There's growing interest in developing applications for the Internet of Things. Such applications' main objective is to integrate technology into people's everyday lives, to be of service to them en masse. The form in which this integration is implemented, however, still leaves much room for improvement. Usually, the user must set parameters within the application. When the person's context changes, they have to manually reconfigure the parameters. What was meant to be a commodity in an unforeseen situation then becomes extra noise. This article describes a reference architecture that improves how people are integrated with the IoT, with smartphones doing the connecting. The resulting integration opens the way to new IoT scenarios supporting evolution towards the Internet of People.

As quantum computers mature, the complexity of quantum software increases. From initial standalone quantum algorithms, we are moving toward complex solutions combining quantum algorithms with traditional software. To build these, software engineering methods and abstractions are needed. Nowadays quantum computers are usually offered through the cloud, under a pay-per-use model, leading to the adoption of the service-oriented good practices dominant on the cloud. However, specific adaptations are needed to obtain the benefits of service-oriented computing while dealing with quantum hardware limitations. In this paper, we propose the Quantum API Gateway, an adaptation of the API Gateway pattern that takes into account the fact that quantum services cannot be deployed as traditional services. Instead, the Quantum API Gateway recommends the best quantum computer to run a given quantum service at run-time. As a proof of concept, an implementation of the Quantum API Gateway is provided for the Amazon Braket platform.

The development that quantum computing technologies are achieving is beginning to attract the interest of companies that could potentially be users of quantum software. Thus, it is perfectly feasible that during the next few years hybrid systems will start to appear integrating both the classical software systems of companies and new quantum ones providing solutions to problems that still remain unmanageable today. A natural way to support such integration is Service-Oriented Computing. While conceptually the invocation of a quantum software service is similar to that of a classical one, technically there are many differences and technological limitations, which refer to platform independence, decoupling, scalability, etc. To highlight these differences and the difficulties to develop quality quantum services, this paper takes a well-known problem to which a quantum solution can be provided, integer factorization, making use of the Amazon Braket quantum service platform. The exercise of trying to provide the factorization as a quantum service is carried out following the best practices, design patterns and standards existing in the implementation of classical services. This case study is used to highlight the rough edges and limitations that arise in the integration of classical-quantum hybrid systems using service-oriented computing. The conclusion of the study allows us to point out directions in which to focus research efforts in order to achieve effective quantum service-oriented computing.

Researchers from sociological disciplines could greatly benefit from collective information from the many people who use mobile devices to communicate via various social apps and services. However, processing that information is difficult because it's scattered among numerous social platforms. Furthermore, users are becoming increasingly concerned about how and by whom their information is being accessed. A new mobile-centric computing model allows sociological profiles of people to be generated, kept, and securely provided to third parties as a service. With this model, device owners can be fully aware and in control of how their information is accessed, while still contributing to collective sociological information.

IoT edge computing is a new computing paradigm “in the IoT domain” for performing calculations and processing at the edge of the network, closer to the user and the source of the data. This paradigm is relatively recent, and, together with cloud and fog computing, there may be some confusion about its meaning and implications. This paper aims to help practitioners and researchers better understand what the industry thinks about what IoT edge computing is, and the expected benefits and challenges associated with this paradigm. We conducted a survey using a semi-structured in-depth questionnaire to collect qualitative data from relevant stakeholders from 29 multinational companies and qualitatively analyzed these data using the Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz) method. Several researchers participated in the coding process (collaborative coding). To ensure consensus on the constructs that support the theory and thus improve the rigor of qualitative research, we conducted an intercoder agreement analysis. From the analysis, we have derived a substantive and analytic theory of what companies perceive about IoT edge computing, its benefits and challenges. The theory is substantive in that the scope of validity refers to the 29 surveys processed and analytic in that it analyzes “what is” rather than explaining causality or attempting predictive generalizations. A public repository with all the data related to the information capture process and the products resulting from the analysis of this information is publicly available. This study aims to strengthen the evidence and support practitioners in making better informed decisions about why companies are adopting edge computing and the current challenges they face. Additionally, the testing theory phase shows that the results are aligned with the ISO/IEC TR 30164 standard.