Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has gained significant attention in recent years and has become an appealing paradigm for urban sensing. For data collection, MCS systems rely on contribution from mobile devices of a large number of participants or a crowd. Smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices are deployed widely and already equipped with a rich set of sensors, making them an excellent source of information. Mobility and intelligence of humans guarantee higher coverage and better context awareness if compared to traditional sensor networks. At the same time, individuals may be reluctant to share data for privacy concerns. For this reason, MCS frameworks are specifically designed to include incentive mechanisms and address privacy concerns. Despite the growing interest in the research community, MCS solutions need a deeper investigation and categorization on many aspects that span from sensing and communication to system management and data storage. In this paper, we take the research on MCS a step further by presenting a survey on existing works in the domain and propose a detailed taxonomy to shed light on the current landscape and classify applications, methodologies and architectures. Our objective is not only to analyze and consolidate past research but also to outline potential future research directions and synergies with other research areas.

Among the panoply of applications enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), smart and connected health care is a particularly important one. Networked sensors, either worn on the body or embedded in our living environments, make possible the gathering of rich information indicative of our physical and mental health. Captured on a continual basis, aggregated, and effectively mined, such information can bring about a positive transformative change in the health care landscape. In particular, the availability of data at hitherto unimagined scales and temporal longitudes coupled with a new generation of intelligent processing algorithms can: (a) facilitate an evolution in the practice of medicine, from the current post facto diagnose-and-treat reactive paradigm, to a proactive framework for prognosis of diseases at an incipient stage, coupled with prevention, cure, and overall management of health instead of disease, (b) enable personalization of treatment and management options targeted particularly to the specific circumstances and needs of the individual, and (c) help reduce the cost of health care while simultaneously improving outcomes. In this paper, we highlight the opportunities and challenges for IoT in realizing this vision of the future of health care.

Smart Cities sensing is an emerging paradigm to facilitate the transition into smart city services. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the widespread use of mobile devices with computing and sensing capabilities has motivated applications that require data acquisition at a societal scale. These valuable data can be leveraged to train advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) models that serve various smart services that benefit society in all aspects. Despite their effectiveness, legacy data acquisition models backed with centralized Machine Learning models entail security and privacy concerns, and lead to less participation in large-scale sensing and data provision for smart city services. To overcome these challenges, Federated Learning is a novel concept that can serve as a solution to the privacy and security issues encountered within the process of data collection. This survey article presents an overview of smart city sensing and its current challenges followed by the potential of Federated Learning in addressing those challenges. A comprehensive discussion of the state-of-the-art methods for Federated Learning is provided along with an in-depth discussion on the applicability of Federated Learning in smart city sensing; clear insights on open issues, challenges, and opportunities in this field are provided as guidance for the researchers studying this subject matter.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Edge Intelligence (EI) introduces a groundbreaking paradigm for intelligent edge devices. With their capacity for human-like language processing and generation, LLMs empower edge computing with a powerful set of tools, paving the way for a new era of decentralized intelligence. Yet, a notable research gap exists in obtaining a thorough comprehension of LLM-based EI architectures, which should incorporate crucial elements such as security, optimization, and responsible development. This survey aims to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive resource for both researchers and practitioners. We explore LLM-based EI architectures in-depth, carefully analyzing state-of-the-art paradigms and design decisions. To facilitate efficient and scalable edge deployments, we perform a comparative analysis of recent optimization and autonomy techniques specifically designed for resource-constrained edge environments. Additionally, we shed light on the extensive potential of LLM-based EI by demonstrating its varied practical applications across a wide range of domains. Acknowledging the utmost importance of security, our survey thoroughly investigates potential vulnerabilities inherent in LLM-based EI deployments. We explore corresponding defense mechanisms to protect the integrity and confidentiality of data processed at the edge. In conclusion, highlighting the essential aspect of trustworthiness, we outline best practices and guiding principles for the responsible development and deployment of these systems. By conducting a comprehensive review of these key components, our survey aims to support the ethical development and strategic implementation of LLM-driven EI, paving the way for its transformative impact on diverse applications.

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm stands for virtually interconnected objects that are identifiable and equipped with sensing, computing, and communication capabilities. Implementation of services and applications over the IoT architecture can take benefit of the cloud computing concept. Sensing-as-a-Service (S² aaS) is a cloud-inspired service model which enables access to the IoT. In this paper, we present a framework where IoT can enhance public safety by crowd management via sensing services that are provided by smart phones equipped with various types of sensors. In order to ensure trustworthiness in the presented framework, we propose a reputation-based (S² aaS) scheme, namely, Trustworthy Sensing for Crowd Management (TSCM) for front-end access to the IoT. TSCM collects sensing data based on a cloud model and an auction procedure which selects mobile devices for particular sensing tasks and determines the payments to the users of the mobile devices that provide data. Performance evaluation of TSCM shows that the impact of malicious users in the crowdsourced data can be degraded by 75% while trustworthiness of a malicious user converges to a value below 40% following few auctions. Moreover, we show that TSCM can enhance the utility of the public safety authority up to 85%.