Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken us by storm, helping us to make decisions in everything we do, even in finding our “true love” and the “significant other”. While 5G promises us high-speed mobile internet, 6G pledges to support ubiquitous AI services through next-generation softwarization, heterogeneity, and configurability of networks. The work on 6G is in its infancy and requires the community to conceptualize and develop its design, implementation, deployment, and use cases. Towards this end, this paper proposes a framework for Distributed AI as a Service (DAIaaS) provisioning for Internet of Everything (IoE) and 6G environments. The AI service is “distributed” because the actual training and inference computations are divided into smaller, concurrent, computations suited to the level and capacity of resources available with cloud, fog, and edge layers. Multiple DAIaaS provisioning configurations for distributed training and inference are proposed to investigate the design choices and performance bottlenecks of DAIaaS. Specifically, we have developed three case studies (e.g., smart airport) with eight scenarios (e.g., federated learning) comprising nine applications and AI delivery models (smart surveillance, etc.) and 50 distinct sensor and software modules (e.g., object tracker). The evaluation of the case studies and the DAIaaS framework is reported in terms of end-to-end delay, network usage, energy consumption, and financial savings with recommendations to achieve higher performance. DAIaaS will facilitate standardization of distributed AI provisioning, allow developers to focus on the domain-specific details without worrying about distributed training and inference, and help systemize the mass-production of technologies for smarter environments.

Several factors are motivating the development of preventive, personalized, connected, virtual, and ubiquitous healthcare services. These factors include declining public health, increase in chronic diseases, an ageing population, rising healthcare costs, the need to bring intelligence near the user for privacy, security, performance, and costs reasons, as well as COVID-19. Motivated by these drivers, this paper proposes, implements, and evaluates a reference architecture called Imtidad that provides Distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a Service (DAIaaS) over cloud, fog, and edge using a service catalog case study containing 22 AI skin disease diagnosis services. These services belong to four service classes that are distinguished based on software platforms (containerized gRPC, gRPC, Android, and Android Nearby) and are executed on a range of hardware platforms (Google Cloud, HP Pavilion Laptop, NVIDIA Jetson nano, Raspberry Pi Model B, Samsung Galaxy S9, and Samsung Galaxy Note 4) and four network types (Fiber, Cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth). The AI models for the diagnosis include two standard Deep Neural Networks and two Tiny AI deep models to enable their execution at the edge, trained and tested using 10,015 real-life dermatoscopic images. The services are evaluated using several benchmarks including model service value, response time, energy consumption, and network transfer time. A DL service on a local smartphone provides the best service in terms of both energy and speed, followed by a Raspberry Pi edge device and a laptop in fog. The services are designed to enable different use cases, such as patient diagnosis at home or sending diagnosis requests to travelling medical professionals through a fog device or cloud. This is the pioneering work that provides a reference architecture and such a detailed implementation and treatment of DAIaaS services, and is also expected to have an extensive impact on developing smart distributed service infrastructures for healthcare and other sectors.

Homes are the building block of cities and societies and therefore smart homes are critical to establishing smart living and are expected to play a key role in enabling smart, sustainable cities and societies. The current literature on smart homes has mainly focused on developing smart functions for homes such as security and ambiance management. Homes are composed of families and are inherently complex phenomena underlined by humans and their relationships with each other, subject to individual, intragroup, intergroup, and intercommunity goals. There is a clear need to understand, define, consolidate existing research, and actualize the overarching roles of smart homes, and the roles of smart homes that will serve the needs of future smart cities and societies. This paper introduces our data-driven parameter discovery methodology and uses it to provide, for the first time, an extensive, fairly comprehensive, analysis of the families and homes landscape seen through the eyes of academics and the public, using over a hundred thousand research papers and nearly a million tweets. We developed a methodology using deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and big data analytics methods (BERT and other machine learning methods) and applied it to automatically discover parameters that capture a comprehensive knowledge and design space of smart families and homes comprising social, political, economic, environmental, and other dimensions. The 66 discovered parameters and the knowledge space comprising 100 s of dimensions are explained by reviewing and referencing over 300 articles from the academic literature and tweets. The knowledge and parameters discovered in this paper can be used to develop a holistic understanding of matters related to families and homes facilitating the development of better, community-specific policies, technologies, solutions, and industries for families and homes, leading to strengthening families and homes, and in turn, empowering sustainable societies across the globe.

Technological advancements and innovations have profoundly changed the lives of people giving rise to smart environments, cities, and societies. As homes are the building block of cities and societies, smart homes are critical to establishing smart living and are expected to play a key role in enabling smart cities and societies. The current academic literature and commercial advancements on smart homes have mainly focused on developing and providing smart functions for homes to provide security management and facilitate the residents in their various activities such as ambiance management. Homes are much more than physical structures, buildings, appliances, operational machines, and systems. Homes are composed of families and are inherently complex phenomena underlined by humans and their relationships with each other, subject to individual, intragroup, intergroup, and intercommunity goals. There is a clear need to understand, define, consolidate existing research, and actualize the overarching roles of smart homes, the roles of smart homes that would serve the needs of future smart cities and societies. This paper introduces our data-driven parameter discovery methodology and uses it to provide, for the first time, an extensive, rather fairly comprehensive, analysis of the families and homes landscape seen through the eyes of academics and the public using over a hundred thousand research papers and nearly a million tweets. We develop a methodology using deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and big data analytics methods and apply it to automatically discover parameters that capture a comprehensive knowledge and design space of smart families and homes comprising social, political, economic, environmental, and other dimensions. The 66 discovered parameters and the knowledge space comprising 100s of dimensions are explained by reviewing and referencing over 300 articles from the academic literature and tweets. The knowledge and parameters discovered in this paper can be used to develop a holistic understanding of matters related to families and homes facilitating the development of better, community-specific, policies, technologies, solutions, and industries for families and homes, leading to strengthening families and homes, and in turn, empowering sustainable societies across the globe.

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