Editorial

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to our first regular issue in 2022, which contains 5 very relevant and new articles on various topics in computer science. Looking back over the past year, we had a successful relaunch of the J.UCS platform hosted by Pensoft Publishers Ltd. on their ARPHA Publishing Platform. Thanks to the combined efforts of the Pensoft team and the J.UCS publishing team, we are listed and indexed in more than 40 indexing services worldwide, including DOAJ, Web of Science, and Scopus. Increased visibility and social media presence have also continued to increase page views and article downloads, as well as the number of articles submitted and special issue proposals. We are also very proud to report that the journal's Impact Factor continued to improve. The Web of Science Impact Factor increased to 1.139 and the Scopus Science Score to 2.0. We are proud to present a total of 12 issues with 64 articles on new aspects of various topics in computer science; more precisely, 40 articles were published in 6 special issues and 24 articles in 6 regular issues. These great achievements were only possible through the commitment and interest of the community, the valuable support of the Editorial Board, and the support of the members of the J.UCS Consortium. In particular, I would like to thank Dr. Ulrike Krießmann from the Library of the Graz University of Technology, Prof. Klaus Tochtermann from the ZBW, Prof. Christian Eckhardt from California Polytechnic State University, and Prof. Krzysztof Pietroszek from the American University in Washington DC for their generous support in offering an open-content journal without charging authors for their articles. I would also like to thank the J.UCS team, Johanna Zeisberg for taking care of the publication process, Aleksandar Bobic for his social media support, and Alexander Nussbaumer for his technical support, as well as Pensoft Publishers Ltd. for hosting our journal. I look forward to continuing to work with our editors, editorial team and technical support to maintain the success of J.UCS. I would be very grateful for suggestions and feedback on how we can make J.UCS even better and develop it further in the future. In this regular issue, I am very pleased to introduce 5 accepted articles from 5 different countries. Roberto Cavicchioli, Riccardo Martoglia and Micaela Verucchi from Italy report on an innovative framework aiming to facilitate the design of advanced Big Data analytics workflows for smart cities. Sébastien Martinez, Christophe Gransart, Olivier Stienne, Virginie Deniau, and Philippe Bon from France focus in their article on aspects of dynamic software updating, specifically they present SoREn - Security REconfigurable Engine – in the context of moving vehicles. In their article, Rodolfo Medeiros, Sílvio Fernandes, and Paulo G. G. Queiroz from Brazil perform a systematic review of the literature to bring together middleware solutions for the Internet of Things, identify the requirements and communication protocols used, and finally point out some gaps and directions for future research in IoT middleware development. Canan Tastimur and Erhan Akin form Turkey focus on the challenging problem of classifying highly similar objects by exploring the Siamese Convolution Neural Network, a similarity measurement-based network, and applying it to classify different types of screws, nuts, and bolts. In a research collaboration between Argentina and Brazil, Florencia Vega, Guillermo Rodríguez, Fabio Rocha and Rodrigo Pereira dos Santos present and discuss Scrum Watch, a tool for monitoring the performance of Scrum-based work teams.