Smart City Applications with Pervasive AI

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) systems have expanded the role of Artificial intelligence (AI) in many applications. On the other hand, AI has witnessed a substantial usage in different IoT applications and services, spanning the smart city systems and speech processing applications to robotics control and military surveillance. This is driven by the easier access to sensed data and the enormous scale of pervasive/ubiquitous devices that generate zettabytes (ZB) of real-time data streams. Designing accurate models using such data streams to predict future insights and revolutionize the decision-taking process, inaugurates pervasive AI systems as a worthy paradigm to achieve better predictions which can lead to a better quality-of-life. The confluence of pervasive computing and artificial intelligence (Pervasive AI) expanded the role of ubiquitous IoT systems from mainly data collection to executing distributed computations with a promising alternative to centralized learning, presenting various challenges, including privacy concerns, scalability, and latency requirements. In this context, a wise cooperation and resource scheduling should be envisaged for a smart city using IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, smart healthcare, and smart vehicles) and infrastructure (e.g., edge nodes and base stations) to avoid communication and computation overheads and ensure maximum performance and efficient accuracy.

In this talk, a quick review of the recent techniques and strategies developed to overcome these resource challenges in pervasive AI systems will be given. Specifically, a description of pervasive computing, its architecture, and its intersection with artificial intelligence is presented. Then, we review the background, applications, and performance metrics of AI, particularly Federated Learning (FL), running in a ubiquitous system. Next, we present some communication-efficient techniques of distributed inference, training and learning tasks across a plethora of IoT devices, edge devices and cloud servers. Finally, we discuss future directions in this area and provide some research challenges.