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At least 37 records · Page 2

Dynamical Sketching for Enhanced Communication Efficiency in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has revolutionized distributed machine learning by enabling collaborative model training without sharing local data. However, communication efficiency and privacy guarantees remain significant challenges. This paper introduces a dynamic sketching mechanism in FL, optimizing the trade-off between communication efficiency and model accuracy. By dynamically selecting the sketch matrix size, our approach adapts to the evolving characteristics of the data and the model, ensuring optimal performance across diverse scenarios. We leverage Bayesian optimization to systematically tune the sketch parameters, achieving an effective balance between resource efficiency and model performance. Experimental results on the MNIST dataset using a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture validate the proposed method's efficiency and scalability. Our dynamic sketching approach significantly outperforms fixed-size sketching techniques, achieving higher compression ratios (up to 62x) and providing better privacy guarantees while maintaining high model accuracy. These findings highlight the robustness and versatility of our approach and make it a valuable solution for privacy-preserving, communication-efficient federated learning.

Afrose, Sharmin [ORNL]↗

Optimal Control of Differentially Private EV Charging: A Scalable Learning Approach Under Uncertainty

Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled electric vehicles (IoEVs) enable intelligent charging coordination that accounts for grid congestion. However, increased data exchange raises privacy concerns, as charging patterns can reveal sensitive driver behavior to grid operators. Here, we propose a differentially private (DP) EV charging framework that enables coordinated control while protecting driver data with theoretical privacy guarantees. Nevertheless, integrating DP inevitably introduces uncertainty into the control strategy for EVs, which can lead to infeasible solutions. To tackle this challenge, we develop a feasible and scalable control algorithm based on constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) and convex hulls. While our framework is designed to handle the uncertainty introduced by DP, it is general and also applicable to other sources of uncertainty in EV charging, such as the stochastic nature of driver behavior and renewable variability. This ensures feasible and privacy-preserving coordination of EV charging at scale. Our method constructs convex hulls within the action space to guarantee feasibility under stochastic constraints and incorporates constraint reduction techniques to improve scalability. Case studies based on IEEE benchmark systems demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively balances feasibility under uncertainty, scalability, and privacy in large-scale EV charging control.

Engineering - Power transmission and distribution↗

Enhancing Smart Home Privacy: A Tutorial on Local Differential Privacy Techniques for Frequency and Mean Estimation

The ubiquity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems has seamlessly integrated into our daily lives, particularly in smart homes where devices continuously monitor and optimize our living environments. These systems significantly contribute to home automation, energy efficiency, and overall comfort. However, this widespread connectivity poses inherent risks linked to the streaming of sensitive household data, necessitating robust privacy preservation mechanisms. This tutorial systematically examines privacy preservation through local differential privacy (LDP), with a particular focus on frequency and mean estimation techniques for smart home applications. Here, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of smart home data formats and provide detailed implementation guidance for event-based and w-event LDP mechanisms. Through practical examples using smart thermostats and HVAC systems, we demonstrate how these techniques can be effectively deployed in real-world scenarios. The tutorial concludes by examining emerging research directions, including adaptive privacy budgets and federated learning approaches, establishing a foundation for privacy-preserving smart home deployments.

Kotevska, Olivera [Oak Ridge National Laboratory (↗

Secure Federated Learning Across Heterogeneous Cloud and High-Performance Computing Resources: A Case Study on Federated Fine-Tuning of LLaMA 2

Federated learning enables multiple data owners to collaboratively train robust machine learning models without transferring large or sensitive local datasets by only sharing the parameters of the locally trained models. Here, in this article, we elaborate on the design of our Advanced Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (APPFL) framework, which streamlines end-to-end secure and reliable federated learning experiments across cloud computing facilities and high-performance computing resources by leveraging Globus Compute, a distributed function as a service platform, and Amazon Web Services. We further demonstrate the use case of APPFL in fine-tuning an LLaMA 2 7B model using several cloud resources and supercomputers.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Virtual Power Plants: Pilots, Challenges, and Innovations Shaping Future Development

Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) aggregate distributed energy resources (DERs) to provide grid services traditionally delivered by centralized power plants. This article reviews the current state of VPP deployment, highlighting business models, compensation mechanisms, and global pilot projects. While VPPs offer benefits such as grid flexibility, resilience, and cost savings, challenges remain in communication infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, market access, and customer engagement. To address these, we propose a scalable, privacy-preserving hierarchical VPP architecture that coordinates with distribution utilities and preserves customer data. We also present the Integrated T&D Control Room of the Future as a key test bed for validating and accelerating VPP adoption. These innovations can help transition VPPs from pilot programs to integral components of a modern, reliable power grid.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Balancing Trade-offs: Adaptive Differential Privacy in Interpretable Machine Learning Models

In the advancing field of machine learning, balancing accuracy, interpretability, and privacy represents a significant challenge. The problem is exacerbated by the widespread deployment of pre-trained models locally in diverse applications, which could lead to various amounts of privacy leakage. Conventional Differential Privacy strategies, in which uniform noises are applied to model gradients, guarantee data privacy at the expense of accuracy and interpretability. This paper introduces a Feature-Sensitive Adaptive Differential Privacy (FADP) framework with a unique noise-adding strategy. Noises are adaptively added based on feature importance clustering, where important features are considered for interpretability. By employing a unique masking technique, FADP selectively preserves crucial features with minimal noise interference, maintaining accuracy while enhancing interpretability. The FADP framework addresses the limitations of traditional DP methods by preserving critical channels and improving interpretability — a vital requirement in machine learning applications that demand transparency in model decisions. Through comprehensive testing, FADP is shown to balance the trade-offs among accuracy, privacy, and interpretability, marking a substantial advancement in the field of privacy-preserving machine learning.

Farhad Riya, Farhin [University of Tennessee, Knox↗

Scalable and Secure Power Outage Data Reporting: A Hexagonal Geospatial Approach

Power outages disrupt critical infrastructure and cause billions of dollars in economic losses annually in the United States. Accurate and granular outage reporting is vital for effective restoration and mitigation. This paper examines the integration of the Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial Indexing System (H3) to enhance power outage reporting, leveraging its uniform grid structure, scalable resolutions, and support for privacy-preserving analysis. Using high-resolution LandScan Global population data and K-anonymization techniques, this work achieves a balance between data granularity and privacy. Results show that lower privacy thresholds (e.g., K-anonymity = 2) enable higher resolution, while stricter thresholds (e.g., >15 people per hex) reduce granularity, potentially affecting localized responses. State-and county-level resolution case studies demonstrate H3’s adaptability and the trade-offs between precision and privacy. The proposed H3-based framework offers a scalable and efficient solution for geospatial data integration within the energy sector, such as outage data, aiding utilities and regulators in improving resilience and response efforts, particularly in disaster-prone regions.

Ahmad, Nasir [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000150677368)↗

Emerging Technologies for Privacy Preservation in Energy Systems

This study explores the intersection of digitalization and privacy within the energy sector, focusing on the emerging challenges and opportunities presented by integrating Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and advanced metering infrastructure. The need for robust digital privacy measures has become crucial as the energy industry evolves towards a more decentralized, digitalized, and decarbonized future. This study delves into four cutting-edge privacy-preserving technologies—Homomorphic Encryption (HE), Secure Multiparty Computation (SMPC), Differential Privacy (DP), and Federated Learning (FL)—each offering unique solutions to safeguard consumer data by increasing digital connectivity and data exchange. Through a detailed examination of these methods, the study explains how each technology operates, its applications within the energy sector, and the specific privacy challenges it addresses. Homomorphic Encryption allows for secure computations on encrypted data, enabling data analysis without compromising privacy. Secure Multiparty Computation enables collaborative data analysis across different entities while protecting the confidentiality of the inputs. Differential Privacy introduces randomness into the assembled data set, preventing the identification of individual records in statistical databases. Lastly, Federated Learning offers a paradigm shift in data analysis, where machine learning models are trained at the edge, minimizing the centralization of sensitive data. The research underscores the significance of implementing these privacy-enhancing technologies to comply with strict data protection regulations, foster consumer trust, and enhance the security of the energy infrastructure. By providing a comprehensive overview of these methodologies and their practical implications for the energy sector, this study aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on digital privacy, offering insights into how the energy industry can navigate the complexities of data privacy in the digital age.

