Edge artificial intelligence (AI) is an innovative computing paradigm that aims to shift the training and inference of machine learning models to the edge of the network. This paradigm offers the opportunity to significantly impact our everyday lives with new services such as autonomous driving and ubiquitous personalized health care. Nevertheless, bringing intelligence to the edge involves several major challenges, which include the need to constrain model architecture designs, the secure distribution and execution of the trained models, and the substantial network load required to distribute the models and data collected for training. In this article, we highlight key aspects in the development of edge AI in the past and connect them to current challenges. This article aims to identify research opportunities for edge AI, relevant to bring together the research in the fields of artificial intelligence and edge computing.

Smart solutions increasingly involve the use of sensor data to represent the physical world in the digital world and apply intelligence to such representation. The main approach is a vertical end-to-end solution from sensors to intelligence and back to actuators. Recently, a new holistic approach, the so-called Digital Twin, has emerged. This goes beyond traditional smart solutions by replicating, with high-fidelity cross-domain aspects, a physical object into the digital world. The key differentiation is the inclusion of semantics information in the digital replica in a form of knowledge graph. Further, analytics continuously enrich Digital Twin’s information with predictions and insights. In this article, we adopt the Digital Twin approach for the creation of a digital replica of Espinardo’s campus at the University of Murcia (Spain). The starting point is the existing sensor network deployment and the infrastructure under development of Fog–Edge–Cloud computing based on a 5G private network. The smart campus Digital Twin is formed by the Digital Twins of 23 buildings for which different sets of data features have been thoroughly selected. We implement the concept of Digital Twin by merging sensor data with external open data sources, analytics models implemented, and information processed by these analytics. We report our experience showing the issues encountered handling the data and producing various analytics models for predicting energy consumption, building occupancy, room usage, solar energy, and anomaly detection. From our experience, we highlight some lessons learned and directions toward the full operational smart campus Digital Twin.

All of the objects in the real world are envisioned to be connected and/or represented, through an infrastructure layer, in the virtual world of the Internet, becoming Things with status information. Services are then using the available data from this Internet-of-Things (IoT) for various social and economical benefits which explain its extreme broad usage in very heterogeneous fields. Domain administrations of diverse areas of application developed and deployed their own IoT systems and services following disparate standards and architecture approaches that created a fragmentation of things, infrastructures and services in vertical IoT silos. Coordination and cooperation among IoT systems are the keys to build “smarter” IoT services boosting the benefits magnitude. This article analyses the technical trends of the future IoT world based on the current limitations of the IoT systems and the capability requirements. We propose a hyper-connected IoT framework in which “things” are connected to multiple interdependent services and describe how this framework enables the development of future applications. Moreover, we discuss the major limitations in today’s IoT and highlight the required capabilities in the future. We illustrate this global vision with the help of two concrete instances of the hyper-connected IoT in smart cities and autonomous driving scenarios. Finally, we analyse the trends in the number of connected “things” and point out open issues and future challenges. The proposed hyper-connected IoT framework is meant to scale the benefits of IoT from local to global.

As the impact of AI is difficult to assess by a single group, policymakers should prioritize societal and environmental well being and seek advice from interdisciplinary groups focusing on ethical aspects, responsibility, and transparency in the development of algorithms.

Proliferation of data sources associated to Internet of Things (IoT) deployment as well as those bound to Open Data Portals (e.g. European Data Portal, Municipalities Open Data Portals, etc.) and Social Media platforms is creating an abundance of information that is called to bring benefits for both the private and public sectors, through the development of added-value services, increasing administrations’ transparency and availability or fostering efficiency of public services. However, pieces of information without a context are significantly less valuable. Raw data lacks semantics and it is highly heterogeneous from one data-source to another. This poses a challenge to make it useful. To turn all this data into valuable information it is necessary to enable its combination so that meaningful context can be created. Moreover, it is fundamental to define the mechanisms enabling the adoption and orchestration of advanced (typically AI-enabled) data processing techniques to be applied over the harmonized datasets and data-streams. This paper presents the Data Enrichment Toolchain (DET) that provides the necessary harmonization and enrichment to datasets and data-streams coming from heterogeneous sources. The value of the enriched data lies on the one hand in the transfer of the data into a semantically grounded knowledge graph and, on the other hand, in the creation of new data through linking, aggregating and reasoning on the data. In both cases, the benefit of employing linked-data modelling and semantics comes from the extension of the metadata that is associated to every piece of information. Furthermore, the experimental evaluation of the DET implementation that we have carried out is also presented in the paper.