With the expansion of smart meters, like the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), and the Internet of Things (IoT), each smart city is equipped with various kinds of electronic devices. Therefore, equipment and technologies enable us to be smarter and make various aspects of smart cities more accessible and applicable. The goal of the current paper is to provide an inclusive review on the concept of the smart city besides their different applications, benefits, and advantages. In addition, most of the possible IoT technologies are introduced, and their capabilities to merge into and apply to the different parts of smart cities are discussed. The potential application of smart cities with respect to technology development in the future provides another valuable discussion in this paper. Meanwhile, some practical experiences all across the world and the key barriers to its implementation are thoroughly expressed.

Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely applied in every area of human being’s daily life. Despite the AI benefits, its application suffer from the opacity of complex internal mechanisms and doesn’t satisfy by design the principles of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). The lack of transparency further exacerbates the problem in the field of Cybersecurity because entrusting crucial decisions to a system that cannot explain itself presents obvious dangers. There are several methods in the literature capable of providing explainability of AI results. Anyway, the application of XAI in Cybersecurity can be a double-edged sword. It substantially improves the Cybersecurity practices but simultaneously leaves the system vulnerable to adversary attacks. Therefore, there is a need to analyze the state-of-the-art of XAI methods in Cybersecurity to provide a clear vision for future research. This study presents an in-depth examination of the application of XAI in Cybersecurity. It considers more than 300 papers to comprehensively analyze the main Cybersecurity application fields, like Intrusion Detection Systems,Malware detection, Phishing and Spam detection, BotNets detection, Fraud detection, Zero-Day vulnerabilities, Digital Forensics and Crypto-Jacking. Specifically, this study focuses on the explainability methods adopted or proposed in these fields, pointing out promising works and new challenges.

A promising research area in the field of group decision making (GDM) is the study of interpersonal influence and its impact on the evolution of experts' opinions. In conventional GDM models, a group of experts express their individual preferences on a finite set of alternatives, then preferences are aggregated and the best alternative, satisfying the majority of experts, is selected. Nevertheless, in real situations, experts form their opinions in a complex interpersonal environment where preferences are liable to change due to social influence. In order to take into account the effects of social influence during the GDM process, we propose a new influence-guided GDM model based on the following assumptions: experts influence each other and the more an expert trusts in another expert, the more his opinion is influenced by that expert. The effects of social influence are especially relevant to cases when, due to domain complexity, limited expertise or pressure to make a decision, an expert is unable to express preferences on some alternatives, i.e., in presence of incomplete information. The proposed model adopts fuzzy rankings to collect both experts' preferences on available alternatives and trust statements on other experts. Starting from collected information, possibly incomplete, the configuration and the strengths of interpersonal influences are evaluated and represented through a social influence network (SIN). The SIN, in its turn, is used to estimate missing preferences and evolve them by simulating the effects of experts' interpersonal influence before aggregating them for the selection of the best alternative. The proposed model has been experimented with synthetic data to demonstrate the influence driven evolution of opinions and its convergence properties.

Energy efficiency and sustainability are important factors to address in the context of smart cities. In this sense, smart metering and nonintrusive load monitoring play a crucial role for fighting energy thefts and for optimizing the energy consumption of home, building, city, and so forth. The estimated number of smart meters will exceed 800 million by 2020. By providing near real-time data about power consumption, smart meters can be used to analyze electricity usage trends and to point out anomalies guaranteeing companies’ safety and avoiding energy wastes. In literature, there are many proposals approaching the problem of anomaly detection. Most of them are limited because they lack of context and time awareness and the false positive rate is affected by the consumer habits change. This research work focuses on the need to define anomaly detection method capable to face with the concept drift, for instance family structure changes, a house becomes a second residence, and so forth. The proposed methodology adopts Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network in order to profile and forecast the consumers’ behavior basing on their recent past consumptions. The continuous monitoring of the consumption prediction errors allows us to distinguish between possible anomalies and changes (drifts) in normal behavior that correspond to different error motifs. Experimental results demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework by pointing out an anomaly in a near real-time after a training period of 1 week.