Jon Crowcroft

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Cambridge

This letter puts forth a new hybrid horizontal-vertical federated learning (HoVeFL) for mobile edge computing-enabled Internet of Things (EdgeIoT). In this framework, certain EdgeIoT devices train local models using the same data samples but analyze disparate data features, while the others focus on the same features using non-independent and ident...

Although COVID-19 appears to be better controlled since its initial outbreak in 2020, it continues to threaten citizens in different communities due to the unpredictability of new strains. The global viral pandemic has resulted in over 700 million infections and 7 million deaths worldwide, with 22 million cases occurring in the United Kingdom (UK)....

SARS‐CoV‐2 Omicron and its sub‐lineages have become the predominant variants globally since early 2022. As of January 2023, over 664 million confirmed cases and over 6.7 million deaths had been reported globally. Current infection models are limited by the need for large datasets or calibration to specific contexts, making them difficult to apply t...

This letter puts forth a new hybrid horizontal-vertical federated learning (HoVeFL) for mobile edge computing-enabled Internet of Things (EdgeIoT). In this framework, certain EdgeIoT devices train local models using the same data samples but analyze disparate data features, while the others focus on the same features using non-independent and ident...

Smart Cities will cause major societal change because they will provide a comprehensive set of key services including seamless communication, intelligent transport systems, advanced healthcare platforms, urban and infrastructure management, and digital services for local and regional government. Thus, a new service and networking environment which...

Not all research leads to fruitful results; trying new ways or methods may surpass state of the art, but sometimes the hypothesis is not proven, the improvement is insignificant, or the system fails because of a design error done years ago in previous works. In a systems discipline like pervasive computing, there are many sources of errors, from ha...

TCP Delayed Acknowledgments (ACKs) is a widely deployed mechanism that allows reducing protocol overhead in many scenarios. However, Delayed ACKs may also contribute to suboptimal performance. When a relatively large congestion window (cwnd) can be used, less frequent ACKs may be desirable. On the other hand, in relatively small cwnd scenarios, eli...

SARS-CoV-2 Omicron has become the predominant variant globally. Current infection models are limited by the need for large datasets or calibration to specific contexts, making them difficult to cater for different settings. To ensure public health decision-makers can easily consider different public health interventions (PHIs) over a wide range of...

Not all research leads to fruitful results; trying new ways or methods may surpass the state of the art, but sometimes the hypothesis is not proven or the improvement is insignificant. In a systems discipline like pervasive computing, there are many sources of errors, from hardware issues over communication channels to heterogeneous software enviro...

Applications based on machine learning (ML) are greatly facilitated by mobile devices and their enormous volume and variety of data. To better safeguard the privacy of user data, traditional ML techniques have transitioned toward new paradigms like federated learning (FL) and split learning (SL). However, existing frameworks have overlooked device...

Mobile devices and the immense amount and variety of data they generate are key enablers of machine learning (ML)-based applications. Traditional ML techniques have shifted toward new paradigms such as federated (FL) and split learning (SL) to improve the protection of user's data privacy. However, these paradigms often rely on server(s) located in...

This work performs the statistical QoS analysis of a Rician block-fading reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted D2D link in which the transmit node operates under delay QoS constraints. First, we perform mode selection for the D2D link, in which the D2D pair can either communicate directly by relaying data from RISs or through a base sta...

The number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is expected to reach 64 billion by 2025. These IoT devices will mostly use cellular networks for transferring a huge amount of IoT data to the cloud for machine learning (ML) based forecasting. Keeping in view a large number of application scenarios for highly resource constraint IoT devices connected...

An optimisation-theoretic model for Multi-Mode TCP congestion control in high-speed, long-delay networks. This paper sheds the light on modelling the multi-mode operation of TCP congestion control algorithms by developing an analytical model, from which important characteristics -- e.g. fairness to legacy TCP -- can be inferred.

This work performs the statistical QoS analysis of a Rician block-fading reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted D2D link in which the transmit node operates under delay QoS constraints. First, we perform mode selection for the D2D link, in which the D2D pair can either communicate directly by relaying data from RISs or through a base sta...

Given a simple concept that has the potential for a methodological contribution to the field of HCI, the constraints of submission conventions within the field may make it impossible to communicate the concept in a manner that is intelligible to the reader.

