Blockchain-Based Continuous Knowledge Transfer in Decentralized Edge Computing Architecture

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Edge computing brings computational ability to network edges to enable low latency based on deploying devices close to the environment where the data is generated. Nevertheless, the limitation of size and energy consumption constrain the scalability and performance of edge device applications such as deep learning, although, cloud computing can be adopted to support high-performance tasks with centralized data collection. However, frequently communicating with a central cloud server brings potential risks to security and privacy issues by exposing data on the Internet. In this paper, we propose a secure continuous knowledge transfer approach to improve knowledge by collaborating with multiple edge devices in the decentralized edge computing architecture without a central server. Using blockchain, the knowledge integrity is maintained in the transfer process by recording the transaction information of each knowledge improvement and synchronizing the blockchain in each edge device. The knowledge is a trained deep-learning model that is derived by learning the local data. Using the local data of each edge device, the model is continuously trained to improve performance. Therefore, each improvement is recorded as the contribution of each edge device immutably in the decentralized edge computing architecture.

Related collections

Most cited references 53

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Swarm Learning for decentralized and confidential clinical machine learning

Stefanie Warnat-Herresthal, Hartmut Schultze, Krishnaprasad Lingadahalli Shastry … (2021)

Fast and reliable detection of patients with severe and heterogeneous illnesses is a major goal of precision medicine 1 , 2 . Patients with leukaemia can be identified using machine learning on the basis of their blood transcriptomes 3 . However, there is an increasing divide between what is technically possible and what is allowed, because of privacy legislation 4 , 5 . Here, to facilitate the integration of any medical data from any data owner worldwide without violating privacy laws, we introduce Swarm Learning—a decentralized machine-learning approach that unites edge computing, blockchain-based peer-to-peer networking and coordination while maintaining confidentiality without the need for a central coordinator, thereby going beyond federated learning. To illustrate the feasibility of using Swarm Learning to develop disease classifiers using distributed data, we chose four use cases of heterogeneous diseases (COVID-19, tuberculosis, leukaemia and lung pathologies). With more than 16,400 blood transcriptomes derived from 127 clinical studies with non-uniform distributions of cases and controls and substantial study biases, as well as more than 95,000 chest X-ray images, we show that Swarm Learning classifiers outperform those developed at individual sites. In addition, Swarm Learning completely fulfils local confidentiality regulations by design. We believe that this approach will notably accelerate the introduction of precision medicine. Swarm Learning is a decentralized machine learning approach that outperforms classifiers developed at individual sites for COVID-19 and other diseases while preserving confidentiality and privacy.