Social Edge Intelligence: Integrating Human and Artificial Intelligence at the Edge

In this vision paper, we propose a new concept, "Social Edge Intelligence (SEI)", where the artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence (HI) are tightly integrated to address a set of critical research challenges in edge computing applications. The SEI concept is motivated by two technical trends: 1) the recent rapid advancement of AI techniques in many edge and mobile applications (e.g., mobile sensing, smart homes, intelligent transportation systems), and 2) the emergence of the crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., Amazon MTurk, Waze) that are used to explore the wisdom of common individuals. We envision that an unprecedented opportunity has been unleashed to integrate AI with human intelligence at the edge of the network to obtain the best of both worlds. In this vision paper, we will review several real-world applications under the SEI vision and discuss the fundamental research challenges in implementing SEI in those applications. We also observe that approaches originated from multiple disciplines (e.g., information theory, machine learning, AI, statistics) are desirable to address the emerging challenges in SEI applications. Finally, we conclude the paper by outlining a few research directions for future work in this exciting direction.