Nowadays we are witnessing rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and cellular network technologies. They are key components to promote wireless networks beyond 5 G (B5G). The plenty of data generated from numerous IoT devices, such as smart sensors and mobile devices, can be utilised to train intelligent models. But i...

We introduce Proof-of-Steak (PoS) as a fundamental net-zero block generation technique, often accompanied by Non-Frangipane Tokens. Genesis cut is gradually heated and minted (using the appropriate sauce), enabling the miners to redirect the extracted gold and the dissipated heat into the furnace, hence enabling the first fully-circular economy eve...

This study investigates thoroughly whether acute exposure to outdoor PM 2.5 concentration, P, modifies the rate of change in the daily number of COVID-19 infections (R) across 18 high infection provincial capitals in China, including Wuhan. A best-fit multiple linear regression model was constructed to model the relationship between P and R, from 1...

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is a promising technique to enhance the spectral efficiency for 5G and beyond cellular networks. Traditionally, D2D communication was considered solely as communication directly between two closely-located devices, without any support from the available network infrastructure; however, this understanding limits...

Edge intelligence refers to a set of connected systems and devices for data collection, caching, processing, and analysis proximity to where data are captured based on artificial intelligence. Edge intelligence aims at enhancing data processing and protects the privacy and security of the data and users. Although recently emerged, spanning the peri...

With the massive amount of data generated from mobile devices and the increase of computing power of edge devices, the paradigm of Federated Learning has attracted great momentum. In federated learning, distributed and heterogeneous nodes collaborate to learn model parameters. However, while providing benefits such as privacy by design and reduced...

Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. There-fore, tracking bias in everyday news and building a platform where people can receive balanced news information is im-portant. We propose a model that maps the news...

Social media profiles are telling examples of the everyday need for disclosure and concealment. The balance between concealment and disclosure varies across individuals, and personality traits might partly explain this variability. Experimental findings on the relationship between information disclosure and personality have been so far inconsistent...

The literature of urban sociology and that of psychology have separately established two relationships: the first has linked characteristics of a community to its residents’ well-being, the second has linked well-being of individuals to their use of words. No one has hitherto explored the potential transitive relationship - that between characteris...

We present a preliminary but groundbreaking study of the media landscape of Twitter. We use public data on whom follows who to uncover common behaviour in media consumption, the relationship between various classes of media, and the diversity of media content which social links may bring. Our analysis shows that there is a non-negligible amount of...

This work does the statistical quality-of-service (QoS) analysis of a block-fading device-to-device (D2D) link in a multi-tier cellular network that consists of a macro-BS ( $BS_{_{MC}}$ ) and a micro-BS ( $BS_{_{mC}}$ ) which both operate in full-duplex (FD) mode. For the D2D link under consideration, we first formulate the mode selection proble...

In this paper we propose SCDP, a general-purpose data transport protocol for data centres that, in contrast to all other protocols proposed to date, supports efficient one-to-many and many-to-one communication, which is extremely common in modern data centres. SCDP does so without compromising on efficiency for short and long unicast flows. SCDP ac...

This work does the statistical quality-of-service (QoS) analysis of a block-fading device-to-device (D2D) link in a multi-tier cellular network that consists of a macro-BS (BSMC) and a micro-BS (BSmC) which both operate in full-duplex (FD) mode. For the D2D link under consideration, we first formulate the mode selection problem-whereby D2D pair cou...

In the modern world, the connectivity-as-we-go model is gaining popularity. Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions a future in which human beings communicate with each other and with devices that have identities and virtual personalities, as well as sensing, processing, and networking capabilities, which will allow the developing of smart environments...

In the modern world, the connectivity-as-we-go model is gaining popularity. Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions a future in which human beings communicate with each other and with devices that have identities and virtual personalities, as well as sensing, processing, and networking capabilities, which will allow the developing of smart environments...

The article suggests the re–introduction of bartering to create a cryp- tocurrencyless, currencyless, and moneyless economy segment. As such bartering would be an option to complement the existing fiat money-based trade system.

div>COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. At the time of writing, more than 2.8 million people have tested positive. Infections have been growing exponentially and tremendous efforts are being made to fight the disease. In this paper, we attempt...

IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, Volume: 1, Issue: 1, Aug. 2020, pp. 85-103, URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9184922 --- COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. By mid-August 2020, more than 21 million people have tested posi...

