Federated learning (FL) is an emerging and privacy-preserving machine learning technique that is shown to be increasingly important in the digital age. The two challenging issues for FL are: (1) communication overhead between clients and the server, and (2) volatile distribution of training data such as class imbalance. The paper aims to tackle these two challenges with the proposal of a federated fuzzy learning algorithm (FFLA) that can be used for data-based construction of fuzzy classification models in a distributed setting. The proposed learning algorithm is fast and highly cheap in communication by requiring only two rounds of interplay between the server and clients. Moreover, FFLA is empowered with an an imbalance adaptation mechanism so that it remains robust against heterogeneous distributions of data and class imbalance. The efficacy of the proposed learning method has been verified by the simulation tests made on a set of balanced and imbalanced benchmark data sets.
The design brief is commonly a written description of a scope for a design problem that requires some kind of visual design. The exploration of opportunities before formulating the design brief results in framing and reframing the problem to create a common shared understanding of the problem. In this paper the applicability of Storyboard, the actual making of the storyboard, and its values to the front-front end of innovation is examined. Experiments has been performed in order to test three hypotheses and validate the results, in total four experiments was performed consisting of 25 teams developing 17 concepts. The three hypotheses focus, regarding type of innovation, scope and level of ambiguity, creates understanding of the values storyboarding can add with regards to framing opportunity for innovation in the front-front end of innovation. The result shows that storyboarding contribute to a narrow focus in creating the brief. Regarding the innovation type the hypothesis could not be confirmed, but storyboarding enables a reflection on both meaning and function. There were also some indications on ambiguity in the brief, but this hypothesis was not confirmed.© 2013 The Design Society.