A Review of Federated Learning in Agriculture.

Federated learning (FL), with the aim of training machine learning models using data and computational resources on edge devices without sharing raw local data, is essential for improving agricultural management and smart agriculture. This study is a review of FL applications that address various agricultural problems. We compare the types of data partitioning and types of FL (horizontal partitioning and horizontal FL, vertical partitioning and vertical FL, and hybrid partitioning and transfer FL), architectures (centralized and decentralized), levels of federation (cross-device and cross-silo), and the use of aggregation algorithms in different reviewed approaches and applications of FL in agriculture. We also briefly review how the communication challenge is solved by different approaches. This work is useful for gaining an overview of the FL techniques used in agriculture and the progress made in this field.

Density-Based Entropy Centrality for Community Detection in Complex Networks.

One of the most important problems in complex networks is the location of nodes that are essential or play a main role in the network. Nodes with main local roles are the centers of real communities. Communities are sets of nodes of complex networks and are densely connected internally. Choosing the right nodes as seeds of the communities is crucial in determining real communities. We propose a new centrality measure named density-based entropy centrality for the local identification of the most important nodes. It measures the entropy of the sum of the sizes of the maximal cliques to which each node and its neighbor nodes belong. The proposed centrality is a local measure for explaining the local influence of each node, which provides an efficient way to locally identify the most important nodes and for community detection because communities are local structures. It can be computed independently for individual vertices, for large networks, and for not well-specified networks. The use of the proposed density-based entropy centrality for community seed selection and community detection outperforms other centrality measures.

FLoCIC: A Few Lines of Code for Raster Image Compression.

A new approach is proposed for lossless raster image compression employing interpolative coding. A new multifunction prediction scheme is presented first. Then, interpolative coding, which has not been applied frequently for image compression, is explained briefly. Its simplification is introduced in regard to the original approach. It is determined that the JPEG LS predictor reduces the information entropy slightly better than the multi-functional approach. Furthermore, the interpolative coding was moderately more efficient than the most frequently used arithmetic coding. Finally, our compression pipeline is compared against JPEG LS, JPEG 2000 in the lossless mode, and PNG using 24 standard grayscale benchmark images. JPEG LS turned out to be the most efficient, followed by JPEG 2000, while our approach using simplified interpolative coding was moderately better than PNG. The implementation of the proposed encoder is extremely simple and can be performed in less than 60 lines of programming code for the coder and 60 lines for the decoder, which is demonstrated in the given pseudocodes.