AI for Resource Allocation and Resource Allocation for AI: a two-fold paradigm at the network edge

5G-and-beyond and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are pushing a shift from the classic cloud-centric view of the network to a new edge-centric vision. In such a perspective, the computation, communication and storage resources are moved closer to the user, to the benefit of network responsiveness/latency, and of an improved context-awareness, that is, the ability to tailor the network services to the live user's experience. However, these improvements do not come for free: edge networks are highly constrained, and do not match the resource abundance of their cloud counterparts. In such a perspective, the proper management of the few available resources is of crucial importance to impr…