Javier Berrocal

University of Extremadura | UNEX · Department of Computer Systems and Telematics Engineering

Yearly, the rates of Internet penetration are on the rise, surpassing 80% in developed nations. Despite this progress, over two billion individuals in rural and low-income regions face a complete absence of Internet access. This lack of connectivity hinders the implementation of vital services like remote healthcare, emergency assistance, distance...

The Internet of Things enhances the quality of life by automating tasks and streamlining human-device interactions. However, manual device management remains time-consuming, especially in multiple or new environments that demand new settings and interactions. Learning systems aid in automating task management, but their learning times hinder person...

The advent of the Internet of Things has increased the interest in automating mission-critical processes from domains such as smart cities. These applications' stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements motivate their deployment through the Cloud-IoT Continuum, which requires solving the NP-hard problem of placing the application's services on...

The emergence of Digital Twins (DTs) has transformed domains like Industry 4.0 or automotive, enabling advanced insights and predictive maintenance, driving efficiency and innovation. With the evolution towards human-centric domains, such as Industry 5.0 or intelligent vehicles, the need for Human Digital Twins (HDTs), human digital representations...

Federated Learning allows us to train Machine Learning models in a distributed way. This improves users' security and privacy and allows the computational load to be distributed. One of the advantages is the application of these models on low-powerful devices, bringing the processing closer to the devices that generate them, as is pursued with Edge...

The growth of capabilities of mobile devices allows them to host increasingly sophisticated application services. Emerging paradigms within the Cloud Continuum are based on the concept of running services closer to users, even on their own devices. Nonetheless, running collaborative services on these devices requires attention to constraints that d...

En los últimos años, el interés por digitalizar los procesos críticos de diversos entornos intensivos, como la medicina, utilizando el paradigma del Internet de las Cosas (IoT), ha crecido sustancialmente. No obstante, al digitalizar un proceso crítico mediante una aplicación IoT, la aplicación IoT pasa también a ser crítica, lo que se ve reflejado...

The main goal of the Web of Things (WoT) is to improve people’s quality of life by automating tasks and simplifying human–device interactions with ubiquitous systems. However, the management of devices still has to be done manually, which wastes a lot of time as their number increases. Thus, the expected benefits are not achieved. This management o...

The great popularity and acceptance of smart devices have encouraged the development of applications focused on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) paradigms. These applications are normally based on cloud-centric architectures. However, the increasing amount of information exchanged and the need of IoT devices capable of adapting...

There are contexts where communication with TCP/IP protocol is not possible due to the lack of infrastructure or a reliable and continuous data transmission. In this cases, alternatives such as Opportunistic Networks (OPPNets) are valid. Such challenging conditions are common in rural areas and are a significant obstacle for the deployment of eHeal...

Biohazards and noise risks in wastewater treatment plants are a real concern. These stations generate risks of gas inhalation due to contaminants carried by the wastewater and exposure to dangerous high noise generated by the work equipment. The stations are equipped with sensors that are capable of monitoring ambient gas levels and noise levels. T...

The main goal of Web of Things (WoT) is to improve people’s quality of life by automating tasks and simplifying human-device interactions with ubiquitous systems. However, the management of devices still has to be carried out manually, making it very time-consuming as their number increases. Thus, not reaching the expected benefits. This management...

Cloud-Internet of Things computing paradigms call for novel and efficient methodologies to decide where to place application services in continuity with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines and infrastructure monitoring. In this article, we present Continuous Adaptation (CA), a new DevOps practice for (1) detecting runtime changes...

Robotics enabled by AI and advanced software technologies are taking the world by storm. The advanced automation systems, systems-of-systems that power them, and their collaboration are complex and difficult to understand. Lacking knowledge about how they work can only improve our lives so much; in fact, it can hamper the interactions between syste...

