EdgeFaaS: A Function-based Framework for Edge Computing

Edge computing brings unique challenges as the resources on the edge are highly diverse in capabilities and capacities, and highly distributed across many users and the physical world. Existing distributed computing frameworks cannot adequately handle this level of heterogeneity and distribution. This paper proposes EdgeFaaS, a novel function-based edge computing framework to enable edge applications to effectively utilize heterogeneous resources distributed across the Internet of Things (IoT), edge, and cloud for computing. It proposes function virtualization and storage virtualization to abstract distributed and heterogeneous physical resources and provides consistent virtual interfaces for deploying and executing functions and storing and accessing data. EdgeFaaS provides comprehensive support to diverse edge computing workflows, and at the same time allows users to flexibly adjust the configurations and explore various important tradeoffs. To demonstrate its usability, the paper also presents the implementation and evaluation of three representative workflows on EdgeFaaS for video analytics, federated learning, and audio classification, on a real testbed of 100+ geographically distributed IoT devices, edge servers, and cloud services. EdgeFaaS allows users to flexibly explore the deployment configurations of these workflows over distributed and heterogeneous resources. For example, users can easily vary the function placement of the video processing pipeline across IoT, edge, and cloud resources and study the tradeoff between computation and communication costs; users can also flexibly adjust the cluster count and size in the hierarchical federated learning system and explore the tradeoff between training accuracy and speed.

Exploring the relationship between human-centric AI and firm idiosyncratic risks

Despite the extensive discussions of human-centric AI (HCAI) in Industry 5.0, its effects on firms' idiosyncratic risks (IR) remains underexplored. This is an imperative issue for firms navigate financial risks during the current technological revolution, as IR reflects investor reactions to corporate heterogeneous AI strategies and implementations by isolating firm-level stock volatility from systematic factors. Integrating situated AI theory with social-technical systems theory, we conceptualise HCAI as a situated AI strategy that reduces AI-related ethical risks and fosters AI-Human synergies in firms' business operations, ultimately reducing IR by aligning with stakeholders' diverse expectations. Moreover, socio-technical factors, namely digitalisation, operational efficiency, executive shareholding, and CEOs with IT background, may moderate the HCAI-IR relationship. Using a multi-source panel dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2023, we find that HCAI is associated with lower firm IR. Furthermore, digitalisation and executive shareholding strengthen this risk-reducing effect, whereas operational efficiency and CEOs with IT background surprisingly attenuate it. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and practical insights for both ethical AI governance and firm financial risk management in the AI era.