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future internet
Editorial
Wireless Internet, Multimedia, and Artificial Intelligence: New
Applications and Infrastructures
Roberto Saia 1,* , Salvatore Carta 1and Olaf Bergmann 2
Citation: Saia, R.; Carta, S.;
Bergmann, O. Wireless Internet,
Multimedia, and Artificial
Intelligence: New Applications and
Infrastructures. Future Internet 2021,
13, 240. https://doi.org/10.3390/
fi13090240
Received: 14 September 2021
Accepted: 17 September 2021
Published: 21 September 2021
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1Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Cagliari, 09124 Cagliari, Italy;
salvatore@unica.it
2Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen, D-28359 Bremen, Germany;
bergmann@tzi.org
*Correspondence: roberto.saia@unica.it
Abstract:
The potential offered by the Internet, combined with the enormous number of connectable
devices, offers benefits in many areas of our modern societies, both public and private. The possibility
of making heterogeneous devices communicate with each other through the Internet has given rise
to a constantly growing scenario, which was unthinkable not long ago. This unstoppable growth
takes place thanks to the continuous availability of increasingly sophisticated device features, an
ever-increasing bandwidth and reliability of the connections, and the ever-lower consumption of
the devices, which grants them long autonomy. This scenario of exponential growth also involves
other sectors such as, for example, that of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which offers us increasingly
sophisticated approaches that can be synergistically combined with wireless devices and the Internet
in order to create powerful applications for everyday life. Precisely for the aforementioned reasons,
the community of researchers, year by year, dedicates more time and resources in this direction. It
should be observed that this happens in an atypical way concerning the other research fields, and
this is because the achieved progress and the developed applications have practical applications in
numerous and different domains.
Keywords:
internet; wireless; multimedia; artificial intelligence; machine learning; ubiquitous
computing; wireless sensor; networks; Internet of Things; security; deep neural networks; big data
1. Introduction
The increasing power of the connected devices, as well as the continuous improve-
ments in terms of reliability and bandwidth of the Internet, have given rise to the so-called
data age since an ever-increasing number of devices generate a continuous flow of infor-
mation. This data flow can be exploited to our advantage, although it exposes us to risks
in terms of security and privacy. For this reason, in recent years, we have witnessed an
increase in investments in research, both in terms of money and human resources, in order
to exploit the potential of this scenario and reduce the related risks.
Therefore, massive data generation, which is mainly related to the capability of
connecting heterogeneous devices, represents a distinctive mark of our age, but these
stimulating technological opportunities must be properly managed, as the ever-increasing
potentialities often do not go hand in hand with efficient implementations in terms of both
functionality and security.
For this reason, the idea behind our Special Issue was that of bringing together
scientists from a large variety of research areas, as to face multiple aspects of the scenario
taken into account, believing that the meeting between ideas from people that belong to
different research areas can bring advantages to each of them.
Future Internet 2021,13, 240. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13090240 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet
Future Internet 2021,13, 240 2 of 3
2. Contributions
This Special Issue of Future Internet received valuable contributions, both in terms of
fundamental and applied research papers and high-quality surveys.
An example of this is the work in [
1
], where the authors present an innovative ap-
proach for damage detection of infrastructures on-edge devices by exploiting a brain-
inspired algorithm, or in [
2
], where, instead, two techniques aimed at supporting the user
in making privacy choices about sharing personal content online have been proposed by
the authors. Another interesting work, which aimed to estimate the perceived quality of
service (PQoS) of video conferencing using only 802.11-specific network performance pa-
rameters collected from Wi-Fi access points (APs) on customer premises, has been proposed
in [3].
A completely different but important domain is that of the work proposed in [
4
],
where the authors propose a method for extracting implicit answers from large tweet
collections, with the aim of collecting tweets related to heart attacks, which contain useful
information. The contribution in [
5
], which is focused on network security, first provides
an extensive overview of the scenario, then proposes a novel Local Feature Engineering
(LFE) approach, which is based on a data pre-processing strategy, to face some well-
known problems that affect state-of-the-art solutions. The application of a solar-powered
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for securing communication with a ground node in the
presence of eavesdroppers in urban environments has been considered in [
6
], whereas a
study aimed at identifying the most probable future development of social media over the
next five to ten years has been provided in [7].
As for the surveys, in [
8
], the authors provide an extensive study of various local-
ization techniques and classified them based on centralized, distributed, iterative, range-
based, range-free, device-based, device-free, and their sub-types, discussing the problems,
challenges, various technologies, and available approaches, as well as the localization
applications for a smart city such as services, infrastructure, mobility, transport, and health.
Some innovative fruition modalities of cultural heritage sites have been discussed in the
survey in [
9
], where the authors propose an approach based on User Localization, Multi-
modal Interaction, User Understanding, and Gamification. Lastly, the research domain
related to the Free-Space Optical Communication (FSOC) has been taken into account in
the survey proposed in [10].
Acknowledgments:
We wish to thank all the authors involved in the submitted papers, as well as
all the reviewers for their precious work, and the Future Internet journal for the valuable support at
every stage of the publication process of our Special Issue.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
References
1.
Barchi, F.; Zanatta, L.; Parisi, E.; Burrello, A.; Brunelli, D.; Bartolini, A.; Acquaviva, A. Spiking Neural Network-Based Near-Sensor
Computing for Damage Detection in Structural Health Monitoring. Future Internet 2021,13, 219.
2.
Contu, F.; Demontis, A.; Dessì, S.; Muscas, M.; Riboni, D. AI-Based Analysis of Policies and Images for Privacy-Conscious
Content Sharing. Future Internet 2021,13, 139.
3.
Morshedi, M.; Noll, J. Estimating PQoS of Video Conferencing on Wi-Fi Networks Using Machine Learning. Future Internet
2021
,
13, 63.
4.
Karajeh, O.; Darweesh, D.; Darwish, O.; Abu-El-Rub, N.; Alsinglawi, B.; Alsaedi, N. A Classifier to Detect Informational vs.
Non-Informational Heart Attack Tweets. Future Internet 2021,13, 19.
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Huang, H.; Savkin, A.V. Autonomous Navigation of a Solar-Powered UAV for Secure Communication in Urban Environments
with Eavesdropping Avoidance. Future Internet 2020,12, 170.
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8.
Ghorpade, S.; Zennaro, M.; Chaudhari, B. Survey of Localization for Internet of Things Nodes: Approaches, Challenges and
Open Issues. Future Internet 2021,13, 210.
Future Internet 2021,13, 240 3 of 3
9.
Augello, A.; Infantino, I.; Pilato, G.; Vitale, G. Site Experience Enhancement and Perspective in Cultural Heritage Fruition—A
Survey on New Technologies and Methodologies Based on a “Four-Pillars” Approach. Future Internet 2021,13, 92.
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