Self-learning activation functions to increase accuracy of privacy-preserving Convolutional Neural Networks with homomorphic encryption.

The widespread adoption of cloud computing necessitates privacy-preserving techniques that allow information to be processed without disclosure. This paper proposes a method to increase the accuracy and performance of privacy-preserving Convolutional Neural Networks with Homomorphic Encryption (CNN-HE) by Self-Learning Activation Functions (SLAF). SLAFs are polynomials with trainable coefficients updated during training, together with synaptic weights, for each polynomial independently to learn task-specific and CNN-specific features. We theoretically prove its feasibility to approximate any continuous activation function to the desired error as a function of the SLAF degree. Two CNN-HE models are proposed: CNN-HE-SLAF and CNN-HE-SLAF-R. In the first model, all activation functions are replaced by SLAFs, and CNN is trained to find weights and coefficients. In the second one, CNN is trained with the original activation, then weights are fixed, activation is substituted by SLAF, and CNN is shortly re-trained to adapt SLAF coefficients. We show that such self-learning can achieve the same accuracy 99.38% as a non-polynomial ReLU over non-homomorphic CNNs and lead to an increase in accuracy (99.21%) and higher performance (6.26 times faster) than the state-of-the-art CNN-HE CryptoNets on the MNIST optical character recognition benchmark dataset.

DT-RRNS: Routing Protocol Design for Secure and Reliable Distributed Smart Sensors Communication Systems.

A smart city has a complex hierarchical communication system with various components. It must meet the requirements of fast connection, reliability, and security without data compromise. Internet of Things technology is widely used to provide connectivity and control solutions for smart sensors and other devices using heterogeneous networking technologies. In this paper, we propose a routing solution for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET) with increasing speed, reliability, and sufficient security. Many routing protocols have been proposed for WSNs and MANETs. We combine the Secret Sharing Schemes (SSS) and Redundant Residual Number Systems (RRNS) to provide an efficient mechanism for a Distributed dynamic heterogeneous network Transmission (DT) with new security and reliability routing protocol (DT-RRNS). We analyze the concept of data transmission based on RRNS that divides data into smaller encoded shares and transmits them in parallel, protecting them from attacks on routes by adaptive multipath secured transmission and providing self-correcting properties that improve the reliability and fault tolerance of the entire system.

Dynamic performance-Energy tradeoff consolidation with contention-aware resource provisioning in containerized clouds.

Containers have emerged as a more portable and efficient solution than virtual machines for cloud infrastructure providing both a flexible way to build and deploy applications. The quality of service, security, performance, energy consumption, among others, are essential aspects of their deployment, management, and orchestration. Inappropriate resource allocation can lead to resource contention, entailing reduced performance, poor energy efficiency, and other potentially damaging effects. In this paper, we present a set of online job allocation strategies to optimize quality of service, energy savings, and completion time, considering contention for shared on-chip resources. We consider the job allocation as the multilevel dynamic bin-packing problem that provides a lightweight runtime solution that minimizes contention and energy consumption while maximizing utilization. The proposed strategies are based on two and three levels of scheduling policies with container selection, capacity distribution, and contention-aware allocation. The energy model considers joint execution of applications of different types on shared resources generalized by the job concentration paradigm. We provide an experimental analysis of eighty-six scheduling heuristics with scientific workloads of memory and CPU-intensive jobs. The proposed techniques outperform classical solutions in terms of quality of service, energy savings, and completion time by 21.73-43.44%, 44.06-92.11%, and 16.38-24.17%, respectively, leading to a cost-efficient resource allocation for cloud infrastructures.

Congestion game scheduling for virtual drug screening optimization.

In virtual drug screening, the chemical diversity of hits is an important factor, along with their predicted activity. Moreover, interim results are of interest for directing the further research, and their diversity is also desirable. In this paper, we consider a problem of obtaining a diverse set of virtual screening hits in a short time. To this end, we propose a mathematical model of task scheduling for virtual drug screening in high-performance computational systems as a congestion game between computational nodes to find the equilibrium solutions for best balancing the number of interim hits with their chemical diversity. The model considers the heterogeneous environment with workload uncertainty, processing time uncertainty, and limited knowledge about the input dataset structure. We perform computational experiments and evaluate the performance of the developed approach considering organic molecules database GDB-9. The used set of molecules is rich enough to demonstrate the feasibility and practicability of proposed solutions. We compare the algorithm with two known heuristics used in practice and observe that game-based scheduling outperforms them by the hit discovery rate and chemical diversity at earlier steps. Based on these results, we use a social utility metric for assessing the efficiency of our equilibrium solutions and show that they reach greatest values.