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1. Data Offloading in UAV-Assisted Multi-Access Edge Computing Systems: A Resource-Based Pricing and User Risk-Awareness Approach

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s20082434  

   Mitsis, Giorgos ; Tsiropoulou, Eirini Eleni ; Papavassiliou, Symeon ( April 2020 , Sensors)

   Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) systems have emerged recently as a flexible and dynamic computing environment, providing task offloading service to the users. In order for such a paradigm to be viable, the operator of a UAV-mounted MEC server should enjoy some form of profit by offering its computing capabilities to the end users. To deal with this issue in this paper, we apply a usage-based pricing policy for allowing the exploitation of the servers’ computing resources. The proposed pricing mechanism implicitly introduces a more social behavior to the users with respect to competing for the UAV-mounted MEC servers’ computation resources. In order to properly model the users’ risk-aware behavior within the overall data offloading decision-making process the principles of Prospect Theory are adopted, while the exploitation of the available computation resources is considered based on the theory of the Tragedy of the Commons. Initially, the user’s prospect-theoretic utility function is formulated by quantifying the user’s risk seeking and loss aversion behavior, while taking into account the pricing mechanism. Accordingly, the users’ pricing and risk-aware data offloading problem is formulated as a distributed maximization problem of each user’s expected prospect-theoretic utility function and addressed as a non-cooperativemore »game among the users. The existence of a Pure Nash Equilibrium (PNE) for the formulated non-cooperative game is shown based on the theory of submodular games. An iterative and distributed algorithm is introduced which converges to the PNE, following the learning rule of the best response dynamics. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach is achieved via modeling and simulation, and detailed numerical results are presented highlighting its key operation features and benefits.« less
2. Adversarial Point-of-Interest Recommendation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313609  

   Zhou, Fan ; Yin, Ruiyang ; Zhang, Kunpeng ; Trajcevski, Goce ; Zhong, Ting ; Wu, Jin ( January 2019 , The World Wide Web Conference, {WWW} 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 13-17, 2019)

   Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is essential to a variety of services for both users and business. An extensive number of models have been developed to improve the recommendation performance by exploiting various characteristics and relations among POIs (e.g., spatio-temporal, social, etc.). However, very few studies closely look into the underlying mechanism accounting for why users prefer certain POIs to others. In this work, we initiate the first attempt to learn the distribution of user latent preference by proposing an Adversarial POI Recommendation (APOIR) model, consisting of two major components: (1) the recommender (R) which suggests POIs based on the learned distribution by maximizing the probabilities that these POIs are predicted as unvisited and potentially interested; and (2) the discriminator (D) which distinguishes the recommended POIs from the true check-ins and provides gradients as the guidance to improve R in a rewarding framework. Two components are co-trained by playing a minimax game towards improving itself while pushing the other to the boundary. By further integrating geographical and social relations among POIs into the reward function as well as optimizing R in a reinforcement learning manner, APOIR obtains significant performance improvement in four standard metrics compared to the state of the art methods.
3. HyperSoRec: Exploiting Hyperbolic User and Item Representations with Multiple Aspects for Social-aware Recommendation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3463913  

   Wang, Hao ; Lian, Defu ; Tong, Hanghang ; Liu, Qi ; Huang, Zhenya ; Chen, Enhong ( April 2022 , ACM Transactions on Information Systems)

   Social recommendation has achieved great success in many domains including e-commerce and location-based social networks. Existing methods usually explore the user-item interactions or user-user connections to predict users’ preference behaviors. However, they usually learn both user and item representations in Euclidean space, which has large limitations for exploring the latent hierarchical property in the data. In this article, we study a novel problem of hyperbolic social recommendation, where we aim to learn the compact but strong representations for both users and items. Meanwhile, this work also addresses two critical domain-issues, which are under-explored. First, users often make trade-offs with multiple underlying aspect factors to make decisions during their interactions with items. Second, users generally build connections with others in terms of different aspects, which produces different influences with aspects in social network. To this end, we propose a novel graph neural network (GNN) framework with multiple aspect learning, namely, HyperSoRec. Specifically, we first embed all users, items, and aspects into hyperbolic space with superior representations to ensure their hierarchical properties. Then, we adapt a GNN with novel multi-aspect message-passing-receiving mechanism to capture different influences among users. Next, to characterize the multi-aspect interactions of users on items, we propose an adaptivemore »hyperbolic metric learning method by introducing learnable interactive relations among different aspects. Finally, we utilize the hyperbolic translational distance to measure the plausibility in each user-item pair for recommendation. Experimental results on two public datasets clearly demonstrate that our HyperSoRec not only achieves significant improvement for recommendation performance but also shows better representation ability in hyperbolic space with strong robustness and reliability.« less
4. Incentivizing effort in interdependent security games using resource pooling

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3338506.3340272  

   Khalili, Mohammad Mahdi ; Zhang, Xueru ; Liu, Mingyan ( June 2019 , Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on the Economics of Networks, Systems and Computation)

   We consider an InterDependent Security (IDS) game with networked agents and positive externality where each agent chooses an effort/investment level for securing itself. The agents are interdependent in that the state of security of one agent depends not only on its own investment but also on the other agents' effort/investment. Due to the positive externality, the agents under-invest in security which leads to an inefficient Nash equilibrium (NE). While much has been analyzed in the literature on the under-investment issue, in this study we take a different angle. Specifically, we consider the possibility of allowing agents to pool their resources, i.e., allowing agents to have the ability to both invest in themselves as well as in other agents. We show that the interaction of strategic and selfish agents under resource pooling (RP) improves the agents' effort/investment level as well as their utility as compared to a scenario without resource pooling. We show that the social welfare (total utility) at the NE of the game with resource pooling is higher than the maximum social welfare attainable in a game without resource pooling but by using an optimal incentive mechanism. Furthermore, we show that while voluntary participation in this latter scenario ismore »not generally true, it is guaranteed under resource pooling.« less
5. Risk-Aware Resource Management in Public Safety Networks

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s19183853  

   Vamvakas, Panagiotis ; Tsiropoulou, Eirini Eleni ; Papavassiliou, Symeon ( September 2019 , Sensors)

   Modern Public Safety Networks (PSNs) are assisted by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to provide a resilient communication paradigm during catastrophic events. In this context, we propose a distributed user-centric risk-aware resource management framework in UAV-assisted PSNs supported by both a static UAV and a mobile UAV. The mobile UAV is entitled to a larger portion of the available spectrum due to its capability and flexibility to re-position itself, and therefore establish better communication channel conditions to the users, compared to the static UAV. However, the potential over-exploitation of the mobile UAV-based communication by the users may lead to the mobile UAV’s failure to serve the users due to the increased levels of interference, consequently introducing risk in the user decisions. To capture this uncertainty, we follow the principles of Prospect Theory and design a user’s prospect-theoretic utility function that reflects user’s risk-aware behavior regarding its transmission power investment to the static and/or mobile UAV-based communication option. A non-cooperative game among the users is formulated, where each user determines its power investment strategy to the two available communication choices in order to maximize its expected prospect-theoretic utility. The existence and uniqueness of a Pure Nash Equilibrium (PNE) is proven and themore »convergence of the users’ strategies to it is shown. An iterative distributed and low-complexity algorithm is introduced to determine the PNE. The performance of the proposed user-centric risk-aware resource management framework in terms of users’ achievable data rate and spectrum utilization, is achieved via modeling and simulation. Furthermore, its superiority and benefits are demonstrated, by comparing its performance against other existing approaches with regards to UAV selection and spectrum utilization.« less