Mingxi Cheng

Bio: Mingxi Cheng is an academic researcher from University of Southern California. The author has contributed to research in topics: Rumor & Cloud computing. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 14 publications receiving 143 citations. Previous affiliations of Mingxi Cheng include Duke University.

DRL-cloud: deep reinforcement learning-based resource provisioning and task scheduling for cloud service providers

Abstract: Cloud computing has become an attractive computing paradigm in both academia and industry. Through virtualization technology, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that own data centers can structure physical servers into Virtual Machines (VMs) to provide services, resources, and infrastructures to users. Profit-driven CSPs charge users for service access and VM rental, and reduce power consumption and electric bills so as to increase profit margin. The key challenge faced by CSPs is data center energy cost minimization. Prior works proposed various algorithms to reduce energy cost through Resource Provisioning (RP) and/or Task Scheduling (TS). However, they have scalability issues or do not consider TS with task dependencies, which is a crucial factor that ensures correct parallel execution of tasks. This paper presents DRL-Cloud, a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based RP and TS system, to minimize energy cost for large-scale CSPs with very large number of servers that receive enormous numbers of user requests per day. A deep Q-learning-based two-stage RP-TS processor is designed to automatically generate the best long-term decisions by learning from the changing environment such as user request patterns and realistic electric price. With training techniques such as target network, experience replay, and exploration and exploitation, the proposed DRL-Cloud achieves remarkably high energy cost efficiency, low reject rate as well as low runtime with fast convergence. Compared with one of the state-of-the-art energy efficient algorithms, the proposed DRL-Cloud achieves up to 320% energy cost efficiency improvement while maintaining lower reject rate on average. For an example CSP setup with 5,000 servers and 200,000 tasks, compared to a fast round-robin baseline, the proposed DRL-Cloud achieves up to 144% runtime reduction.

VRoC: Variational Autoencoder-aided Multi-task Rumor Classifier Based on Text

Abstract: Social media became popular and percolated almost all aspects of our daily lives. While online posting proves very convenient for individual users, it also fosters fast-spreading of various rumors. The rapid and wide percolation of rumors can cause persistent adverse or detrimental impacts. Therefore, researchers invest great efforts on reducing the negative impacts of rumors. Towards this end, the rumor classification system aims to to detect, track, and verify rumors in social media. Such systems typically include four components: (i) a rumor detector, (ii) a rumor tracker, (iii) a stance classifier, and (iv) a veracity classifier. In order to improve the state-of-the-art in rumor detection, tracking, and verification, we propose VRoC, a tweet-level variational autoencoder-based rumor classification system. VRoC consists of a co-train engine that trains variational autoencoders (VAEs) and rumor classification components. The co-train engine helps the VAEs to tune their latent representations to be classifier-friendly. We also show that VRoC is able to classify unseen rumors with high levels of accuracy. For the PHEME dataset, VRoC consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques, on both observed and unobserved rumors, by up to 26.9%, in terms of macro-F1 scores.

There Is Hope After All: Quantifying Opinion and Trustworthiness in Neural Networks.

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a fundamental role in the modern world, especially when used as an autonomous decision maker. One common concern nowadays is "how trustworthy the AIs are." Human operators follow a strict educational curriculum and performance assessment that could be exploited to quantify how much we entrust them. To quantify the trust of AI decision makers, we must go beyond task accuracy especially when facing limited, incomplete, misleading, controversial or noisy datasets. Toward addressing these challenges, we describe DeepTrust, a Subjective Logic (SL) inspired framework that constructs a probabilistic logic description of an AI algorithm and takes into account the trustworthiness of both dataset and inner algorithmic workings. DeepTrust identifies proper multi-layered neural network (NN) topologies that have high projected trust probabilities, even when trained with untrusted data. We show that uncertain opinion of data is not always malicious while evaluating NN's opinion and trustworthiness, whereas the disbelief opinion hurts trust the most. Also trust probability does not necessarily correlate with accuracy. DeepTrust also provides a projected trust probability of NN's prediction, which is useful when the NN generates an over-confident output under problematic datasets. These findings open new analytical avenues for designing and improving the NN topology by optimizing opinion and trustworthiness, along with accuracy, in a multi-objective optimization formulation, subject to space and time constraints.

