We start by discussing the two survey papers, and the position paper, that have been accepted in this Special Section. In the article ‘‘Artificial intelligence based techniques for emergingheterogeneousnetworks:Stateofthearts,opportunitiesandchallenges’’,XiaofeiWangetal.provideadetailed survey of how AI-based techniques apply to emerging heterogeneous networks. The use of AI-based techniques for mobile cellular networks is becoming increasingly important as mobile networks are becoming more complex. The authors describe how AI can be used to surmount the myriad challenges related to management, optimization, and maintenance of mobile networks that crop up due to the fast developing mobile communication industry. The use of AI techniques can be use to enable HetNets in becoming intelligent, self-organizing, and autonomously-evolving networks. The authors provide a detailed taxonomy of AI-related techniques from a wide variety of fields (including machine-learning, bio-inspired algorithms, fuzzy neural networks). In the article ‘‘Neighbour discovery for opportunistic networking in Internet of Things scenarios: A survey’’, Pozza et al. have provided a survey of neighbor discovery techniques for opportunistic networking in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. The problem of neighbor discovery is becoming increasingly important with the emergence of opportunistic networking in IoT scenarios (such as smart cities)—in such scenarios, acquiring and predicting patterns of node encounters becomes fundamentally important since the success of communication relies on exploiting the availability of fleetingly-available dynamic end-to-end paths. AI techniques can be leveraged in such settings to learn and thereafter exploit knowledge of the mobility patterns of users and devices. In this survey paper, the authors presented a detailed taxonomy through which mobilityaware and mobility-agnostic neighbor discover approaches were introduced. It was shown that mobility-aware neighbor discoveryapproachescancanprofitsignificantlybyoptimizing from their knowledge of mobility.