The article reviews significant advances in networked signal and information
processing, which have enabled in the last 25 years extending decision making
and inference, optimization, control, and learning to the increasingly
ubiquitous environments of distributed agents. As these interacting agents
cooperate, new collective behaviors emerge from local decisions and actions.
Moreover, and significantly, theory and applications show that networked
agents, through cooperation and sharing, are able to match the performance of
cloud or federated solutions, while offering the potential for improved
privacy, increasing resilience, and saving resources.