The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enables real-time data exchange among vehicles and roadside units and thus provides a promising solution to alleviate traffic jams in the urban area. Meanwhile, better traffic management via efficient traffic light control can benefit the IoV as well by enabling a better communication environment and decreasing the network load. As such, IoV and efficient traffic light control can formulate a virtuous cycle. Edge computing, an emerging technology to provide low-latency computation capabilities at the edge of the network, can further improve the performance of this cycle. However, while the collected information is valuable, an efficient solution for better utilization and faster feedback has yet to be developed for edge-empowered IoV. To this end, we propose a Decentralized Reinforcement Learning at the Edge for traffic light control in the IoV (DRLE). DRLE exploits the ubiquity of the IoV to accelerate traffic data collection and interpretation towards better traffic light control and congestion alleviation. Operating within the coverage of the edge servers, DRLE aggregates data from neighboring edge servers for city-scale traffic light control. DRLE decomposes the highly complex problem of large area control into a decentralized multi-agent problem. We prove its global optima with concrete mathematical reasoning and demonstrate its superiority over several state-of-the-art algorithms via extensive evaluations.

Vehicular communication applications require an efficient communication architecture for timely information delivery. Centralized, cloud-based infrastructures present latencies too high to satisfy the requirements of emergency information processing and transmission, while Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication is too variable for reliable in-time information transmission. In this paper, we present EAVVE, a novel Vehicle-to-Everything system, consisting of vehicles with and without comprehensive data processing capabilities, facilitated by edge servers co-located with roadside units. Adding computation capabilities at the edge of the network allows reducing the overall latency compared to vehicle-to-cloud and makes up for scenarios in which in-vehicle computational power is not sufficient to satisfy the service demand. To improve the offloading efficiency, we propose a decentralized algorithm for real-time task scheduling and a client/server algorithm for information filtering. We demonstrate the practical applications of EAVVE with a bandwidth-hungry, latency constrained real-life prototype system that connects vehicular vision through Augmented Reality vision. We evaluate this prototype system with real-life road tests. We complement this practical evaluation with extensive simulations based on real-world base station and vehicular traffic data to demonstrate the scalability of EAVVE and its performance in citywide scenarios. EAVVE decreases the latency by 42.6% and 78.7% compared to local and remote cloud solutions while relaxing congestion at the bottleneck by 99% with reasonable infrastructure expenditure.

Artificial intelligence shows promise for solving many practical societal problems in areas such as healthcare and transportation. However, the current mechanisms for AI model diffusion such as Github code repositories, academic project webpages, and commercial AI marketplaces have some limitations; for example, a lack of monetization methods, model traceability, and model auditabilty. In this work, we sketch guidelines for a new AI diffusion method based on a decentralized online marketplace. We consider the technical, economic, and regulatory aspects of such a marketplace including a discussion of solutions for problems in these areas. Finally, we include a comparative analysis of several current AI marketplaces that are already available or in development. We find that most of these marketplaces are centralized commercial marketplaces with relatively few models.

Connected vehicles, whether equipped with advanced driver-assistance systems or fully autonomous, require human driver supervision and are currently constrained to visual information in their line-of-sight. A cooperative perception system among vehicles increases their situational awareness by extending their perception range. Existing solutions focus on improving perspective transformation and fast information collection. However, such solutions fail to filter out large amounts of less relevant data and thus impose significant network and computation load. Moreover, presenting all this less relevant data can overwhelm the driver and thus actually hinder them. To address such issues, we present Augmented Informative Cooperative Perception (AICP), the first fast-filtering system which optimizes the informativeness of shared data at vehicles to improve the fused presentation. To this end, an informativeness maximization problem is presented for vehicles to select a subset of data to display to their drivers. Specifically, we propose (i) a dedicated system design with custom data structure and lightweight routing protocol for convenient data encapsulation, fast interpretation and transmission, and (ii) a comprehensive problem formulation and efficient fitness-based sorting algorithm to select the most valuable data to display at the application layer. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype of AICP with a bandwidth-hungry, latency-constrained real-life augmented reality application. The prototype adds only 12.6 milliseconds of latency to a current informativeness-unaware system. Next, we test the networking performance of AICP at scale and show that AICP effectively filters out less relevant packets and decreases the channel busy time.

Recent advances in extended reality (XR) technologies have enabled new and increasingly realistic empathy tools and experiences. In XR, all interactions take place in different spatial contexts, all with different features, affordances, and constraints. We present a systematic literature survey of recent work on empathy in XR. As a result, we contribute a research roadmap with three future opportunities and six open questions in XR-enabled empathy research across both physical and virtual spaces.

Recent advances in information technology have revolutionized the automotive industry, paving the way for next-generation smart vehicular mobility. Specifically, vehicles, roadside units, and other road users can collaborate to deliver novel services and applications that leverage, for example, big vehicular data and machine learning. Relatedly, fifth-generation cellular networks (5G) are being developed and deployed for low-latency, high-reliability, and high bandwidth communications. While 5G adjacent technologies such as edge computing allow for data offloading and computation at the edge of the network thus ensuring even lower latency and context-awareness. Overall, these developments provide a rich ecosystem for the evolution of vehicular applications, communications, and computing. Therefore in this work, we aim at providing a comprehensive overview of the state of research on vehicular computing in the emerging age of 5G and big data. In particular, this paper highlights several vehicular applications, investigates their requirements, details the enabling communication technologies and computing paradigms, and studies data analytics pipelines and the integration of these enabling technologies in response to application requirements.