Nowadays, people’s medical records are crucial when it comes to providing treatments, discovering pathologies, or keeping track of health status. Advances in technology have allowed these records to be increasingly digitized, to the point that they can be consulted by specialists from anywhere. This also allows people to report their health status,...

In mobile and pervasive computing applications, opportunistic connections allow co-located devices to exchange data directly. Keeping data sharing local enables large-scale cooperative applications and empowers individual users to control what and how information is shared. Supporting such applications requires runtime frameworks that allow them to...

The massive deployment of Internet-connected devices has led to an increase in the collection of data that are then used by companies to improve their decision-making processes. This growing trend demands more and more cloud and communications infrastructure. The limited resources, the need for sharing them, and the fact that many consumers are int...

Dropout prediction is a problem that must be addressed in various organizations, as retaining customers is generally more profitable than attracting them. Existing approaches address the problem considering a dependent variable representing dropout or non-dropout, without considering the dynamic perspetive that the dropout risk changes over time. T...

In this chapter, different experiments have been carried out and different analyses have been performed, from which several technical and technological deficiencies of current quantum computing have been extracted. Therefore, this chapter also proposes an approach to the development of hybrid quantum-classical services using Amazon Braket, in order...

Nowadays, there are millions of smart devices connected to the Internet. The purpose of these devices is to make people’s lives easier. Thanks to the collaboration among them, the possibilities that the Internet of Things brings can grow exponentially. However, many manufacturers develop closed protocols and devices to protect their market share, l...

During last years, huge efforts have been done to reduce the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector energy consumption due to its impact on the carbon footprint; in particular, the one coming from networking equipment. Although the irruption of programmable and softwarized networks has open new perspectives to improve the energy-effi...

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a paradigm that provides flexibility and programmability to computer networks. By introducing SDN nodes in a legacy IP network topology, network operators can benefit on higher control over the infrastructure. However, this migration is not a fast or straightforward process. Furthermore, to provide an adequate q...

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 he...

The increasing capabilities of mobile devices have led to the emergence of new paradigms exploiting them. These paradigms foster the onload and distribution of functionalities on mobile devices, allowing the development of distributed mobile applications. This distribution reduces the latency and the data traffic overhead and improves privacy. As i...

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 p...

The pandemic situation produced by COVID-19 has made access to medical services and personal treatment difficult. For the older adults, this has been a major problem because they often need assistance to facilitate their daily lives. Different types of solutions have been put into place very quickly to alleviate this problem, such as telemedicine o...

The rate at which the internet is growing is unstoppable due to the large number of connected smart devices. Manufacturers often develop specific protocols for their own devices that do not usually follow any standards. This hinders the interconnection and coordination of devices from different manufacturers, limiting the number of daily activities...

The exaggerated use of smartphones and growing informatization of the environment allows modeling people’s behavior as a process, namely, a social workflow, where both individual actions and interactions with other people are captured. This modelling includes actions that are part of an individual’s routine, as well as less frequent events. Althoug...

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm to intensive domains, such as industry, is a key enabler for the automation of critical, real-world processes. The strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of these domains make low-latency computing paradigms, such as fog computing, very attractive for meeting these requirements. Moreover, th...

Internet of Things (IoT) integrates billions of smart devices and keeps growing. IoT technologies play a crucial role in smart applications that improve the quality of life. Likewise, the computational capacity of mobile devices has greatly increased, opening up new possibilities. In many cases, human interaction is necessary for IoT devices to per...

Dropout prediction is a problem that is being addressed with machine learning algorithms; thus, appropriate approaches to address the dropout rate are needed. The selection of an algorithm to predict the dropout rate is only one problem to be addressed. Other aspects should also be considered, such as which features should be selected and how to me...

The irruption of the Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted the interest of both the industry and academia for their application in intensive domains, such as healthcare. The strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the next generation of intensive IoT applications requires the QoS to be optimized considering the interplay of three key dimen...

