The emergence of blockchain technology, initially just a cryptocurrency with Bitcoin, brought with it a range of solution development possibilities in the most diverse sectors of society. The characteristics of blockchain raise interest in the corporate environment, which even provide complete development environments such as Hyperledger Fabric. Developing systems with blockchain is similar in many ways to developing traditional software. ISO/IEC 25010 brings models that allow measuring the quality of the software. In this work, quality measurement metrics are defined for a blockchain implemented on Hyperledger Fabric. For this, the Hyperledger Caliper was used to observe the metrics from the perspective of ISO/IEC 25010. Through the experiments it was possible to observe, based on the increase in throughput, that the number of transactions directly impacts the performance of the network, and that when analyzing the average latency and CPU utilization, the implemented network presented scalability.

Blockchain is an emerging technology that is being studied more and more in academia and applied in industry. Some of these characteristics are immutability, traceability, and security. Several areas can be benefiting from Blockchain, such as health, transport, and agriculture. With its diffusion, it is natural that the application development areas start to use it, involving different types of professionals. This paper aims to provide an overview of blockchain technology users’ profiles and opinions, whether developers or application users. To meet this objective, an online questionnaire with demographic, technical and open questions was designed. Regarding to open questions, a qualitative analysis was performed, through Grounded Theory. We identified as the main conclusions from our work: (i) security is a feature very well seen by users, (ii) there are difficulties in blockchain learning, and (iii) there are many tools for blockchain development, however, support is needed.

Crowdfunding services help many people to carry out projects for the most diverse purposes and are easily found on the internet. There are several ways to make donations or payments, such as bank transfers and credit cards. However, it is not known exactly whether the investment was in fact for the proper purpose. In this scenario, blockchain stands out with cryptocurrency applications and smart contracts, adding credibility to the transactions carried out even if in a decentralized manner, and providing traceability. The objective of this work is to propose a solution to the problem of traceability of money invested by financiers, in addition to an analysis of financial costs and transaction times, helping investors to understand where the funds raised go. To meet the objective, an architecture was designed and the Ethereum blockchain was used in the experiments, concluding that it is necessary to evaluate the cost benefit of the solution and the size of the data to be stored in the blockchain, as well as the variations in the ether values at the time of conversion to the local currency.

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION: The world population is living longer than ever before, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) research try to ensure people are ageing well by using digital and physical technologies. The development of AAL platforms presents several challenges (e.g., sensor data integration, device interoperability). Many requirements for AAL platforms can be met by using the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Computing paradigm standards. METHODOLOGY: In this paper, we conducted a systematic mapping of the literature on AAL platforms to investigate the correlation between these three paradigms. We focused on AAL platforms that use IoT and Cloud Computing concepts to meet their requirements. Our primary research question is "What are the requirements of AAL platforms in the IoT Era and their relationship with IoT standards?". We defined as the scope of our systematic mapping the primary studies about AAL platforms published between 2013 to 2017, and we used seven indexed electronic databases. RESULTS: We obtained 35 papers whose AAL platforms developed using IoT or Cloud Computing standards. We then analyse and correlate the requirements, architectures, and evaluation types presented by these platforms. We found patterns by connecting specific requirements with platform design. We believe these results assist AAL developers and architectural designers in the creation of new AAL platforms and applications.

E-health can be defined as a set of health-related computing solutions that uses the Internet to provide services. In these systems, managing the sharing of the various types of generated data is a challenge, making it difficult to develop and maintain. A software intensive system is a system in which software essentially influences the design, construction, deployment, and evolution of the system as a whole to encompass individual applications, subsystems, systems of systems, and aggregations of interest. Blockchain has emerged as a solution to provide privacy and data security, providing interesting solutions for E-health applications. The objective of this work is to present architectural and behavioral aspects of E-health systems, using Blockchain. In addition, some research opportunities are also presented.

With the increase in the volume of computer networks usage, effective management is becoming increasingly difficult. Software Defined Networks (SDN) have emerged to address this situation. The objective of this work is to demonstrate the benefits of using SDN control policies through load balancing strategies in accessing servers. For this, we developed multiple access tests on servers submitted directly to the control access provided by the manager, demonstrating how different algorithms can affect the quality of bandwidth and latency in a structure with limited servers. The algorithms evaluated were Round-Robin, Random and Least-Bandwidth. The results indicated that Round-Robin behaved better than the other access scales in environments with limited servers, and the algorithm that used the least trafficked link showed better scalability when managing multiple servers and requisitions.