Background Motivated by the findings that exposure to daily outdoor PM 2.5 (P) may increase the risk of influenza infection, our study examines if immediate exposure to outdoor P will modify the rate of change in the daily number of COVID-19 infections (R), for (1) 31 Chinese provincial capital cities and (2) Wuhan, China, using regression modellin...

div>COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. At the time of writing, more than 2.8 million people have tested positive. Infections have been growing exponentially and tremendous efforts are being made to fight the disease. In this paper, we attempt...

div>COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. At the time of writing, more than 2.8 million people have tested positive. Infections have been growing exponentially and tremendous efforts are being made to fight the disease. In this paper, we attempt...

Edge computing and Federated Learning (FL) can work in tandem to address issues related to privacy and collaborative distributed learning in untrusted IoT environments. However, deployment of FL in resource-constrained IoT devices faces challenges including asynchronous participation of such devices in training, and the need to prevent malicious de...

Edge computing and Federated Learning (FL) can work in tandem to address issues related to privacy and collaborative distributed learning in untrusted IoT environments. However, deployment of FL in resource-constrained IoT devices faces challenges including asynchronous participation of such devices in training, and the need to prevent malicious de...

This is a Technical Report. Cite as: Siddique Latif, Muhammad Usman, Sanaullah Manzoor, Waleed Iqbal, Junaid Qadir, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro, Adeel Razi, Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Adrian Weller and Jon Crowcroft. Leveraging Data Science To Combat COVID-19: A Comprehensive Review (2020). Companion site: https://github.com/Data-Science-and-COVID-19/...

Due to the advancement of IoT devices in both domestic and industrial environments, the need to incorporate a mechanism to build accountability in the IoT ecosystem is paramount. In the last few years, various initiatives have been started in this direction addressing many socio-technical concerns and challenges to build an accountable system. The...

The stages of digital technology readiness are viewed through the lens of three contemporary and widely discussed examples, namely distributed ledger technology, machine learning, and the internet of things. I use these examples to clarify when there is really just an old technology being re-branded, when there is something genuinely new and useful...

Background: Covid-19 was first reported in Wuhan, China in Dec 2019. Since then, it has been transmitted rapidly in China and the rest of the world. While Covid-19 transmission rate has been declining in China, it is increasing exponentially in Europe and America. Although there are numerous studies examining Covid-19 infection, including an archiv...

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are experiencing high momentum as an inexpensive solution for enabling Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Recent Internet connectivity support developments are expected to further fuel the adoption of LPWAN. However, the latter present challenges to Internet protocols. Remarkably, many LPWAN scenarios exhib...

Evolution of cellular networks into dynamic, dense, and heterogeneous networks have introduced new challenges for cell resource optimization, especially in the imbalanced traffic load regions. Numerous load balancing schemes have been proposed to tackle this issue; however, they operate in a reactive manner that confines their ability to meet the t...

In this paper, we propose network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communication in licensed and unlicensed spectrum interoperable networks, to improve D2D users’ throughput while alleviating the spectrum scarcity issue of cellular networks. The idea of licensed and unlicensed spectrum interoperability is based on the findings of the IEEE 1932.1 wor...

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networking is an emerging technology domain that promises an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT). Significant market opportunities for BLE mesh networking have motivated the recent development of two different BLE mesh networking standards: Bluetooth Mesh and 6BLEMesh, produced by the Bluetooth SIG and the...

While placing the paper "XORs in the Air" in the context of the theoretical and practical understanding of network coding, we present a view of the progress of the field of network coding, In particular, we examine the interplay of theory and practice in the field.

The ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIG-COMM) has been a major research forum for fifty years. This community has had a major impact on the history of the Internet, and therefore we argue its exploration may reveal fundamental insights into the evolution of networking technologies around the globe. Hence, on the 50 t h anniversar...

In this paper we propose SCDP, a novel, general-purpose data transport protocol for data centres that, in contrast to all other protocols proposed to date, natively supports one-to-many and many-to-one data communication, which is extremely common in modern data centres. SCDP does so without compromising on efficiency for short and long unicast flo...

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) represents a new sensing paradigm that utilizes the smart mobile devices to collect and share data. With the popularity of unmanned vehicles like UAVs and driverless cars, they can provide much more reliable, accurate and cost-efficient sensing services. In this paper, we propose a distributed control framework for energy-...

