Preserving energy in households and office buildings is a significant challenge, mainly due to the recent shortage of energy resources, the uprising of the current environmental problems, and the global lack of utilizing energy-saving technologies. Not to mention, within some regions, COVID-19 social distancing measures have led to a temporary transfer of energy demand from commercial and urban centers to residential areas, causing an increased use and higher charges, and in turn, creating economic impacts on customers. Therefore, the marketplace could benefit from developing an Internet of Things ecosystem that monitors energy consumption habits and promptly recommends action to facilitate energy efficiency. This article aims to present the full integration of a proposed energy efficiency framework into the Home-Assistant platform using an edge-based architecture. End users can visualize their consumption patterns as well as ambient environmental data using the Home-Assistant user interface. More notably, explainable energy-saving recommendations are delivered to end users in the form of notifications via the mobile application to facilitate habit change. In this context, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop and implement an energy-saving recommender system on edge devices. Thus, ensuring better privacy preservation since data are processed locally on the edge, without the need to transmit them to remote servers, as is the case with cloudlet platforms.

Recommender systems are a key technology for many applications, such as e-commerce, streaming media, and social media. Traditional recommender systems rely on collaborative filtering or content-based filtering to make recommendations. However, these approaches have limitations, such as the cold start and the data sparsity problem. This survey paper presents an in-depth analysis of the paradigm shift from conventional recommender systems to generative pre-trained-transformers-(GPT)-based chatbots. We highlight recent developments that leverage the power of GPT to create interactive and personalized conversational agents. By exploring natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques, we investigate how GPT models can better understand user preferences and provide context-aware recommendations. The paper further evaluates the advantages and limitations of GPT-based recommender systems, comparing their performance with traditional methods. Additionally, we discuss potential future directions, including the role of reinforcement learning in refining the personalization aspect of these systems.

In the age of information overload, recommender systems have emerged as essential tools, assisting users in decision-making processes by offering personalized suggestions. However, their effectiveness is contingent on the availability of large amounts of user data, raising significant privacy and security concerns. This review article presents an extended analysis of recommender systems, elucidating their importance and the growing apprehensions regarding privacy and data security. Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving machine learning approach, is introduced as a potential solution to these challenges. Consequently, the potential benefits and implications of integrating FL with recommender systems are explored and an overview of FL, its types, and key components, are provided. Further, the privacy-preserving techniques inherent to FL are discussed, demonstrating how they contribute to secure recommender systems. By illustrating case studies and significant research contributions, the article showcases the practical feasibility and benefits of combining FL with recommender systems. Despite the promising benefits, challenges, and limitations exist in the practical deployment of FL in recommender systems. This review outlines these hurdles, bringing to light the security considerations crucial in this context and offering a balanced perspective. In conclusion, the article signifies the potential of FL in transforming recommender systems, paving the path for future research directions in this intersection of technologies.