Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the industry by bridging the gap
between Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). Machines
are being integrated with connected sensors and managed by intelligent
analytics applications, accelerating digital transformation and business
operations. Bringing Machine Learning (ML) to industrial devices is an
advancement aiming to promote the convergence of IT and OT. However, developing
an ML application in industrial IoT (IIoT) presents various challenges,
including hardware heterogeneity, non-standardized representations of ML
models, device and ML model compatibility issues, and slow application
development. Successful deployment in this area requires a deep understanding
of hardware, algorithms, software tools, and applications. Therefore, this
paper presents a framework called Semantic Low-Code Engineering for ML
Applications (SeLoC-ML), built on a low-code platform to support the rapid
development of ML applications in IIoT by leveraging Semantic Web technologies.
SeLoC-ML enables non-experts to easily model, discover, reuse, and matchmake ML
models and devices at scale. The project code can be automatically generated
for deployment on hardware based on the matching results. Developers can
benefit from semantic application templates, called recipes, to fast prototype
end-user applications. The evaluations confirm an engineering effort reduction
by a factor of at least three compared to traditional approaches on an
industrial ML classification case study, showing the efficiency and usefulness
of SeLoC-ML. We share the code and welcome any contributions.

本文介绍了一个基于语义低代码工程的 ML 应用程序框架，名为 SeLoC-ML，利用语义 Web 技术来支持在工业物联网（IIoT）中快速开发 ML 应用程序，使非专业人士能够轻松建模、发现、复用和匹配 ML 模型和设备。SeLoC-ML 在至少降低三倍的工程努力方面显示了效率和实用性。

SeLoC-ML: 工业物联网中用于机器学习应用的语义低代码工程

SeLoC-ML: Semantic Low-Code Engineering for Machine Learning Applications in Industrial IoT

Academia and industry have developed several platforms to support the popular
privacy-preserving distributed learning method -- Federated Learning (FL).
However, these platforms are complex to use and require a deep understanding of
FL, which imposes high barriers to entry for beginners, limits the productivity
of researchers, and compromises deployment efficiency. In this paper, we
propose the first low-code FL platform, EasyFL, to enable users with various
levels of expertise to experiment and prototype FL applications with little
coding. We achieve this goal while ensuring great flexibility and extensibility
for customization by unifying simple API design, modular design, and granular
training flow abstraction. With only a few lines of code, EasyFL empowers them
with many out-of-the-box functionalities to accelerate experimentation and
deployment. These practical functionalities are heterogeneity simulation,
comprehensive tracking, distributed training optimization, and seamless
deployment. They are proposed based on challenges identified in the proposed FL
life cycle. Compared with other platforms, EasyFL not only requires just three
lines of code (at least 10x lesser) to build a vanilla FL application but also
incurs lower training overhead. Besides, our evaluations demonstrate that
EasyFL expedites distributed training by 1.5x. It also improves the efficiency
of deployment. We believe that EasyFL will increase the productivity of
researchers and democratize FL to wider audiences.

本文介绍了一种名为 EasyFL 的低代码平台，可用于支持联邦学习方法。该平台不仅易于使用，而且具有模块化设计和简单的 API，可用于加速实验和部署。EasyFL 提供了多个功能，如模拟、全面跟踪、分布式培训优化和无缝部署，从而使联邦学习方法被更广泛地使用，并帮助提高研究人员的生产力。