H₂O-Cloud: A Resource and Quality of Service-Aware Task Scheduling Framework for Warehouse-Scale Data Centers

Abstract: Cloud computing has attracted both end-users and cloud service providers (CSPs) in recent years. Improving resource utilization rate (RUtR), such as CPU and memory usages on servers, while maintaining quality of service (QoS) is one key challenge faced by CSPs with warehouse-scale datacenters. Prior works proposed various algorithms to reduce energy cost or to improve RUtR, which either lack the fine-grained task scheduling capabilities, or fail to take a comprehensive system model into consideration. This article presents H2O-Cloud, a Hierarchical and Hybrid Online task scheduling framework for warehouse-scale Cloud service providers, to improve resource usage effectiveness while maintaining QoS. H2O-Cloud is highly scalable and considers comprehensive information, such as various workload scenarios, cloud platform configurations, user request information, and dynamic pricing model. The hierarchy and hybridity of the framework, combined with its deep reinforcement learning (DRL) engines, enable H2O-Cloud to efficiently start on-the-go scheduling and learning in an unpredictable environment without pretraining. Our experiments confirm the high efficiency of the proposed H2O-Cloud when compared to baseline approaches, in terms of energy and cost while maintaining QoS. Compared with a state-of-the-art DRL-based algorithm, H2O-Cloud achieves up to 201.17% energy cost efficiency improvement, 47.88% energy efficiency improvement, and 551.76% reward rate improvement.

Transformative effects of IoT, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence on cloud computing: Evolution, vision, trends and open challenges

Abstract: Cloud computing plays a critical role in modern society and enables a range of applications from infrastructure to social media. Such system must cope with varying load and evolving usage reflecting societies’ interaction and dependency on automated computing systems whilst satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Enabling these systems are a cohort of conceptual technologies, synthesized to meet demand of evolving computing applications. In order to understand current and future challenges of such system, there is a need to identify key technologies enabling future applications. In this study, we aim to explore how three emerging paradigms (Blockchain, IoT and Artificial Intelligence) will influence future cloud computing systems. Further, we identify several technologies driving these paradigms and invite international experts to discuss the current status and future directions of cloud computing. Finally, we proposed a conceptual model for cloud futurology to explore the influence of emerging paradigms and technologies on evolution of cloud computing.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Cyber Security.

Abstract: The scale of Internet-connected systems has increased considerably, and these systems are being exposed to cyberattacks more than ever. The complexity and dynamics of cyberattacks require protecting mechanisms to be responsive, adaptive, and scalable. Machine learning, or more specifically deep reinforcement learning (DRL), methods have been proposed widely to address these issues. By incorporating deep learning into traditional RL, DRL is highly capable of solving complex, dynamic, and especially high-dimensional cyber defense problems. This article presents a survey of DRL approaches developed for cyber security. We touch on different vital aspects, including DRL-based security methods for cyber-physical systems, autonomous intrusion detection techniques, and multiagent DRL-based game theory simulations for defense strategies against cyberattacks. Extensive discussions and future research directions on DRL-based cyber security are also given. We expect that this comprehensive review provides the foundations for and facilitates future studies on exploring the potential of emerging DRL to cope with increasingly complex cyber security problems.

Transformative effects of IoT, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence on cloud computing: Evolution, vision, trends and open challenges

Abstract: Cloud computing plays a critical role in modern society and enables a range of applications from infrastructure to social media. Such system must cope with varying load and evolving usage reflecting societies interaction and dependency on automated computing systems whilst satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Enabling these systems are a cohort of conceptual technologies, synthesized to meet demand of evolving computing applications. In order to understand current and future challenges of such system, there is a need to identify key technologies enabling future applications. In this study, we aim to explore how three emerging paradigms (Blockchain, IoT and Artificial Intelligence) will influence future cloud computing systems. Further, we identify several technologies driving these paradigms and invite international experts to discuss the current status and future directions of cloud computing. Finally, we proposed a conceptual model for cloud futurology to explore the influence of emerging paradigms and technologies on evolution of cloud computing.