Introduction to the special issue on Artificial Intelligence for Society and Economy

AI can significantly support the societal and economic development driven by the rapidly emerging demand for innovative technologies in many application areas both in the public and private sectors. A special track of the XIII Symposium of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2014) held in Pisa, Italy 10-12 December 2014, entitled AI for Society and Economy attracted presentations with the intent to strengthen the awareness that AI is assuming a central role in the competitive strategies of the present scenario of rapid changes. This special issue starts from that precise aim by collecting contributions of selected presentations of the AI*IA 2014 Symposium that highlight original research or visionary challenges regarding societal or industrial problems for which AI can provide effective solutions. The paper of Apolloni et al. entitled Social things: Now, we can envisions social functionalities for Open Internet of Things empowered by a computational intelligence approach. Users, household appliances and social networks are part of the SandS ecosystem designed in the frame of the EU project Social&Smart. Two mockups are described, running in Milan (IT) and Boecillo (ES). In the paper State of the Art Language Technologies for Italian: the EVALITA 2014 perspective Attardi et al. start from the recent evaluation campaign of NLP and speech tools for Italian, called EVALITA 2014 and hosted at AI*IA 2014, to outlook results, challenges, and impact on applications and society of human language technologies applied to Italian texts. The paper