Users’ smartphones collect information about the different interactions they perform in their daily life, including web interactions. Mining this information to discover user’s processes provides information about them as individuals and as part of a social group. However, analyzing events produced by human behavior, where indeterminism and variabi...

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 clo...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is more present in our daily lives than ever before, turning everyday physical objects into smart devices. However, these devices often need excessive human interaction before reaching their best performance, making them time-consuming and reducing their usability. Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are b...

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 p...

Quantum computing holds great promise to solve to problems where classical computers cannot reach. To the point where it already arouses the interest of both scientific and industrial communities. Thus, it is expected that hybrid systems will start to appear where quantum software interacts with classical systems. Such coexistence can be fostered b...

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm offers applications the potential of automating real-world processes. Applying IoT to intensive domains comes with strict quality of service (QoS) requirements, such as very short response times. To achieve these goals, the first option is to distribute the computational workload throughout the infrastructure (...

The growing number of devices in the Web of Things (WoT) allows larger and more complex smart environments. These environments aim to provide the desired state for the people, adapting the devices to their preferences. The characteristics of the environment, the people and the devices generate a multitude of interconnections and behaviours in speci...

The symptoms of depression cause patients to face psychological barriers that dictate the search for treatment. Also, people’s daily behavior allows us to identify different symptoms of depression in combination with intelligent devices that accompany us in almost any situation and contain a large number of sensors. In this sense, mobile devices ca...

Global population is facing a widespread ageing. In next decades, the increasing percentage of people over sixty-five will be significant, which will impact society in several ways. The health system will be one of the sectors specially involved, exploiting the technology as a perfect allied. However, a big percentage of adults live in rural areas...

Nowadays, the number of devices connected to the Internet is growing at an unstoppable rate. This, added to the amount of information these devices produce, makes new techniques necessary to take advantage of their potential. New devices are continually being introduced in the daily life of people, and they are already producing an unprecedented am...

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has opened new research lines that focus on applying IoT applications to domains further beyond basic user-grade applications, such as Industry or Healthcare. These domains demand a very high Quality of Service (QoS), mainly a very short response time. In order to meet these demands, some works are evaluatin...

Today, smart environments require attention from the network level for connecting devices to the application level for adapting their behavior to continuously changing environmental conditions. Just as a smartphone can choose between using mobile internet or a WLAN connection, IoT applications that manage smart environments must know how to establi...

During the last decade, the mobile application market has grown steadily thanks to the massive use of smartphones and the emergence of cloud computing for offloading computation tasks and improving the quality of experience. With the more recent deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, this cloud‐based architectural design and the correspond...

For the past twenty years, Service Oriented Computing has changed the way in which information technology was understood. The approach involves not only technological advances that have influenced the development of Software Engineering, such as Service Oriented Architecture, Web services, Service Choreography, or Microservices. In addition, it has...

Although the percentage of people living outside a broadband network has more than halved in recent years, around 10% of the global population does not have access to the Internet. This lack of coverage is particularly concentrated in rural and low-income areas, in which the lack of a cost-effective electricity supply is the main barrier to expandi...

We live in an era in which the most valued services are not paid for in money, but in personal data. Every day, service providers collect the personal information of billions of individuals, information that sustain their infrastructure by marketing profiles labeled with this information to personal data consumers, such as advertisers. Not all uses...

The rate of world population aging is increasing. This situation directly affects all countries socially and economically, increasing their compromise and effort to improve the living conditions of this sector of society. In environments with large influxes of elderly people, such as nursing homes, the use of technology has shown promise in improvi...

The continuous growth of the Web of Things allows us to find devices with different characteristics. This variety of devices favours the creation of heterogeneous intelligent environments that also makes interoperability between them difficult. This is why both the scientific community and consortiums such as the W3C are working on solutions to imp...

Advertising has become the most important source of income for a significant number of web-based companies. This income is usually dependent on the personal information that companies gather from their users which has led them to create very rich profiles of their users. However, these profiles do not follow any standard and are usually incomplete...