Motivated by the huge disparity between the limited battery capacity of user devices and the ever-growing energy demands of modern mobile apps, we propose INFv. It is the first offloading system able to cache, migrate and dynamically execute on demand functionality from mobile devices in ISP networks. It aims to bridge this gap by extending the pro...

Decentralization, in the form of mesh networking and blockchain, two promising technologies, is coming to the telecommunications industry. Mesh networking allows wider low‐cost Internet access with infrastructures built from routers contributed by diverse owners, whereas blockchain enables transparency and accountability for investments, revenue, o...

The hype about Bitcoin has overrated the potential of smart contracts deployed on-blockchains (on-chains) and underrated the potential of smart contracts deployed on-Trusted Third Parties (on-TTPs). As a result, current research and development in this field is focused mainly on smart contract applications that use on-chain smart contracts. We argu...

Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is underscored by decentralization and transparency. In ideal terms, blockchain advocates a decentralized, transparent, and more democratic version of the Internet. Essentially being a trusted and decentra...

This study uses the article content and metadata of four important computer networking periodicals-IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (COMST), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM), and IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)-obtained using ACM, IEEE...

This study uses the article content and metadata of four important computer networking periodicals-IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (COMST), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM), and IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)-obtained using ACM, IEEE...

Community networks (CNs) have gained momentum in the last few years with the increasing number of spontaneously deployed WiFi hotspots and home networks. These networks, owned and managed by volunteers, offer various services to their members and to the public. While Internet access is the most popular service, the provision of services of local in...

Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is underscored by decentralization and transparency. In ideal terms, blockchain advocates a decentralized, transparent, and more democratic version of the Internet. Essentially being a trusted and decentra...

Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this article, we perform a comparative analysis of the usage and impact of bots and humans on Twitter—one of the largest OSNs in the world. We collect a large-scale Twitter dataset and define various metrics based on tweet metadata. Using a human an...

Emerging blockchain technology is a promising platform for implementing smart contracts. But there is a large class of applications, where blockchain is inadequate due to performance, scalability, and consistency requirements, and also due to language expressiveness and cost issues that are hard to solve. In this paper we explain that in some situa...

Ultra-dense multi-tier cellular networks have recently drawn the attention of researchers due to their potential efficiency in dealing with high-data rate demands in upcoming 5G cellular networks. These networks consist of multi-tier base stations including micro base stations with very high-system capacity and short inter-site distances, overlooke...

Emerging Machine Learning (ML) techniques, such as Deep Neural Network, are widely used in today's applications and services. However, with social awareness of privacy and personal data rapidly rising, it becomes a pressing and challenging societal issue to both keep personal data private and benefit from the data analytics power of ML techniques a...

Decentralised (on-blockchain) and centralised (off– blockchain) platforms are available for the implementation of smart contracts. However, none of the two alternatives can individually provide the services and quality of services (QoS) imposed on smart contracts involved in a large class of ap- plications. The reason is that blockchain platforms s...

In this paper, we propose to leverage the emerging deep learning techniques for sequential modeling of user interests based on big social data, which takes into account influence of their social circles. First, we present a preliminary analysis for two popular big datasets from Yelp and Epinions. We show statistically sequential actions of all user...

Caching close to users in a radio access network (RAN) has been identified as a promising method to reduce a backhaul traffic load and minimize latency in 5G and beyond. In this paper, we investigate a novel community detection inspired by a proactive caching scheme for device-to-device (D2D) enabled networks. The proposed scheme builds on the idea...

Data analytics on edge devices has gained rapid growth in research, industry, and different aspects of our daily life. This topic still faces many challenges such as limited computation resource on edge devices. In this paper, we further identify two main challenges: the composition and deployment of data analytics services on edge devices. We pres...

Recently, decentralised (on-blockchain) platforms have emerged to complement centralised (off-blockchain) platforms for the implementation of automated, digital ("smart") contracts. However, neither alternative can individually satisfy the requirements of a large class of applications. On-blockchain platforms suffer from scalability, performance, t...

The physical, ubiquitous, and autonomous nature of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) raises various accountability challenges relating to safety and security, privacy and surveillance, and governance and responsibility. The authors consider the IoT’s emerging systems-of-systems nature, providing the broad legal context for addressing these conc...

