A Preface to the Special Issue: Emerging Areas in Network and Intelligence Empowered Computing

Abstract

The past decade has seen networking and intelligent computing converge into a single discipline, where connectivity is no longer a passive substrate but an active, learning system. Ubiquitous IoT devices, cloud–edge continuums, and programmable data planes now generate torrents of telemetry that demand real-time inference, closed-loop control, and autonomy. From 5G/6G network slicing to intent-based and self-organizing networks, the stack is becoming software-defined, data-driven, and increasingly adaptive – setting the stage for AI models that reason over graphs, streams, and spatiotemporal patterns, and for networks that optimize themselves under tight latency, reliability, and energy constraints.