  This paper discusses the perspective of the H2020 TEACHING project on the
next generation of autonomous applications running in a distributed and highly
heterogeneous environment comprising both virtual and physical resources
spanning the edge-cloud continuum. TEACHING puts forward a human-centred vision
leveraging the physiological, emotional, and cognitive state of the users as a
driver for the adaptation and optimization of the autonomous applications. It
does so by building a distributed, embedded and federated learning system
complemented by methods and tools to enforce its dependability, security and
privacy preservation. The paper discusses the main concepts of the TEACHING
approach and singles out the main AI-related research challenges associated
with it. Further, we provide a discussion of the design choices for the
TEACHING system to tackle the aforementioned challenges
