” of the PMT current integration electronics of a direct-reader channel using microprocessor bus architectures, programmable support chips, data domain conversion integrated circuits, and inexpensive single-board microcomputers. Traditional analog integration of the current signal is replaced by domain conversion of the current to a frequency, and integration/digitization is achieved with the use of single chip software programmable counters. Each channel can be independently addressed, configured, cleared, preset, and read, as the channels are autonomous units on the bus of the data acquisition and control microcomputer.