After three years working on harnessing the power of edge computing and federated machine learning, AIDA project has come to an end with many and significative outcomes in the fields of data processing, scalability, and privacy protection:

• 8 software tool
• 42 scientific publications:
  • 3 with PT partners and CMU
  • 3 with Mobileum
• 2 use cases:
  • Bot net detection
  • Anomalous Behavior Detection 

This is what our coordinator has to say about the work developed in the last years and the main contributions from the AIDA project:

“Unlike previous evolution’s, 5G re-thinks and re-architects how the network is built and managed, by introducing emerging use cases urllc(Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications), mmtc (massive Machine Type Communications) , embb ( enhanced Mobile Broadband) and business models, affecting not only consumers but also enterprises and industries. In 5G, most subscribers will not be consumers as before, the bulk of 5G will consist in IoT devices with quite different behaviors from human subscribers. In fact, even in terms of IoT and depending on the use case, IoT devices can actually have totally different behaviors (e.g: a Smartmeter and a connected car).

Furthermore, the capabilities to support the divergent use cases in 5G, can only be accomplished in a flexible and efficient architecture, with the agility of modular network functions which can be quickly deployed and scaled on demand. 

Taken together, 5G networks bring significant changes to fraud management, namely by introducing new use cases and consequently new attack vectors and type of stakeholders involved in fraud, as well as massive volumes of information that require a distributed approach to process them.

The main contribution of the AIDA Project is to address the changes in the current threat model for 5G, explicitly proposing (I) a distributed edge computing Federated ML architecture on the 5G Edge, using decentralized data to train ML models, supporting the processing of massive volumes of information in real time; (II) linear, scalable, ranked out, parameter free methods that are able to identify abnormal behavior in smart fraud context where artificial intelligence is used to perpetrated fraud and avoid detection; (III) Visualization of Million-Scale Call Graphs, with meaningful and explainable visualizations extracts to assist analysts in spotting fraudsters and suspicious behavior.

AIDA represents the effort of the industry with a consortium of academic partners from multiple areas with the goal of providing a solution that enables us to face the challenges of 5G fraud and distributed platform components, achiving greater levels of scalability, by leveraging the increasing edge computing capacity made available by the IoT, and the imminent large-scale deployment of 5G cellular technology.”

— Pedro Fidalgo, Mobileum

AIDA’s partners travelled to Porto, Portugal, where they participated in the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), from June 27-29. Their participation was an opportunity to present the project’s results since it reached its concluding phase. For the last three years, the AIDA’s partners produced 8 software tools, 42 scientific publications (3 with PT partners and CMU and 3 with Mobileum), and 2 use cases (Bot net detection and International Revenue Share Fraud).

Earlier this month, two researchers from INESC TEC, one partner of the AIDA project, presented a poster at this year EuroSys Conference, in Rome, with the title “Emission-Aware Federated Learning: A Case Study on Transportation and Carbon Footprint”. The poster is focused on the addition of Federated Learning”, which enables the promotion of sustainable and personalised travel behaviours while preserving data privacy.

As written in the poster, the main goal of the research “is to preserve the privacy of users data while increasing awareness on their carbon footprint”. 

EuroSys Conference is one of the most important events related to systems software research and development.

On March 29, eight PhD students got together to share and discuss the work they have been developing within the AIDA project. This event was an excellent networking opportunity for the students to meet each other and to get to know other investigation topics.

There were presentations in three main areas related to the project outputs: Distributed Systems, Security, and Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection.

The meeting was moderated by Pedro Fidalgo, from Mobileum, and had the participation of Luís Ferreira, from INESC TEC, José Flora, Iury Araújo, Mariana Cunha and Jessica Castro, from University of Coimbra, and Minji Yoon, Saranya Vijayakumar and Jeremy Lee, from Carnegie Mellon University.

INESC TEC, one of AIDA’s partners, presented AIDA to the Doctoral Program in Computer Science (MAP-I)’S first year students. This visit, which took place on December 6, 2022, happened during a visit to the High-Assurance Software Laboratory from INESC TEC at the University of Minho.

This was an opportunity to present the work carried out by the AIDA project and get to know a good example of international collaboration between industry and academia.

It is important to mention that the initiative was also an opportunity to share the project’s vision and expected outcomes, while promoting the project’s activities and benefits.

Pedro Fidalgo, from our coordinator partner Mobileum, participated in the roundtable “Adaptive, automated, and autonomic computing” at this year’s CMU Portugal Summit, which happened under the motto “New Frontiers in tech”. 

During the conference, the AIDA project had a meeting with the CMU Portugal External Review Committee, an advisory board charged with assessing the project’s performance and making recommendations.   

Paula Raissa Silva, from INESC TEC, also participated in the conference with a paper entitled “Federated Anomaly Detection over Distributed Data Streams”.

The conference aimed at bringing experts to present research progress in various areas, such as Health, Cybersecurity, Forests, Artificial Intelligence, Language Technologies, Machine Learning, among others. The CMU Portugal Summit 2022 took place in Lisbon, on November 9 and 10.  

On May 13^th, the AIDA project was presented at the CMU Portugal Program workshop that preceded the Commencement Ceremony, in Pittsburgh.

Our researcher David Garlan, from CMU, presented the project as an ongoing research work, and collaboration between Portugal and CMU. David Garlan also talked about architecting effective ML based systems in the AIDA project and CMU Portugal Project Camelot.

This event was an opportunity for CMU researchers and PhD students to address their ongoing research work in collaboration between Portugal and CMU.

“Adaptive Database Synchronization for an Online Analytical Cloud-to-Edge Continuum” is the new paper of the AIDA project, which was presented this week at the ACM Dependable, Adaptive, and Secure Distributed Systems (DADS 2022). 

Internet of Things devices are generally underpowered, but they exist in large volumes and are located very close to where the data is captured. The use of these devices is increasingly common in the industry, agriculture, running cities, and even at homes. Because of their limitations, the data is traditionally transferred periodically to dedicated servers. However, this approach means that data analysis can quickly become outdated. Furthermore, it is not possible to known in advance which data will be relevant, meaning that certain data is transferred over the network unnecessarily.

This paper focuses on a a mechanism developed to, on the one hand, transfer only the data necessary to answer the question, and on the other hand, enable real-time analysis. This way, data is ideally transferred only once – and only the necessary one. “This reduces the impact on the network and the devices, thus offering better performance and reducing costs. The mechanism also allows one to adapt to network and device characteristics to get the best performance out of them.”, said Daniel Costa, one of the authors of the papers and a researcher at INESC TEC.

This design can be used, for example, in an anomaly or failure investigation, allowing captured data to be exploited in real-time without having to transfer everything over the network.

Read the full paper here.

On March 17, 2022, the AIDA consortium met in Braga (Portugal) to plan the last months of the project. The discussion focused on the use cases needed for pilot proposes and which frameworks can be used to execute the pilot correctly. Additionally, the partners discussed the tests required to achieve a good quality assurance metric. In this sense, collaboration between all partners is crucial in determining the success of project outcomes.