Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a challenging task due to its cross-domain nature, involving the translation of visual-gestural language to text. Many previous methods employ an intermediate representation, i.e., gloss sequences, to facilitate SLT, thus transforming it into a two-stage task of sign language recognition (SLR) followed by sign language translation (SLT). However, the scarcity of gloss-annotated sign language data, combined with the information bottleneck in the mid-level gloss representation, has hindered the further development of the SLT task. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Gloss-Free SLT based on Visual-Language Pretraining (GFSLT-VLP), which improves SLT by inheriting language-oriented prior knowledge from pre-trained models, without any gloss annotation assistance. Our approach involves two stages: (i) integrating Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) with masked self-supervised learning to create pre-tasks that bridge the semantic gap between visual and textual representations and restore masked sentences, and (ii) constructing an end-to-end architecture with an encoder-decoder-like structure that inherits the parameters of the pre-trained Visual Encoder and Text Decoder from the first stage. The seamless combination of these novel designs forms a robust sign language representation and significantly improves gloss-free sign language translation. In particular, we have achieved unprecedented improvements in terms of BLEU-4 score on the PHOENIX14T dataset (≥+5) and the CSL-Daily dataset (≥+3) compared to state-of-the-art gloss-free SLT methods. Furthermore, our approach also achieves competitive results on the PHOENIX14T dataset when compared with most of the gloss-based methods ¹ .

Currently, the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are playing an important role in numerous areas, especially in smart homes and buildings, health-care, vehicles, and energy. It will continue to expand in various fields in the future. However, some issues limit the further development of IoT technologies. First, the battery-powered feature increases the maintenance cost of replacing batteries for IoT devices. Second, existing Cloud-IoT frameworks are not able to cope with emerging delay-constrained applications in the IoT system due to its centralized mode of operation and the considerable communication delay. Existing studies neither satisfy the demand for the quick response in time-constraint IoT applications nor fundamentally solving the problem of energy sustainability. Therefore, this paper studies the problem of energy sustainability and timeliness in IoT system. Based on Energy Harvesting Technologies (EHT), the Green and Sustainable Mobile Edge Computing (GS-MEC) framework is proposed to make IoT devices self-powered by utilizing the green energy in the IoT environment. In this framework, we formulate the problem of minimizing response time and packet losses of tasks under the limitation of energy queue stability to improve the timeliness and reliability of task processing. Additionally, the dynamic parallel computing offloading and energy management (DPCOEM) algorithm is designed to solve the problem based on the Lyapunov optimization technology. Finally, theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and the numerical result of simulation shows that the average performance of the proposed algorithm is an order of magnitude better than state-of-the-art algorithms.

At the dawn of big data and 5G networks, end-to-end communication with large amounts of data between mobile devices is difficult to be implemented through the traditional face-to-face transmission mechanism in social networks. Consequently, opportunistic social networks proposed that message applications should choose proper relay nodes to perform effective data transmission processes. At present, several routing algorithms, based on node similarity, attempt to use the contextual information related to nodes and the special relationships between them to select a suitable relay node among neighbors. However, when evaluating the similarity degree between a pair of nodes, most existing algorithms in opportunistic social networks pay attention to only a few similar factors, and even ignore the importance of mobile similarity in the data transmission process. To improve the transmission environment, this study establishes a fuzzy routing-forwarding algorithm (FCNS) exploiting comprehensive node similarity (the mobile and social similarities) in opportunistic social networks. In our proposed scheme, the transmission preference of the node is determined through the fuzzy evaluation of mobile and social similarities. The suitable message delivery decision is made by collecting and comparing the transmission preference of nodes, and the sustainable and stable data transmission process is performed through the feedback mechanism. Through simulations and the comparison of social network algorithms, the delivery ratio in the proposed algorithm is 0.85 on average, and the routing delay and network overhead of this algorithm are always the lowest.

Fog computing is a distributed computing model that can utilise the storage, analysis and processing capabilities of fog nodes near edge devices. Although fog computing can support task processing for various Internet of Things (IoT) systems, Fog‐IoT architecture faces several new challenges with the rapid development of IoT systems, especially delay‐sensitive IoT systems, such as stochastic and dynamic data arrival, optimal utility and deadline of tasks. To address these challenges, workload scheduling toward worst‐case delay and optimal utility for single‐hop Fog‐IoT architecture are studied and the workload dynamic scheduling algorithm (WDSA) is proposed. The proposed WDSA algorithm can maximise the average throughput utility while guarantees the worst‐case delay of task processing. In addition, it is online and needs no prior information about future. The algorithm performance is analysed from the perspective of optimality and worst‐case delay, demonstrating that the proposed WDSA algorithm can get an approximate optima and worst‐case delay guarantees. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the efficiency and efficacy of this kind of the algorithm can meet the requirement.

As demands for multi-access edge computing (MEC) increase exponentially, resource limitations at individual edge servers (ESs) will inevitably become bottlenecks. Most existing works largely ignore spot access spectrum resource availability when considering computing cooperation among ESs. In this paper, we present a general cooperative MEC framework to enable network-wide cooperation of ESs by leveraging a multi-hop task relaying strategy. Under this framework, we can maximize overall throughput (task completion rate) by balancing the workload for both spot communication and computing through task routing. To address the problem, we formulate an optimization problem and apply matching theory to find a task offloading scheme with low-complexity. Finally, we conduct numerical analysis to show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme and the superiority of our multi-hop relay-assisted MEC systems.