Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been applied to solve various challenges of real-world problems in recent years. However, the emergence of new AI technologies has brought several problems, especially with regard to communication efficiency, security threats and privacy violations. Towards this end, Federated Learning (FL) has received widespread attention due to its ability to facilitate the collaborative training of local learning models without compromising the privacy of data. However, recent studies have shown that FL still consumes considerable amounts of communication resources. These communication resources are vital for updating the learning models. In addition, the privacy of data could still be compromised once sharing the parameters of the local learning models in order to update the global model. Towards this end, we propose a new approach, namely, Federated Optimisation (FedOpt) in order to promote communication efficiency and privacy preservation in FL. In order to implement FedOpt, we design a novel compression algorithm, namely, Sparse Compression Algorithm (SCA) for efficient communication, and then integrate the additively homomorphic encryption with differential privacy to prevent data from being leaked. Thus, the proposed FedOpt smoothly trade-offs communication efficiency and privacy preservation in order to adopt the learning task. The experimental results demonstrate that FedOpt outperforms the state-of-the-art FL approaches. In particular, we consider three different evaluation criteria; model accuracy, communication efficiency and computation overhead. Then, we compare the proposed FedOpt with the baseline configurations and the state-of-the-art approaches, i.e., Federated Averaging (FedAvg) and the paillier-encryption based privacy-preserving deep learning (PPDL) on all these three evaluation criteria. The experimental results show that FedOpt is able to converge within fewer training epochs and a smaller privacy budget.

Background: Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a disorder associated with genetic and neurological components leading to difficulties in social interaction and communication. According to statistics of WHO, the number of patients diagnosed with ASD is gradually increasing. Most of the current studies focus on clinical diagnosis, data collection and brain images analysis, but do not focus on the diagnosis of ASD based on machine learning. Objective: This study aims to classify ASD data to provide a quick, accessible and easy way to support early diagnosis of ASD. Methods: Three ASD datasets are used for children, adolescences and adults. To classify the ASD data, we used the k-Nearest Neighbours method (kNN), the Support Vector Machine method (SVM) and the Random Forests method (RF). In our experiments, the data was randomly split into training and test sets. The parts of the data were randomly selected 100 times to test the classification methods. Results: The final results were assessed by the average values. It is shown that SVM and RF are effective methods for ASD classification. In particular, the RF method classified the data with an accuracy of 100% for all above datasets. Conclusion: The early diagnosis of ASD is critical. If the number of data samples is large enough, we can achieve a high accuracy for machine learning-based ASD diagnosis. Among three classification methods, RF achieves the best performance for ASD data classification.

With the advent of smart devices, smartphones, and smart everything, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged with an incredible impact on the industries and human life. The IoT consists of millions of clients that exchange massive amounts of critical data, which results in high privacy risks when processed by a centralized cloud server. Motivated by this privacy concern, a new machine learning paradigm has emerged, namely Federated Learning (FL). Specifically, FL allows for each client to train a learning model locally and performs global model aggregation at the centralized cloud server in order to avoid the direct data leakage from clients. However, despite this efficient distributed training technique, an individual’s private information can still be compromised. To this end, in this paper, we investigate the privacy and security threats that can harm the whole execution process of FL. Additionally, we provide practical solutions to overcome those attacks and protect the individual’s privacy. We also present experimental results in order to highlight the discussed issues and possible solutions. We expect that this work will open exciting perspectives for future research in FL.