Edge intelligence and, by extension, any distributed computing continuum system will bring to our future society a plethora of new and useful applications, which will certainly revolutionize our way of living. Nevertheless, managing these systems challenges all previously developed technologies for Internet-distributed systems. In this regard, this article presents a set of techniques and concepts that can help manage these systems; these are framed in the main paradigm for autonomic computing, the well-known monitor–analyze–plan–execute over shared knowledge, or MAPE-K. All in all, this article aims at unveiling research opportunities for these new systems, encouraging the community to work together toward new technologies to make edge intelligence a reality.

Machine learning (ML) typically relies on the assumption that training and testing distributions are identical and that data are centrally stored for training and testing. However, in real-world scenarios, distributions may differ significantly, and data are often distributed across different devices, organizations, or edge nodes. Consequently, it is to develop models capable of effectively generalizing across unseen distributions in data spanning various domains. In response to this challenge, there has been a surge of interest in federated domain generalization (FDG) in recent years. FDG synergizes federated learning (FL) and domain generalization (DG) techniques, facilitating collaborative model development across diverse source domains for effective generalization to unseen domains, all while maintaining data privacy. However, generalizing the federated model under domain shifts remains a complex, underexplored issue. This article provides a comprehensive survey of the latest advancements in this field. Initially, we discuss the development process from traditional ML to domain adaptation (DA) and DG, leading to FDG, as well as provide the corresponding formal definition. Subsequently, we classify recent methodologies into four distinct categories: federated domain alignment (FDAL), data manipulation (DM), learning strategies (LSs), and aggregation optimization (AO), detailing appropriate algorithms for each. We then overview commonly utilized datasets, applications, evaluations, and benchmarks. Conclusively, this survey outlines potential future research directions.

Computing paradigms have evolved significantly in recent decades, moving from large room-sized resources (processors and memory) to incredibly small computing nodes. Recently, the power of computing has attracted almost all current application fields. Currently, distributed computing continuum systems (DCCSs) are unleashing the era of a computing paradigm that unifies various computing resources, including cloud, fog/edge computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile devices into a seamless and integrated continuum. Its seamless infrastructure efficiently manages diverse processing loads and ensures a consistent user experience. Furthermore, it provides a holistic solution to meet modern computing needs. In this context, this paper presents a deeper understanding of DCCSs’ potential in today’s computing environment. First, we discuss the evolution of computing paradigms up to DCCS. The general architectures, components, and various computing devices are discussed, and the benefits and limitations of each computing paradigm are analyzed. After that, our discussion continues into various computing devices that constitute part of DCCS to achieve computational goals in current and futuristic applications. In addition, we delve into the key features and benefits of DCCS from the perspective of current computing needs. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive overview of emerging applications (with a case study analysis) that desperately need DCCS architectures to perform their tasks. Finally, we describe the open challenges and possible developments that need to be made to DCCS to unleash its widespread potential for the majority of applications.

This article discusses four fundamental topics for future Distributed Computing Continuum Systems: their representation, model, lifelong learning, and business model. Further, it presents techniques and concepts that can be useful to define these four topics specifically for Distributed Computing Continuum Systems. Finally, this article presents a broad view of the synergies among the presented technique that can enable the development of future Distributed Computing Continuum Systems.

Recently, the wide adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has introduced new challenges that the current cloud-centric approach must overcome. The high-latency obtained from sending daily massive volumes of generated data to the cloud, for further processing, is insufficient to meet the stringent requirements of emerging IoT applications. As a consequence, researchers have introduced new paradigms, like edge and fog computing, with the purpose of extending cloud capabilities closer to the edge of the network. This extension of the cloud enables IoT applications to be deployed in the proximity of sensors, adding new benefits like fast response time and better security and privacy. In this paper, we discuss in detail both paradigms based on their individual characteristics and use cases. Furthermore, we explain what future challenges, i.e., resource management, security and privacy, and network management, researches must solve to enable the adoption in society. Finally, we present our vision regarding a smart city scenario in which users have the possibility of customizing their environment as they desire, by seamlessly downloading applications on a personal edge network.

Recent developments in machine learning (ML) allow for efficient data stream processing and also help in meeting various privacy requirements. Traditionally, predefined privacy policies are enforced in resource-rich and homogeneous environments such as in the cloud to protect sensitive information from being exposed. However, large amounts of data streams generated from heterogeneous IoT devices often result in high computational costs, cause network latency, and increase the chance of data interruption as data travels away from the source. Therefore, this article proposes a novel privacy-enforcing framework for transforming data streams by executing various privacy policies close to the data source. To achieve our proposed framework, we enable domain experts to specify high-level privacy policies in a human-readable form. Then, the edge-based runtime system analyzes data streams (i.e., generated from nearby IoT devices), interprets privacy policies (i.e., deployed on edge devices), and transforms data streams if privacy violations occur. Our proposed runtime mechanism uses a Deep Neural Networks (DNN) technique to detect privacy violations within the streamed data. Furthermore, we discuss the framework, processes of the approach, and the experiments carried out on a real-world testbed to validate its feasibility and applicability.