Cali, Umit↗

TwinMe4AD: WGAN-based Digital Twins for Anomaly Detection

SAND2024-08373O TwinMe4AD is a Python-based software tool designed for anomaly detection using digital twins that closely mimic real, wearable healthcare datasets. The tool is invaluable for scenarios where collecting data is either expensive or impractical, serving as a privacy-preserving solution. Sensitive information is protected by training deep learning models on synthetic data derived from real datasets. One of TwinMe4AD's key features is its anomaly detection capability, which is based on fourth-order moments of parameters. This versatile approach can be applied across a range of datasets, from univariate to multivariate, making it compatible with various types of data. It also generates synthetic twins using Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs), allowing users to create a small cohort of a population similar to that of a village population. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Poorey, Kunal↗

Differentially Private Map Matching (DPMM) v1.0

Human mobility trajectories provide valuable information for developing mobility applications, as they contain diverse and rich information about the users. User mobility data is valuable for various applications such as intelligent transportation systems (ITS), commercial business models, and disease-spread models. However, such spatio-temporal traces may pose a threat to user privacy. GPS trajectories in their raw form are not suitable for transportation studies, as they require matching locations with nearest road links — a process called map-matching. This software implements a differential privacy (DP)-based map-matching algorithm, called DPMM, that generates link-level location trajectories in a privacy-preserving manner to protect users' origin destinations (OD) and travel paths. OD privacy is achieved by injecting Planar Laplace noise to the user OD GPS points. Travel-path privacy is provided with randomized travel path construction using exponential DP mechanism. The injected noise level is selected adaptively, by considering the link density of the location and the functional category of the localized links. For path privacy, our mechanism samples waypoints and selects candidate paths between waypoints. DPMM provides privacy effectively with respect to link density instead of other trajectory samples in the database compared to other privacy mechanisms. Compared to the different baseline models our DP-based privacy model offers closer query responses to the raw data in terms of individual and aggregate trajectory-level statistics with an average at absolute deviation from the baseline for individual statistics on ϵ = 1.0. Beyond individual trajectory statistics, the DPMM outperforms the other benchmark DP-based mechanisms on different aggregate statistics with up to 8x improvement in utility.

Peisert, Sean [Lawrence Berkeley National Laborato↗

Does class matter? Understanding differential pandemic recovery via a building typology

This study investigates the recovery of building-level footfall from the COVID-19 pandemic using privacy-preserving mobile devices-based footfall data within 60 downtown areas in the USA and Canada. Using clustering, we identify five distinct building typologies based on their characteristics, including rent, quality and recovery rates. The results reveal significant variation of recovery rates by building features. We find negative relationships with footfall recovery for both the percentage of office and remote work tenants and building quality. In contrast, buildings with traditional work tenants and retail functions achieve higher recovery rates. We also test the ‘flight to quality’ hypothesis via on our typology results. High-quality office buildings (Class A+) continue to have high rents but experience low physical footfall recovery, which suggests that this class is not as resilient as portrayed. The findings thus suggest the importance of considering both economic and footfall resilience in evaluating the performance of office buildings.

