OTE: Optimal Trustworthy EdgeAI solutions for smart cities

Abstract

This work studies and defines the problem of providing extensive and opportunistic Edge AI-based area coverage in smart city application scenarios, by researching and determining the optimal configuration of sensing and computational resources for minimizing the environmental/technology footprint of the solution. A typical smart city computing continuum consists of statically installed multimodal sensing Internet-of-Things (IoT) nodes at various city locations, accompanied by interconnected computational Cloud/Edge/IoT nodes. This paper presents Optimal Trustworthy EdgeAI (OTE), an entirely novel research pipeline, that complements existing smart city infrastructure with intelligent drone Edge/IoT nodes (in the form of modularly equipped unmanned aerial vehicles), capable of autonomous repositioning according to individual/collective sensing and coverage criteria. Thereby, we envisage the emerging cutting-edge technologies of trustworthy sensing, perceiving, modelling technologies for predicting the behavior of moving targets (e.g., citizens/vehicles/objects), understanding natural phenomena (e.g., sea wave motion, urban flora/fauna, biodiversity) in order to anticipate events (people's bad habits, environmental changes), by exploiting novel continuous data processing services across the whole span of the enhanced Cloud-Edge-IoT computing continuum.