Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for Communications

The five articles in this special section focus on data science and artificial intelligence (AI) for communications. The innovation in AI, machine learning (ML), and network data analytics provides a huge opportunity to revolutionize the world’s communications systems and user experience. Through gathering, processing, learning, and controlling the vast amounts of information in an intelligent manner, these analytics tools enable the possibility to automate and optimize systems in a way that was not previously possible. This is particularly important as the communications infrastructures evolve to support increasingly more complex human type as well as machine type communications and enable, through the connectedness of meters, sensors, and things, a plethora of new services. Supporting such immensely diverse traffic patterns and applications will require dynamic, highly adaptive network environments, all the while ensuring highly reliable, secure, and ultra-low-latency service performance guarantees.