Given its advantages in low latency, fast response, context-aware services, mobility, and privacy preservation, edge computing has emerged as the key support for intelligent applications and 5G/6G Internet of things (IoT) networks. This technology extends the cloud by providing intermediate services at the edge of the network and improving the quality of service for latency-sensitive applications. Many AI-based solutions with machine learning, deep learning, and swarm intelligence have exhibited the high potential to perform intelligent cognitive sensing, intelligent network management, big data analytics, and security enhancement for edge-based smart applications. Despite its many benefits, there are still concerns about the required capabilities of intelligent edge computing to deal with the computational complexity of machine learning techniques for big IoT data analytics. Resource constraints of edge computing, distributed computing, efficient orchestration, and synchronization of resources are all factors that require attention for quality of service improvement and cost-effective development of edge-based smart applications. In this context, this paper aims to explore the confluence of AI and edge in many application domains in order to leverage the potential of the existing research around these factors and identify new perspectives. The confluence of edge computing and AI improves the quality of user experience in emergency situations, such as in the Internet of vehicles, where critical inaccuracies or delays can lead to damage and accidents. These are the same factors that most studies have used to evaluate the success of an edge-based application. In this review, we first provide an in-depth analysis of the state of the art of AI in edge-based applications with a focus on eight application areas: smart agriculture, smart environment, smart grid, smart healthcare, smart industry, smart education, smart transportation, and security and privacy. Then, we present a qualitative comparison that emphasizes the main objective of the confluence, the roles and the use of artificial intelligence at the network edge, and the key enabling technologies for edge analytics. Then, open challenges, future research directions, and perspectives are identified and discussed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.

In the future Internet of Things (IoT), smart objects will be the fundamental building blocks for the creation of cyber-physical smart pervasive systems in a great variety of application domains ranging from health-care to transportation, from logistics to smart grid and cities. The implementation of a smart objects-oriented IoT is a complex challenge as distributed, autonomous, and heterogeneous IoT components at different levels of abstractions and granularity need to cooperate among themselves, with conventional networked IT infrastructures, and also with human users. In this paper, we propose the integration of two complementary mainstream paradigms for large-scale distributed computing: Agents and Cloud. Agent-based computing can support the development of decentralized, dynamic, cooperating and open IoT systems in terms of multi-agent systems. Cloud computing can enhance the IoT objects with high performance computing capabilities and huge storage resources. In particular, we introduce a cloud-assisted and agent-oriented IoT architecture that will be realized through ACOSO, an agent-oriented middleware for cooperating smart objects, and BodyCloud, a sensor-cloud infrastructure for large-scale sensor-based systems.