arXiv subjects

Ted Shaowang

Publications and source records attributed to Ted Shaowang.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Algorithmic Data Minimization for Machine Learning over Internet-of-Things Data Streams

Machine learning can analyze vast amounts of data generated by IoT devices to identify patterns, make predictions, and enable real-time decision-making. By processing sensor data, machine learning models can optimize processes, improve efficiency, and enhance personalized user experiences in smart systems. However, IoT systems are often deployed in sensitive environments such as households and offices, where they may inadvertently expose identifiable information, including location, habits, and personal identifiers. This raises significant privacy concerns, necessitating the application of data minimization -- a foundational principle in emerging data regulations, which mandates that service providers only collect data that is directly relevant and necessary for a specified purpose. Despite its importance, data minimization lacks a precise technical definition in the context of sensor data, where collections of weak signals make it challenging to apply a binary "relevant and necessary" rule. This paper provides a technical interpretation of data minimization in the context of sensor streams, explores practical methods for implementation, and addresses the challenges involved. Through our approach, we demonstrate that our framework can reduce user identifiability by up to 16.7% while maintaining accuracy loss below 1%, offering a viable path toward privacy-preserving IoT data processing.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Towards Causal Physical Error Discovery in Video Analytics Systems

Video analytics systems based on deep learning models are often opaque and brittle and require explanation systems to help users debug. Current model explanation system are very good at giving literal explanations of behavior in terms of pixel contributions but cannot integrate information about the physical or systems processes that might influence a prediction. This paper introduces the idea that a simple form of causal reasoning, called a regression discontinuity design, can be used to associate changes in multiple key performance indicators to physical real world phenomena to give users a more actionable set of video analytics explanations. We overview the system architecture and describe a vision of the impact that such a system might have.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ServeFlow: A Fast-Slow Model Architecture for Network Traffic Analysis

Network traffic analysis increasingly uses complex machine learning models as the internet consolidates and traffic gets more encrypted. However, over high-bandwidth networks, flows can easily arrive faster than model inference rates. The temporal nature of network flows limits simple scale-out approaches leveraged in other high-traffic machine learning applications. Accordingly, this paper presents ServeFlow, a solution for machine-learning model serving aimed at network traffic analysis tasks, which carefully selects the number of packets to collect and the models to apply for individual flows to achieve a balance between minimal latency, high service rate, and high accuracy. We identify that on the same task, inference time across models can differ by 1.8x - 141.3x, while the inter-packet waiting time is up to 6-8 orders of magnitude higher than the inference time! Based on these insights, we tailor a novel fast-slow model architecture for networking ML pipelines. Flows are assigned to a slower model only when the inferences from the fast model are deemed high uncertainty. ServeFlow is able to make inferences on 76.3% of flows in under 16ms, which is a speed-up of 40.5x on the median end-to-end serving latency while increasing the service rate and maintaining similar accuracy. Even with thousands of features per flow, it achieves a service rate of over 48.5k new flows per second on a 16-core CPU commodity server, which matches the order of magnitude of flow rates observed on city-level network backbones.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

EdgeServe: A Streaming System for Decentralized Model Serving

The relevant features for a machine learning task may arrive as one or more continuous streams of data. Serving machine learning models over streams of data creates a number of interesting systems challenges in managing data routing, time-synchronization, and rate control. This paper presents EdgeServe, a distributed streaming system that can serve predictions from machine learning models in real time. We evaluate EdgeServe on three streaming prediction tasks: (1) human activity recognition, (2) autonomous driving, and (3) network intrusion detection.

cs.DB↗