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The growing network density and unprecedented increase in network traffic, caused by the massively expanding number of connected devices and online services, require intelligent network operations. Machine Learning (ML) has been applied in this regard in different types of networks and networking technologies to meet the requirements of future communicating devices and services. In this article, we provide a detailed account of current research on the application of ML in communication networks and shed light on future research challenges. Research on the application of ML in communication networks is described in: i) the three layers, i.e., physical, access, and network layers; and ii) novel computing and networking concepts such as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and a brief overview of ML-based network security. Important future research challenges are identified and presented to help stir further research in key areas in this direction. INDEX TERMS Communication networks, machine learning, physical layer, MAC layer, network layer, SDN, NFV, MEC, security, artificial intelligence (AI) I. INTRODUCTION T HE security, availability and performance demands of new applications, services and devices are increasing at a pace higher than anticipated. Real-time responsiveness in application areas like e-health, traffic, and industry requires communication networks to make real-time decisions autonomously. Such real-time autonomous decision-making requires that the network must react and learn from the environment, and control itself without human interventions. However, communication networks have until now taken a different path. Traditional networks rely on human involvement to respond manually to changes such as traffic variation, updates in network functions and services, security breaches, and faults. Human-machine interactions have resulted in network downtime [1], have opened the network to security vulnerabilities [2], and lead to many other challenges in current communication networks [3], [4]. The requirement for human interaction or manual configuration constitutes a major hindrance for a network to use its past experiences to adapt to changing requirements. The general idea is to predict the (future) behavior of a service, network segment, user or User Equipment (UE), and tune the network at run-time based on this information. For instance, the movement trajectory of a user can be predicted using

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6G wireless networks improve on 5G by further increasing reliability, speeding up the networks and increasing the available bandwidth. These evolutionary enhancements, together with a number of revolutionary improvements such as highprecision 3D localization, ultra-high reliability and extreme mobility, introduce a new generation of 6G-native applications. Such application can be based on, for example, distributed, ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ultra-reliable, low-latency Internet of Things (IoT). Along with the enhanced connectivity and novel applications, privacy and security of the networks and the applications must be ensured. Distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain provide one solution for application security and privacy, but introduce their own set of security and privacy risks. In this work, we discuss the opportunities and challenges related to blockchain usage in 6G, and map out possible directions for overtaking the challenges.

Social media data represent an important resource for behavioral analysis of the ageing population. This paper addresses the problem of age prediction from Twitter dataset, where the prediction issue is viewed as a classification task. For this purpose, an innovative model based on Convolutional Neural Network is devised. To this end, we rely on languagerelated features and social media specific metadata. More specifically, we introduce two features that have not been previously considered in the literature: the content of URLs and hashtags appearing in tweets. We also employ distributed representations of words and phrases present in tweets, hashtags and URLs, pre-trained on appropriate corpora in order to exploit their semantic information in age prediction. We show that our CNN-based classifier, when compared with an SVM baseline model, yields an improvement of 12.3% and 6.6% in the micro-averaged F1 score on the Dutch and English datasets, respectively.