Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and technologies are being increasingly adopted in smart systems contexts; however, such technologies are concerned with ethical uncertainties. Various guidelines, principles, and regulatory frameworks are designed to ensure that AI technologies adhere to ethical well-being. However, the implications of AI ethics principles and guidelines are still being debated. To further explore the significance of AI ethics principles and relevant challenges, we conducted a survey of 99 randomly selected representative AI practitioners and lawmakers (e.g., AI engineers and lawyers) from 20 countries across five continents. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study that unveils the perceptions of two different types of population (AI practitioners and lawmakers) and the study findings confirm that transparency, accountability, and privacy are the most critical AI ethics principles. On the other hand, lack of ethical knowledge, no legal frameworks, and lacking monitoring bodies are found to be the most common AI ethics challenges. The impact analysis of the challenges across principles reveals that conflict in practice is a highly severe challenge. Moreover, the perceptions of practitioners and lawmakers are statistically correlated with significant differences for particular principles (e.g. fairness and freedom) and challenges (e.g. lacking monitoring bodies and machine distortion). Our findings stimulate further research, particularly empowering existing capability maturity models to support ethics-aware AI systems’ development and quality assessment.

Many scientific and practical areas have shown increasing interest in reaping the benefits of blockchain technology to empower software systems. However, the unique characteristics and requirements associated with Blockchain-based Software (BBS) systems raise new challenges across the development lifecycle that entail an extensive improvement of conventional software engineering. This article presents a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art in BBS engineering research from the perspective of the software engineering discipline. We characterize BBS engineering based on the key aspects of theoretical foundations, processes, models , and roles . Based on these aspects, we present a rich repertoire of development tasks, design principles, models, roles, challenges, and resolution techniques. The focus and depth of this survey not only give software engineering practitioners and researchers a consolidated body of knowledge about current BBS development but also underpin a starting point for further research in this field.

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) with machine learning (ML) is revolutionizing how services and applications impact our daily lives. In traditional ML methods, data are collected and processed centrally. However, modern IoT networks face challenges in implementing this approach due to their vast amount of data and privacy concerns. To overcome these issues, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a solution. FL allows ML methods to achieve collaborative training by transferring model parameters instead of client data. One of the significant challenges of federated learning is that IoT devices as clients usually have different computation and communication capacities in a dynamic environment. At the same time, their network availability is unstable, and their data quality varies. To achieve high-quality federated learning and handle these challenges, designing the proper client selection process and methods are essential, which involves selecting suitable clients from the candidates. This study presents a comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) that focuses on the challenges of client selection (CS) in the context of federated learning (FL). The objective of this SLR is to facilitate future research and development of CS methods in FL. Additionally, a detailed and in-depth overview of the CS process is provided, encompassing its abstract implementation and essential characteristics. This comprehensive presentation enables the application of CS in diverse domains. Furthermore, various CS methods are thoroughly categorized and explained based on their key characteristics and their ability to address specific challenges. This categorization offers valuable insights into the current state of the literature while also providing a roadmap for prospective investigations in this area of research.