Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Thing (IoT) generate large amounts of data spurring the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based smart applications. Driven by rapid advancements in technologies that support smart devices, agriculture and farming sector is shifting towards IoT connected ecosystem to balance the increase in demand for food supply. As the number of smart farms reach critical mass, it is now possible to include AI assisted systems at a cooperative (co-op) farming level. Today, in the United States alone there are about 1,871 co-ops serving 1,890,057 member farmers. Hence, such advanced technologies and infrastructure when incorporated in the co-op farming ecosystem can immensely benefit small member farmers who operate and maintain these independent co-op entities. In this paper, we develop a connected cooperative ecosystem which defines sensors and their communication among different entities along with cloud supported co-op hub. We develop member farm and co-op ontologies to capture data and various interactions that happen between shared resources, member farms, and the co-op that are stored in the cloud. These can then help generate AI supported insights for farmers and the cooperative. Several co-op farming use case scenarios have been discussed to demonstrate the functioning of our smart cooperative ecosystem. Finally, the paper describes various AI applications that can be deployed at the co-op level to aid member farmers.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based electronic medical records services, due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient centric approach for EHR management where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients' end. This however creates a significant overhead for the patient who has to authorize every access of their health record. This is not practical given the multiple personnel involved in providing care and that at times the patient may not be in a state to provide this authorization. Hence there is a need of developing a proper authorization delegation mechanism for safe, secure and easy cloud-based EHR management. We have developed a novel, centralized, attribute based authorization mechanism that uses Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and allows for delegated secure access of patient records. This mechanism transfers the service management overhead from the patient to the medical organization and allows easy delegation of cloud-based EHR's access authority to the medical providers. In this paper, we describe this novel ABE approach as well as the prototype system that we have created to illustrate it.

The early detection of cybersecurity events such as attacks is challenging given the constantly evolving threat landscape. Even with advanced monitoring, sophisticated attackers can spend more than 100 days in a system before being detected. This paper describes a novel, collaborative framework that assists a security analyst by exploiting the power of semantically rich knowledge representation and reasoning integrated with different machine learning techniques. Our Cognitive Cybersecurity System ingests information from various textual sources and stores them in a common knowledge graph using terms from an extended version of the Unified Cybersecurity Ontology. The system then reasons over the knowledge graph that combines a variety of collaborative agents representing host and network-based sensors to derive improved actionable intelligence for security administrators, decreasing their cognitive load and increasing their confidence in the result. We describe a proof of concept framework for our approach and demonstrate its capabilities by testing it against a custom-built ransomware similar to WannaCry.

Cloud services are becoming an essential part of many organizations. Cloud providers have to adhere to security and privacy policies to ensure their users' data remains confidential and secure. Though there are some ongoing efforts on developing cloud security standards, most cloud providers are implementing a mish-mash of security and privacy controls. This has led to confusion among cloud consumers as to what security measures they should expect from the cloud services, and whether these measures would comply with their security and compliance requirements. We have conducted a comprehensive study to review the potential threats faced by cloud consumers and have determined the compliance models and security controls that should be in place to manage the risk. Based on this study, we have developed an ontology describing the cloud security controls, threats and compliances. We have also developed an application that classifies the security threats faced by cloud users and automatically determines the high level security and compliance policy controls that have to be activated for each threat. The application also displays existing cloud providers that support these security policies. Cloud consumers can use our system to formulate their security policies and find compliant providers even if they are not familiar with the underlying technology.

Managing virtualized services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge. Traditional models of software development are not appropriate for the cloud computing domain, where software (and other) services are acquired on demand. In this paper, we describe a new integrated methodology for the life cycle of IT services delivered on the cloud and demonstrate how it can be used to represent and reason about services and service requirements and so automate service acquisition and consumption from the cloud. We have divided the IT service life cycle into five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption. We detail each phase and describe the ontologies that we have developed to represent the concepts and relationships for each phase. To show how this life cycle can automate the usage of cloud services, we describe a cloud storage prototype that we have developed. This methodology complements previous work on ontologies for service descriptions in that it is focused on supporting negotiation for the particulars of a service and going beyond simple matchmaking.

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology design and development continues to be rapid, despite major limitations in its current form as a practice and discipline to address all sociohumanitarian issues and complexities. From these limitations emerges an imperative to strengthen AI and ML literacy in underserved communities and build a more diverse AI and ML design and development workforce engaged in health research. Objective: AI and ML has the potential to account for and assess a variety of factors that contribute to health and disease and to improve prevention, diagnosis, and therapy. Here, we describe recent activities within the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) Ethics and Equity Workgroup (EEWG) that led to the development of deliverables that will help put ethics and fairness at the forefront of AI and ML applications to build equity in biomedical research, education, and health care. Methods: The AIM-AHEAD EEWG was created in 2021 with 3 cochairs and 51 members in year 1 and 2 cochairs and ~40 members in year 2. Members in both years included AIM-AHEAD principal investigators, coinvestigators, leadership fellows, and research fellows. The EEWG used a modified Delphi approach using polling, ranking, and other exercises to facilitate discussions around tangible steps, key terms, and definitions needed to ensure that ethics and fairness are at the forefront of AI and ML applications to build equity in biomedical research, education, and health care. Results: The EEWG developed a set of ethics and equity principles, a glossary, and an interview guide. The ethics and equity principles comprise 5 core principles, each with subparts, which articulate best practices for working with stakeholders from historically and presently underrepresented communities. The glossary contains 12 terms and definitions, with particular emphasis on optimal development, refinement, and implementation of AI and ML in health equity research. To accompany the glossary, the EEWG developed a concept relationship diagram that describes the logical flow of and relationship between the definitional concepts. Lastly, the interview guide provides questions that can be used or adapted to garner stakeholder and community perspectives on the principles and glossary. Conclusions: Ongoing engagement is needed around our principles and glossary to identify and predict potential limitations in their uses in AI and ML research settings, especially for institutions with limited resources. This requires time, careful consideration, and honest discussions around what classifies an engagement incentive as meaningful to support and sustain their full engagement. By slowing down to meet historically and presently underresourced institutions and communities where they are and where they are capable of engaging and competing, there is higher potential to achieve needed diversity, ethics, and equity in AI and ML implementation in health research.