Covid-19↗

Spatially Adaptive Tunable Lighting Control System with Expanded Wellness and Energy Saving Benefits

Lighting design is becoming increasingly complex, including active dimming for energy savings and spectral tuning for human wellbeing. Modern commercial lighting control systems are already difficult to use, and maintain, and even with so-called Smart Lighting, optimizing light settings is rapidly exceeding the capabilities of direct human control, limiting the adoption of lighting control systems. The growing importance of Occupancy Centric Controls (OCC) for advanced building management systems can be applied to the development of autonomous lighting system controls needed to drive the adoption of advanced lighting controls for improved adaptive “sculpted illumination” for both greater energy savings and broader human wellbeing perspectives. This project, led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, entitled “Spatially adaptive tunable lighting control system with expanded wellness and energy saving benefits” will develop and test an entirely new platform for automated optimized lighting design and control that requires little or no human engagement, yet contours lighting profiles automatically to minimize lighting energy use. We call this approach to lighting control “dynamic light sculpting” since the right amount of illumination is automatically delivered to occupants in real time. Since the system uses new, privacy-preserving occupant position and pose detection technologies developed by Rensselaer for broad OCC building applications, the control system will analyze how to deliver the right amount of the right type of illumination only where and when it is needed based these OCC platforms. To create these powerful autonomous lighting control platforms, the project will integrate evolving augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) tools with sophisticated lighting and interior design toolkits to create interactive lighting design and control simulators. Using the quickly growing paradigm of digital twins, these tools will integrate light fixture properties, occupancy sensor data, interior design data, and lighting specifications to accurately visualize how various design concepts interact with simulated yet realistic human activities that occur in commercial office buildings of various types. These advanced digital twin design and simulation tools will be combined with a new class of digitally-programmable LED lighting fixtures that can dynamically change the spectral content and direction of light emission. When fully integrated, the new autonomous lighting control system will take all of the guesswork out of optimizing light quality while minimizing energy consumption. Digital twin tools will simplify the design, installation, commissioning, operation, and maintenance of future energy-efficient lighting systems. It should be possible to reduce lighting energy costs from 40% to 70% with OCC based dynamic light sculpting systems. The work will be led by the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) and the Center for Architectural Science and Ecology (CASE), both at Renssealer Polytechnic Institute; Lumileds, a global leader in the development of advanced LED systems; and HKS, a leading global architecture design firm. This interdisciplinary project team’s experience includes all of the design simulation tools, VR/AR digital twin visualization technology, advanced occupancy sensing technology, and complex control system design capabilities that will revolutionize lighting design and control technology to autonomously deliver high-quality lighting that improves human health and wellbeing while simultaneously maximizing lighting energy savings.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Differential Privacy in Grid Kitchen: Implementation & Software Documentation

Sharing of power grid feeder models faces significant challenges due to the potential risk of exposing sensitive operational information. Traditional anonymization techniques have shown notable limitations in other sensitive domains, as evidenced by documented re-identification attacks that combine supposedly anonymized datasets with auxiliary information, raising concerns that similar vulnerabilities could affect power grid data. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a more rigorous privacy protection strategy that not only delivers formal mathematical guarantees but also preserves the analytical value of the shared models. To address this challenge, we have enhanced the Grid Kitchen framework by implementing differential privacy mechanisms within the distribution model dehydration pipeline. This implementation carefully calibrates and applies noise to sensitive attributes in feeder models according to configurable privacy levels—low, moderate, and high—each offering different balances between data utility and privacy protection. Our approach uses established noise functions (Gaussian for continuous data and Discrete Laplace for integer values) with parameters carefully calibrated so that the impact of individual data points is effectively masked in the final output. The integration leverages our Noise Catalog, which we developed to categorize feeder model properties by component type, data type, and sensitivity. This catalog guides the application of appropriate noise functions and privacy parameters ($\varepsilon$ and $\delta$) to each attribute, ensuring consistent privacy protection across the model while maintaining its structural integrity and analytical usefulness. This implementation also includes evaluation tools that allow model owners to assess the impact of privacy-preserving transformations before sharing data with external parties. This report provides documentation for the differential privacy capabilities added to the Grid Kitchen project. It includes a primer on differential privacy concepts and their importance in modern data sharing, details the architecture of our implementation, explains the privacy modes and parameter configurations, and offers practical guidance on using the code for applying differential privacy to grid feeder models. Through examples and code snippets, we demonstrate the effective application of these privacy-enhancing technologies, enabling utility operators and researchers to confidently share grid data while protecting sensitive information.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Summary of Responses to the Request for Information (RFI) on Partnerships for Transformational Artificial Intelligence Models

