Mohsen Guizani et al. win CSIM best journal paper award

Professor Mohsen Guizani has hit the ground running in his endeavor to increase Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence’s (MBZUAI) rankings and research accolades.

Less than one month after his appointment as Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Institutional Advancement, Guizani has earned himself his seventh Best Journal/Conference Paper Award in eight years from the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers Society (IEEE).

As a co-author of “Reliable Federated Learning for Mobile Networks” in IEEE the Wireless Communications, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 72-80, April 2020, Guizani has been awarded the ComSoc – CSIM journal awards – Best Journal Paper Award for 2021. The award will be presented at the IEEE’s International Communications Conference (ICC) in Seoul, South Korea from May 16 – 20, 2022.

Research, teaching and more

Guizani is a highly cited researcher and was listed as a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in Computer Science in 2019, 2020 and 2021. IEEE is the largest professional society in the world, and he was elevated to an IEEE Fellow in 2009 for his contribution to “quality of service in broadband and ad hoc wireless networks”.

Guizani is a senior technical editor of the IEEE Network, and an advisory board editor of the IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and he is also an IEEE Communication Society distinguished lecturer. Guizani is the founder of the IEEE International Conference of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC), the founder of WISE (a non-profit organization for education), and he has established three new international journals.

“My main passion is research, which goes hand-in-hand with teaching,” Guizani said. “The authors of this paper are a group of colleagues I work with from Singapore and from Wuhan, China. This paper was a terrific collaboration, and the findings will improve the reliability of federated learning tasks in mobile networks.”

Guizani has authored or co-authored 10 books and more than 800 technical papers in top journals and conferences and has been granted more than 10 US patents. He has more than 30 years of experience in academia as a professor, administrator, and chair of three different departments in the United States (Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Idaho, Computer Science at the University of Western Michigan, and Computer Science at the University of West Florida).

“MBZUAI has also been successful in some recent research grants, which are still in their infancy, but I can’t wait to get a research team in place to get started on some homegrown projects. To get MBZUAI published in some higher quartile journals and represented at more conferences is a real focus in my Associate Provost role.”

About the Paper:
Reliable Federated Learning for Mobile Networks

Federated learning, as a promising machine learning approach, has emerged to leverage a distributed personalized dataset from a number of nodes, for example, mobile devices, to improve performance while simultaneously providing privacy preservation for mobile users. In federated learning, training data is widely distributed and maintained on the mobile devices as workers. A central aggregator updates a global model by collecting local updates from mobile devices using their local training data to train the global model in each iteration.

However, unreliable data may be uploaded by the mobile devices (i.e., workers), leading to frauds in tasks of federated learning. The workers may perform unreliable updates intentionally, for example, the data poisoning attack, or unintentionally, for example, low-quality data caused by energy constraints or high-speed mobility. Therefore, finding trusted and reliable workers in federated learning tasks becomes critical.

The concept of reputation is introduced as a metric. Based on this metric, a reliable worker selection scheme is proposed for federated learning tasks. Consortium blockchain is leveraged as a decentralized approach for achieving efficient reputation management of the workers without repudiation and tampering. By numerical analysis, the proposed approach is demonstrated to improve the reliability of federated learning tasks in mobile networks.

IEEE Wireless Communications paper authors

Professor Mohsen Guizani, MBZUAI

Professor Mohsen Guizani (IEEE S’85–M’89–SM’99–F’09) is the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Institutional Advancement at MBZUAI. Guizani has served in multiple administrative positions in the USA and the Gulf region, such as the Founding Associate Vice President for Graduate Studies at QU, Chair of the ECE Department at the University of Idaho, Chair of the Computer Science Department at Western Michigan University and Professor at the University of Missouri. He received his BS (with distinction), Master’s and Ph.D. from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA. Guizani is a highly experienced educator and researcher in the field of applied machine learning and artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent systems, smart city, and cybersecurity.

Jiawen Kang, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Jiawen Kang received the M.S. degree from the Guangdong University of Technology, China, in 2015, and the Ph.D. degree from the same school in 2018. He is currently a postdoc at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests mainly focus on blockchain, security and privacy protection in wireless communications and networking.

Zehui Xiong, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Zehui Xiong [S’17] received his B.Eng. degree with the highest honors in telecommunication engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2016. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He was a visiting student at Princeton University in 2019. His research interests include network economics, wireless communications, blockchain, and deep reinforcement learning.

Dusit Niyato, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Dusit Niyato [M’09 SM’15, F’17] is currently a professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University. He received his B.Eng. from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Thailand, in 1999 and his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 2008. His research interests are in the areas of energy harvesting for wireless communication, Internet of Things, and sensor networks.

Yuze Zou, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Yuze Zou received the B.E. degree in electronic information engineering (EIE) from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2015, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the Department of EIE. His research interests include wireless power transfer, backscatter communications, and game theory and its applications in networked systems.

Yang Zhang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

Yang Zhang [M’11] received the B.Eng. degree from Beihang University, and the Ph.D. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is currently an associate professor at Wuhan University of Technology, China, and a research fellow in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His current research interests include market-oriented modeling for network resource allocations, multiple objective optimization, and deep reinforcement learning.

Guizani’s other best paper awards

• Best Journal Paper Award, IEEE International Communications Conference (ICC), Seoul, South Korea, May 16-20, 2022.
• IEEE ComSoc Best Survey Paper Award, the most prestigious ComSoc paper Award for journal survey papers, 2018.
• Best Paper Award, IEEE International Communications Conference (ICC), Virtual, June 7-11, 2020.
• Best Paper Award, IEEE GLOBECOM (Global Comm.) Conference, Abu Dhabi, December 9-13, 2018.
• Best Paper Award, IEEE GLOBECOM (Global Comm.) Conference, Washington DC, December 4-8, 2016.
• Best Paper Award, IEEE International Communications Conference (ICC), Sydney, Australia, June 10-14, 2014.
• Best Paper Award, IEEE ComManTel 2014 (Computing, Management and Telecom.), Da Nang, Vietnam, April 27–29, 2014.