## 6 Discussion
However, contrary to the results of our questionnaire, deep learning is only offered at seven of the 20 top-ranked schools, with the rest having included some deep learning topics in their machine learning lectures. A similar study was conducted by [PERSON] and [PERSON], who did a questionnaire-based survey about teaching AI in Italian universities [59]. Collecting data from members of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI * IA) and colleagues, the authors investigated the number of AI courses taught in Italian higher education, the number of students participating in them, and the educational level we encounter most of them. Figure 8: Number of publications per year concerning EC (based on data from [57]). According to the paper results, AI courses are offered at 19 of the 80 universities, with 73 courses total. The 42 courses deal exclusively with AI topics and applications, while the remaining 31 contain some relevant sections (to be precise, AI topics cover half of the syllabus in these courses). Moreover, AI lectures are found at all higher education (HE) levels (undergraduate, Master, and Ph.D.), with most of them taught in the postgraduate program. Universities in Italy focus mainly on the basics of Artificial Intelligence, robotics, automated machine learning, automated reasoning, and knowledge engineering. As it is presented in [59], 3000 Italian students attend AI-related courses each year. This may be due to recent advances in artificial intelligence, which have influenced student participation in such courses. The thorough search of the relevant literature yielded one more comprehensive research work in which the Brazilian public universities' approach in AI and its subjects was investigated [60]. Explicitly analyzing the curriculum of 25 universities, the number of courses related to the AI knowledge area was recorded (20 required and 30 elective courses). At the same time, the topics to which more attention is given were identified. As stated by the authors, machine learning, heuristic search, neural networks, and knowledge-based/expert systems are the most popular research areas, unlike computer vision, where it is not mentioned anywhere. Several professors also mention fuzzy logic without however much deepening being done. Finally, an essential piece of information extracted from this study is that most professors have difficulty finding practical examples, probably due to the still little practical use of AI in industry or because enterprises are reluctant to share information about AI applications. Hence, students do not learn enough techniques and methods to implement AI applications, which is a significant barrier to implementing Industry 4.0. The results of the research were able to give us an answer to the third research question (**RQ3**). Specifically, in the case of IoT, according to the questionnaire results presented in Figure 6, we can observe fewer academic professionals than AI (36% of the survey respondents is devoted to IoT, compared to 80% AI teachers). In addition to this, as shown in Table 17, most curricula include IoT fundamentals and application scenarios, where IoT technologies are employed without referring extensively to industrial case studies. From the same table, we can conclude that teaching programs could contain more security issues, while more emphasis could be placed on market behavior and deliveries (Table 18). In addition, according to Table 19, universities should focus more on subjects concerning the deployment of IoT products and technologies in the production environment (containers, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS). These results largely agree with similar surveys that have been conducted. Similar research results were presented in [61], where the authors explored the IoT curriculum offered by five out of the top public and private Malaysian universities. According to their results, only the top two private universities (Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation (APU) and INTI University) have included IoT courses in their undergraduate programs.