Surveying neuro-symbolic approaches for reliable artificial intelligence of things

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the Internet of Things (IoT), known as the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), enhances the devices’ processing and analysis capabilities and disrupts such sectors as healthcare, industry, and oil. However, AIoT’s complexity and scale are challenging for traditional machine learning (ML). Deep learning offers a solution but has limited testability, verifiability, and interpretability. In turn, the neuro-symbolic paradigm addresses these challenges by combining the robustness of symbolic AI with the flexibility of DL, enabling AI systems to reason, make decisions, and generalize knowledge from large datasets better. This paper reviews state-of-the-art DL models for IoT, identifies their limitations, and explores how neuro-symbolic methods can overcome them. It also discusses key challenges and research opportunities in enhancing AIoT reliability with neuro-symbolic approaches, including hard-coded symbolic AI, multimodal sensor data, biased interpretability, trading-off interpretability, and performance, complexity in integrating neural networks and symbolic AI, and ethical and societal challenges. © The Author(s) 2024.