The Department of Energy (DOE) issued a Request for Information (RFI) in December 2025 inviting public comments regarding partnerships for transformational Artificial Intelligence (AI) models for the Genesis Mission Consortium, a public-private partnership platform. This RFI solicited feedback from industry, nonprofit organizations, universities, independent research organizations and other stakeholders. Specifically, the RFI asked three questions on (1) mobilizing DOE National Laboratories to curate the scientific data in a responsible and privacy-preserving manner, (2) the extent to which existing general-purpose AI models can be leveraged and which scientific disciplines are priorities for such model development, and (3) mechanisms by which these AI models can be provided to scientific communities. This document summarizes the input from 194 unique nonproprietary responses from businesses, universities, nonprofit organizations, research institutes and laboratories as well as a variety of other contributors, including individual contributions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Enhancing segmentation fairness through curriculum learning and progressive loss: a centralized and federated perspective on radiograph analysis

Bias in medical image segmentation can lead to unequal performance across demographic subgroups, raising concerns about fairness and reliability in clinical AI systems. While deep learning models have achieved high segmentation accuracy, ensuring equitable performance across race and gender remains a significant challenge, particularly in privacy-sensitive healthcare environments. This study investigates fairness-aware medical image segmentation for hip and knee radiographs using deep learning models evaluated in both centralized and Federated Learning (FL) settings. We introduce Curriculum Learning (CL) strategies and Progressive Loss (PL) functions to regulate sample difficulty during training. In addition, we propose two novel fairness-oriented federated learning algorithms, Federated Intersection over Union (FedIoU) and Federated Intersection over Union with Outlier Analysis (FedIoUoutlier). Experiments are conducted using multiple segmentation backbones and simulated multi-site data partitions derived from the Osteoarthritis Initiative dataset. Model performance is evaluated using Intersection over Union (IoU), IoU standard deviation, Skewed Error Ratio (SER), and Min-Max Disparity across race and gender subgroups. Statistical significance was verified using paired t-tests to compare per-sample IoU performance against baseline configurations. Across both hip and knee segmentation tasks, curriculum learning and progressive loss strategies consistently improved segmentation accuracy and reduced demographic performance disparities in centralized training. In federated settings, fairness-aware aggregation further enhanced performance. Notably, FedIoUoutlier combined with balanced curriculum learning and tiered progressive loss achieved the highest mean IoU while yielding the lowest SER and Min-Max Disparity, indicating improved fairness without sacrificing accuracy. In several configurations, federated models matched or exceeded the performance of optimized centralized models, with statistically significant improvements in per-sample IoU over baseline configurations. The results demonstrate that structured training strategies and fairness-aware federated aggregation can jointly improve accuracy, stability, and demographic fairness in medical image segmentation. By integrating curriculum learning, progressive loss, and novel FL algorithms, this work provides a practical pathway toward equitable and privacy-preserving AI systems for medical imaging.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Heterogeneous Multi-Domain Dataset Synthesis to Facilitate Privacy and Risk Assessments in Smart City IoT

