During the last decade, the Internet of Things acted as catalyst for the big data phenomenon. As result, modern edge devices can access a huge amount of data that can be exploited to build useful services. In such a context, artificial intelligence has a key role to develop intelligent systems (e.g., intelligent cyber physical systems) that create a connecting bridge with the physical world. However, as time goes by, machine and deep learning applications are becoming more complex, requiring increasing amounts of data and training time, which makes the use of centralized approaches unsuitable. Federated learning is an emerging paradigm which enables the cooperation of edge devices to learn a shared model (while keeping private their training data), thereby abating the training time. Although federated learning is a promising technique, its implementation is difficult and brings a lot of challenges. In this paper, we present an extension of Stack4Things, a cloud platform developed in our department; leveraging its functionalities, we enabled the deployment of federated learning on edge devices without caring their heterogeneity. Experimental results show a comparison with a centralized approach and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of both training time and model accuracy.
Leveraging Stack4Things for Federated Learning in Intelligent Cyber Physical Systems