The large transformer-based language models demonstrate excellent performance in natural language processing. By considering the transferability of the knowledge gained by these models in one domain to other related domains, and the closeness of natural languages to high-level programming languages, such as C/C++, this work studies how to leverage (large) transformer-based language models in detecting software vulnerabilities and how good are these models for vulnerability detection tasks. In this regard, firstly, we present a systematic (cohesive) framework that details source code translation, model preparation, and inference. Then, we perform an empirical analysis of software vulnerability datasets of C/C++ source codes having multiple vulnerabilities corresponding to the library function call, pointer usage, array usage, and arithmetic expression. Our empirical results demonstrate the good performance of the language models in vulnerability detection. Moreover, these language models have better performance metrics, such as F1-score, than the contemporary models, namely bidirectional long short term memory and bidirectional gated recurrent unit. Experimenting with the language models is always challenging due to the requirement of computing resources, platforms, libraries, and dependencies. Thus, this paper also analyses the popular platforms to efficiently fine-tune these models and present recommendations while choosing the platforms for our framework.

Federated learning (FL) and split learning (SL) are state-of-the-art distributed machine learning techniques to enable machine learning training without accessing raw data on clients or end devices. However, their comparative training performance under real-world resource-restricted Internet of Things (IoT) device settings remains barely studied. This work provides empirical comparisons of FL and SL in real-world IoT settings regarding (i) learning performance with heterogeneous data distributions and (ii) on-device execution overhead. Our analyses in this work demonstrate that the learning performance of SL is better than FL under an imbalanced data distribution but worse than FL under an extreme non-IID data distribution. Recently, FL and SL are combined to form splitfed learning (SFL) to leverage each of their benefits (e.g., parallel training of FL and lightweight on-device computation requirement of SL). Our work considers FL, SL, and SFL, and mounts them on Raspberry Pi devices to evaluate their performance, including training time, communication overhead, power consumption, and memory usage with resource-restricted IoT devices. Besides evaluations, we apply two optimizations. First, we generalize SFL by carefully examining the possibility of a hybrid type of model training at the server-side. The generalized SFL merges sequential (dependent) and parallel (independent) processes of model training and thus is beneficial to a system with a large scale of IoT devices, specifically at the server-side operations. Second, we propose pragmatic techniques to substantially reduce the communication overhead by up to four times for the SL and (generalized) SFL.

In recent years, deep learning (DL) models have demonstrated remarkable achievements on non-trivial tasks such as speech recognition, image processing, and natural language understanding. One of the significant contributors to its success is the proliferation of end devices that acted as a catalyst to provide data for data-hungry DL models. However, computing DL training and inference is the main challenge. Usually, central cloud servers are used for the computation, but it opens up other significant challenges, such as high latency, increased communication costs, and privacy concerns. To mitigate these drawbacks, considerable efforts have been made to push the processing of DL models to edge servers (a mesh of computing devices near end devices). Moreover, the confluence point of DL and edge has given rise to edge intelligence (EI). International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) defines EI as the concept where the data is acquired, stored, and processed utilizing edge computing with DL and advanced networking capabilities. Broadly, EI has six levels of categories based on where the training and inference of DL take place, e.g ., cloud server, edge server and end devices. This survey paper focuses primarily on the fifth level of EI, called all in-edge level, where DL training and inference (deployment) are performed solely by edge servers. All in-edge is suitable when the end devices have low computing resources, e.g ., Internet-of-Things, and other requirements such as latency and communication cost are important such as in mission-critical applications ( e.g ., health care). Besides, 5G/6G networks are envisioned to use all in-edge. Firstly, this paper presents all in-edge computing architectures, including centralized, decentralized, and distributed. Secondly, this paper presents enabling technologies, such as model parallelism, data parallelism, and split learning, which facilitates DL training and deployment at edge servers. Thirdly, model adaptation techniques based on model compression and conditional computation are described because the standard cloud-based DL deployment cannot be directly applied to all in-edge due to its limited computational resources. Fourthly, this paper discusses eleven key performance metrics to evaluate the performance of DL at all in-edge efficiently. Finally, several open research challenges in the area of all in-edge are presented.

We consider a graphical approach to index coding. As cycles have been shown to provide coding gain, cycles and cliques (a specific type of overlapping cycles) have been exploited in an existing literature. In this paper, we define a more general form of overlapping cycles, called the interlinked-cycle (IC) structure, that generalizes cycles and cliques. We propose a scheme, called the interlinked-cycle-cover (ICC) scheme, that leverages IC structures in digraphs to construct scalar linear index codes. We characterize a class of infinitely many digraphs where our proposed scheme is optimal over all linear and nonlinear index codes. Consequently, for this class of digraphs, we indirectly prove that scalar linear index codes are optimal. Furthermore, we show that the ICC scheme can outperform all the existing graph-based schemes (including partial-clique-cover and fractional-local-chromatic number schemes), and a random coding scheme (namely, composite coding) for certain graphs.