The emergence of the Smart Cities paradigm and the rapid expansion and integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies within this context have created unprecedented opportunities for high-resolution behavioral analytics, urban optimization, and context-aware services. However, this same proliferation intensifies privacy risks, particularly those arising from cross-modal data linkage across heterogeneous sensing platforms. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a comprehensive, statistically grounded framework for generating synthetic, multimodal IoT datasets tailored to Smart City research. The framework produces behaviorally plausible synthetic data suitable for preliminary privacy risk assessment and as a benchmark for future re-identification studies, as well as for evaluating algorithms in mobility modeling, urban informatics, and privacy-enhancing technologies. As part of our approach, we formalize probabilistic methods for synthesizing three heterogeneous and operationally relevant data streams—cellular mobility traces, payment terminal transaction logs, and Smart Retail nutrition records—capturing the behaviors of a large number of synthetically generated urban residents over a 12-week period. The framework integrates spatially explicit merchant selection using K-Dimensional (KD)-tree nearest-neighbor algorithms, temporally correlated anchor-based mobility simulation reflective of daily urban rhythms, and dietary-constraint filtering to preserve ecological validity in consumption patterns. In total, the system generates approximately 116 million mobility pings, 5.4 million transactions, and 1.9 million itemized purchases, yielding a reproducible benchmark for evaluating multimodal analytics, privacy-preserving computation, and secure IoT data-sharing protocols. To show the validity of this dataset, the underlying distributions of these residents were successfully validated against reported distributions in published research. We present preliminary uniqueness and cross-modal linkage indicators; comprehensive re-identification benchmarking against specific attack algorithms is planned as future work. This framework can be easily adapted to various scenarios of interest in Smart Cities and other IoT applications. By aligning methodological rigor with the operational needs of Smart City ecosystems, this work fills critical gaps in synthetic data generation for privacy-sensitive domains, including intelligent transportation systems, urban health informatics, and next-generation digital commerce infrastructures.

IoT↗

Blockchain-based decentralized computing

An exemplary blockchain-based decentralized computing system and method are disclosed for industrial analytics applications. The exemplary system and method leverage blockchain technology to deliver and execute privacy-preserving decentralized predictive analytics, machine learning, and optimization operations for various industrial applications using a set of self-contained analytics block smart contracts that can be readily utilized and in analytics applications to deploy across multiple sites.

Ramanan, Paritosh P.↗

Efficient Anomaly Detection Driven By Different Machine Learning Architectures And Models

The rapid growth and ubiquitous adoption of the internet and cyber-physical systems (CPS) have fundamentally transformed modern communication, work, and human-system interactions. While networks now form the backbone of critical digital ecosystems, enabling seamless data transmission across diverse, interconnected systems, this increased connectivity also expands the attack surface, making real-time detection of network intrusions and anomalies a pressing challenge. Detecting unusual activities within network infrastructure requires advanced data traffic analysis to differentiate between legitimate and malicious interactions. Traditional approaches to network anomaly detectionâ??such as rule-based and signature-based systemsâ??often depend on predefined patterns to identify known anomalies, limiting their effectiveness against emerging, stealthy, or previously unseen threats. These conventional methods suffer from high false alarm rates and fail to adapt to the ever-evolving nature of network traffic, particularly in large-scale, decentralized environments where data volume, velocity, and variety are constantly increasing. This dissertation presents artificial intelligence (AI)-driven approaches to anomaly detection that leverage graphics processing unit (GPU)-enabled high-performance computing (HPC) platforms for processing massive network traffic data and monitoring the components of cyber-physical systems (CPS) for potentially hazardous conditions. The research advances several key contributions: (1) Designing efficient machine learning techniques for CPS condition monitoring and anomaly detection; (2) enabling federated learning (FL) frameworks that enable distributed detection while preserving data privacy and system resilience; (3) exploring graph-based methodologies combining graph neural networks (GNN) and graph machine learning (ML) approaches for the Internet of Things (IoT) and automotive network security, and (4) performing distributed edge computing optimizations that integrate FL with scalable technologies for reduced communication overhead. Through extensive experiments, these methodologies demonstrate that complex anomaly detection and condition monitoring tasks can be achieved while balancing computational efficiency and detection accuracy through fine-grained network information processing. The frameworks developed in this research establish a robust foundation for network anomaly detection, providing scalable, adaptive, and privacy-preserving solutions for safeguarding CPS and IoT networks in an increasingly interconnected digital landscape. The practical implications of these research findings are significant, as they can inform the development of next-generation network security systems and contribute to the protection of critical infrastructure against sophisticated cyber attacks.

Marfo, William↗