Brazil is the largest country in South America and the fifth largest country in the world by territorial area, with a population of over 210 million according to the official projection of the IBGE research institute for the year 2019. With this vastness territorial and population, country management becomes a task that requires a degree of responsibility and competence from elected managers. However, there are several unfinished and abandoned works that waste public resources that could be invested financially in areas such as education, security and health. Given this, this article presents the process of developing an application that favors its users, the ease of becoming an inspector of unfinished or abandoned public works.

Internet of Things (IoT), is an area that has been growing exponentially lately, gaining market share and increasing investment due to its potential for use in many areas. IoT can be defined as a network of physical objects that can gather and transmit data over the internet. These objects can be controlled and monitored remotely, covering large distances and collecting a large amount of information in real time. Motivated by the potential in IoT products and services development, the market has promoted changes that make it easier for those who want to invest in this area. This article will present the adaptation project of the Physical Computing Laboratory of the Systems and Digital Media course to meet the curricular demands of teaching, research and extension in the development of IoT technologies.

Due to the growth of urbanization, cities have faced social, economic and environmental transformations. In addition, many vehicles currently have several sensors and actuators, capable of performing not only the sensing of the condition of vehicles, but also the environment around them, and this data can be used for various services. The environment of a large university may resemble urban environments, considering that these institutions compare to cities in various aspects, especially in relation to infrastructure problems. The objective of this work is to develop a solution for the monitoring and prediction of bus stops in university transportation. Tests were performed with six online and offline machine learning algorithms in order to analyze which algorithm is most efficient based on the fixed metrics. The best algorithm presented an absolute prediction error of 20 seconds, which shows the quality of the generated final model.

Given the advance of the Smart Grid technology, the electrical grid is now in a process of transformation never seen in history. This new grid model allows customers and providers to generate and manage electrical power efficiently. To support such transformation, a key element of the model is the communication network responsible for delivering measurement data from sensors on the grid to the applications that analyze and adapt distribution according to demands. This work proposes and evaluates a system architecture that copes with reliability and latency demands that are of much importance for a successful Smart Grid deployment, also considering the internal design of distributed applications in the context of Smart Grids. The architecture adopts a Mobile Edge Computing based infrastructure that is suitable for 4G and 5G mobile cellular networks. Experiments made on NS-3 shows that the proposed system architecture is capable of handling a realistic number of smart meters while providing low latency and network reliability, supporting many use cases of a Smart Grid deployment.

Hybrid computational clouds are considered an interesting choice in the usage of computational resources in terms of elasticity. However, proper management of elasticity is necessary because computational resources can be provisioned inefficiently, resulting in idle or waste. This paper proposes an evaluation of the elasticity effects on a hybrid cloud environment. As the main result, we found that the elasticity keeps the quality level set to meet the applications running in the hybrid cloud with different workloads.

Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged due to several advances in microelectronics and wireless communication technologies. IoT can be considered as a set of small devices, called smart objects, capable of monitor and act in the environment in which they are inserted. Many research has come up from IoT, such as precision farming, smart cities, healthcare, and wearable. In IoT domain, healthcare has been highlight due to the growing demand of the population for monitoring people belonging to health risk groups. In this paper, we propose an approach for monitoring people who are part of risk groups, for example, sedentary people, using IoT technologies. Our approach monitors users' physiological data through wearable devices and sends this data to a computational cloud. In the cloud, these data are processed, stored and presented to the healthcare professional, who will monitor and establish new activities for the user. In our work, we built a mobile and web applications, and we used collected data from sensors and a dataset of health data.

Network Function Visualization (NFV) is transforming the market for computer networks. Most proposed NFV solutions have been implemented and tested in cloud computing environments. In this context, both hardware and software-based features have been used to improve the performance of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) by speeding up packet processing. However, there are still essential research challenges that need to be tackled to provide better performance experiences for NFV Services, such as detecting and diagnosing performance bottlenecks. However, due to the characteristics inherited from both Cloud and NFV environments, the detection and diagnose of performance problems is a complex task. In this work, we proposed PerfChecker, a monitoring tool that aims at detecting and diagnosing performance bottlenecks in Cloud-based NFV environments. We implemented a PerfChecker prototype for OpenStack and performed some experiments demonstrating that it can assist the cloud infrastructure operator to improve the performance of NFV services.