Edge computing is shaping the way to run services in the Internet by allowing the computations to become available close to the user's proximity. Many implementations have been recently proposed to facilitate the service delivery in data centers and distributed networks. However, we argue that those implementations cannot fully support the operatio...

Scoped-flooding is used for content discovery in a broad networking context and it has significant impact on the design of caching algorithms in a communication network. Despite its wide usage, a thorough analysis on how scopedflooding affects a network’s performance, e.g., caching and content discovery efficiency, is missing. To develop a better u...

Open-access domestic broadband connection sharing constitutes a voluntary practice that is associated with societal, economic and public-safety benefits. Despite this fact, broadband subscribers are usually hesitant to freely share their broadband connection with guests for a multitude of reasons; one of them being sharing their network might hinde...

In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run time. We explain that emerging blockchain technology is certainly a promising platform for implementing smart...

In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts-their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run time. We explain that emerging blockchain technology is certainly a promising platform for implementing smart c...

Data analytics on edge devices has gained rapid growth in research, industry, and different aspects of our daily life. This topic still faces many challenges such as limited computation resource on edge devices. In this paper, we further identify two main challenges: the composition and deployment of data analytics services on edge devices. We pres...

This paper surveys the literature of opportunistic offloading. Opportunistic offloading refers to offloading traffic originally transmitted through the cellular network to opportunistic network, or offloading computing tasks originally executed locally to nearby devices with idle computing resources through opportunistic network. This research dire...

The Internet has crossed new frontiers with access to it getting faster and cheaper. Considering that the architectural foundations of today's Internet were laid more than three decades ago, the Internet has done remarkably well until today coping with the growing demand. However, the future Internet architecture is expected to support not only the...

TCP has traditionally been neglected as a transport-layer protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, recent trends and industry needs are favoring TCP presence in IoT environments. In this paper, we first motivate and describe the main IoT scenarios where TCP will be used. We then analyze the historically claimed issues of TCP in the IoT c...

The 2nd workshop on Future Internet Architecture for Developing Regions (FI4D) took place on January 8th, 2017. The workshop was hosted by the 14th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications $\&$ Networking Conference in Las Vegas, USA. This report summarizes the motivation, discussions and perspectives held during the half-day event.

Leveraging 6LoWPAN, the IETF 6Lo working group has targeted adaptation of IPv6 over a new generation of communication technologies for the IoT. These comprise Bluetooth LE, ITU-T G.9959, DECT ULE, MS/TP, NFC, IEEE 1901.2, and IEEE 802.11ah. This paper comprehensively analyzes the 6Lo technologies and adaptation layers, giving the motivation for cri...

Machine Learning (ML) techniques, such as Neural Network, are widely used in today's applications. However, there is still a big gap between the current ML systems and users' requirements. ML systems focus on the improve the performance of models in training, while individual users cares more about response time and expressiveness of the tool. Many...

There is an extensive body of research on Social Network Analysis (SNA) based on the email archive. The network used in the analysis is generally extracted either by capturing the email communication in From, To, Cc and Bcc email header fields or by the entities contained in the email message. In the latter case, the entities could be, for instance...

Users predominantly access their email via mobile devices. This presents a two-fold challenge to the email applications. First, email's update from multiple devices has to be eventually reconciled with the server. Prioritization of updates is difficult and maybe undesirable. Solving this problem requires a data store with the complete history of em...

Recent trends show that deploying low cost devices with lightweight virtualisation services is an attractive alternative for supporting the computational requirements at the network edge. Examples include inherently supporting the computational needs for local applications like smart homes and applications with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) re...

Users predominantly access their email via mobile devices. This presents a two-fold challenge to the email applications. First, email's update from multiple devices has to be eventually reconciled with the server. Prioritization of updates is difficult and maybe undesirable. Solving this problem requires a data store with the complete history of em...

There is an extensive body of research on Social Network Analysis (SNA) based on the email archive. The network used in the analysis is generally extracted either by capturing the email communication in From, To, Cc and Bcc email header fields or by the entities contained in the email message. In the latter case, the entities could be, for instance...

The explosion of bots on the Web brings an unprecedented increase in traffic from non-human sources. This work studies bot traffic on Twitter, finding that almost 50% of traffic is generated and propagated by a rapidly growing bot population -- a major concern for networked systems in the future.