Smart cities contain intelligent things which can intelligently.automatically and collaboratively enhance life quality, save peoples lives, and act as sustainable resources. To achieve these tasks, advanced collaborative technologies such as drones, machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) are required to increase the smartness of smart cities by improving the connectivity, energy efficiency,and quality of services (QoS) provision over smart cities. Therefore, collaborative drones and IoT play vital role in supporting a lot of smart cities applications such as those involved in communication, transportation, agriculture, monitoring, disaster mitigation, environmental preservation, service delivery, pollution mitigation, energy saving, e-waste reduction, weather monitoring, etc. This paper presents a critical survey of the potential techniques and applications of collaborative drones and IoT which have recently been proposed in order to increase the smartness of smart cities. We provide a comprehensive survey highlighting the recent and ongoing research on collaborative drone and IoT in improving the real-time application of smart cities. This survey is different from previous surveys in term of breadth, scope, and focus. In particular, we focus on the new concept of collaborative drones and IoT for improving smart cities applications. This survey attempts to show how collaborative drones and IoT improve the smartness of smart cities based on data collection, privacy and security, public safety, disaster management, energy consumption and quality of life in smart cities. It mainly focuses on the measurement of the smartness of smart cities, i.e., environmental aspects, life quality, public safety, and disaster management. The collaborative drones and future IoT technologies provides some clues.

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology and their integration in smart cities have changed the way we work and live, and enriched our society. However, IoT technologies present several challenges such as increases in energy consumption, and produces toxic pollution as well as E-waste in smart cities. Smart city applications must be environmentally-friendly, hence require a move towards green IoT. Green IoT leads to an eco-friendly environment, which is more sustainable for smart cities. Therefore, it is essential to address the techniques and strategies for reducing pollution hazards, traffic waste, resource usage, energy consumption, providing public safety, life quality, and sustaining the environment and cost management. This survey focuses on providing a comprehensive review of the techniques and strategies for making cities smarter, sustainable, and eco-friendly. Furthermore, the survey focuses on IoT and its capabilities to merge into aspects of potential to address the needs of smart cities. Finally, we discuss challenges and opportunities for future research in smart city applications.

Disasters are crisis circumstances that put human life in jeopardy. During disasters, public communication infrastructure is particularly damaged, obstructing Search And Rescue (SAR) efforts, and it takes significant time and effort to re-establish functioning communication infrastructure. SAR is a critical component of mitigating human and environmental risks in disasters and harsh environments. As a result, there is an urgent need to construct communication networks swiftly to help SAR efforts exchange emergency data. UAV technology has the potential to provide key solutions to mitigate such disaster situations. UAVs can be used to provide an adaptable and reliable emergency communication backbone and to resolve major issues in disasters for SAR operations. In this paper, we evaluate the network performance of UAV-assisted intelligent edge computing to expedite SAR missions and functionality, as this technology can be deployed within a short time and can help to rescue most people during a disaster. We have considered network parameters such as delay, throughput, and traffic sent and received, as well as path loss for the proposed network. It is also demonstrated that with the proposed parameter optimization, network performance improves significantly, eventually leading to far more efficient SAR missions in disasters and harsh environments.

When integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) occurred, tens of applications including smart agriculture have emerged to offer innovative solutions to modernize the farming sector. This paper aims to present a low-cost platform for comprehensive environmental parameter monitoring using flying IoT. This platform is deployed and tested in a real scenario on a farm in Medenine, Tunisia, in the period of March 2020 to March 2021. The experimental work fulfills the requirements of automated and real-time monitoring of the environmental parameters using both under- and aboveground sensors. These IoT sensors are on a farm collecting vast amounts of environmental data, where it is sent to ground gateways every 1 h, after which the obtained data is collected and transmitted by a drone to the cloud for storage and analysis every 12 h. This low-cost platform can help farmers, governmental, or manufacturers to predict environmental data over the geographically large farm field, which leads to enhancement in crop productivity and farm management in a cost-effective, and timely manner. Obtained experimental results infer that automated and human-made sets of actions can be applied and/or suggested, due to the innovative integration between IoT sensors with the drone. These smart actions help in precision agriculture, which, in turn, intensely boost crop productivity, saving natural resources.

Digital twins (DTs) play a vital role in revolutionising the healthcare industry, leading to more personalised, intelligent, and proactive healthcare. With the evolution of personalised healthcare, there is a significant need to represent a virtual replica for individuals to provide the right type of care in the right way and at the right time. Therefore, in this paper, we surveyed the concept of a personal digital twin (PDT) as an enhanced version of the DT with actionable insight capabilities. In particular, PDT can bring value to patients by enabling more accurate decision making and proper treatment selection and optimisation. Then, we explored the progression of PDT as a revolutionary technology in healthcare research and industry. However, although several research works have been performed for smart healthcare using DT, PDT is still at an early stage. Consequently, we believe that this work can be a step towards smart personalised healthcare industry by guiding the design of industrial personalised healthcare systems. Accordingly, we introduced a reference framework that empowers smart personalised healthcare using PDTs by bringing together existing advanced technologies (i.e., DT, blockchain, and AI). Then, we described some selected use cases, including the mitigation of COVID-19 contagion, COVID-19 survivor follow-up care, personalised COVID-19 medicine, personalised osteoporosis prevention, personalised cancer survivor follow-up care, and personalised nutrition. Finally, we identified further challenges to pave the PDT paradigm toward the smart personalised healthcare industry.

Recently, there is a rapid and wide increase in fake news, defined as provably incorrect information spread with the goal of fraud. The spread of this type of misinformation is a severe danger to social cohesiveness and well-being since it increases political polarisation and people’s distrust of their leaders. Thus, fake news is a phenomenon that is having a significant impact on our social lives, particularly in politics. This paper proposes novel approaches based on Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) for the fake news detection system to address this phenomenon. The main aim of this paper is to find the optimal model that obtains high accuracy performance. Therefore, we propose an optimized Convolutional Neural Network model to detect fake news (OPCNN-FAKE). We compare the performance of the OPCNN-FAKE with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and The six regular ML techniques: Decision Tree (DT), logistic Regression (LR), K Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Naive Bayes (NB) using four fake news benchmark datasets. Grid search and hyperopt optimization techniques have been used to optimize the parameters of ML and DL, respectively. In addition, N-gram and Term Frequency—Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) have been used to extract features from the benchmark datasets for regular ML, while Glove word embedding has been used to represent features as a feature matrix for DL models. To evaluate the performance of the OPCNN-FAKE, accuracy, precision, recall, F1-measure were applied to validate the results. The results show that OPCNN-FAKE model has achieved the best performance for each dataset compared with other models. Furthermore, the OPCNN-FAKE has a higher performance of cross-validation results and testing results over the other models, which indicates that the OPCNN-FAKE for fake news detection is significantly better than the other models.