Software-intensive systems have become increasingly ubiquitous, large, and complex, with dissemination in several application domains and tightly dependent upon different technologies. Such systems are usually centered in a software platform so that increasing attention has been paid to influence and interdependency in relationships among all the involved players, forming software ecosystems (SECO). Despite the initial advances in SECO research, few analytical models, case studies with real data, and integrated tool support exist. A great barrier for the evolution of the field towards aiding decision-making in the real industry is the gap lack in theof SECO modeling support. In this paper, we aim to perform an exploratory study on the need for modeling in the SECO field. We preliminarily identified some modeling elements from the SECO literature and explored them in the context of a real SECO in the educational domain.

Apply theory and practice is usually a difficult task to lead in undergraduate courses. Generally disciplines involving development projects are used as an attempt to minimize this difficulty. One way of conducting this kind of discipline is defining a development methodology to be applied. This paper aims to present an approach based on design thinking to develop products and services that involve software, aligned with the best practices of Software Engineering. An assessment of the approach was carried out with students of the discipline, concluding that its use contributed to improve communication, documentation and projects monitoring.

In this paper, we present a proposal of a recommendation tool for creating collaborative image stories called Story-Motion. This system will allow users to put their images and photos together in a single story, performed in a semiautomatic way. Any users are free to continue the story as they want, though they can not change what has already been put into it. By doing so, StoryMotion gives its users freedom on the creation process at the same time as it guarantees the authorship of each participant in the story. This can lead to stories that comprehend scopes such as Education, Tourism and Politics. Throughout this paper, it will be described our motivations and theoretical foundation that led to projecting StoryMotion, how our prototype works, its major components and experimental evaluation. After presenting a brief overview of related works, we discuss about our research findings and future work.

Nowadays cloud computing continues its consolidation, both for technologies virtualization as for platforms development and application availability. These environments are naturally distributed and constituted by many types of software and hardware features, serving a broad range of customers with different requirements. A type of service that has had its use increasingly demanded is the processing of multimedia applications, such as audio and video. This type of service is characterized by different QoS, network and devices requirements, which fits well to cloud computing environments. Many applications or music service providers are available, both for web applications and mobile devices, such as Spotify, Deezer and Last.fm. Non-exclusive applications for music, but also videos, like YouTube and Netflix, are also widely employed by users of multimedia services. This paper describes and discusses an architecture for the implementation and development of computer music services in a cloud computing environment.

Currently, due to ease of acquisition of mobile devices and their increasing processing power and storage, many applications in various areas and services have been developed. With access to information held by Internet, many data and research institutions are accessible in repositories in popular formats and they are made available for use by users and developers, such as the Brazilian Portal of Open Data. Due to the transport area is a recurring theme in the Brazilian daily, causing many disorders in big cities, we focus in the the vehicle fleet visualization of Brazilian capital. In this sense, this article aims to propose an application for mobile devices, called cARFleet, to open data visualization. In the application were incorporated features of augmented reality for better visualization and differentiation of the tool.

Cloud computing is a trend of technology aimed at providing on-demand services with payment based on usage. Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are applications that require a highly scalable architecture that provides for its users an acceptable level of Quality of Service (QoS). This work aims to show the steps needed to install a VLE in a cloud computing infrastructure. The VLE's migration to this new type of execution environment allows the increase of its use but also brings some performance issues that must be considered. The case study will consider the Moodle VLE which was chosen for its widespread use.

The search for better execution times was one of the motivations for the emergence of High Performance Computing (HPC) whose importance has obtained significative preponderance in the domain of scientific computing, either in applications for an academic or industrial environment. Cloud Computing proposes the integration of various technological models for the provision of a hardware infrastructure, development platforms and applications as services based on-demand. However, with the emergence of cloud computing, a new challenge arose which was to allow the execution of HPC applications in this new environment. This paper aims to demonstrate the feasibility of using a local cluster built on a private cloud for HPC experiments, and compare with applications running in a real environment for HPC.