Internet of People and situated computing

The new term Internet of People (IoP) has been predicted as the next wave of information and communications technologies (ICT) after the widely accepted smartphones market. Some has estimated that more than 55 billion of IoP devices could be sold in 2025 and our future life might be surrounded by a lot of IoP devices. The success of IoP will heavily rely on the virtuous cycle of innovations from cloud computing, to broadband networks, to big data, and to smart but lightweight devices. Notwithstanding, there are many challenges to meet, in order to have the IoP smarter. The most complicated and at the same time challenging paradigm is the situated computing that highly relies on users’ physical contexts and objects’ interactions to provide services, being projected as a future growth area in both academia and industry. This special issue aims at presenting the current state-ofthe-art research and future trends on various aspects of IoP technologies. It combines the emerging mobile communications and IoP paradigms, in a common research ground, in order to present various research concepts. The major subjects of this special issue cover methodologies, modelling, analysis of human behavior and activities, newly introduced communication technologies and applications, as well as computational intelligence for ambient assisted living. Papers selected for this special issue represent recent progresses in the field, including works on M2M communication, information security, mobile social networks, machine learning. All of these papers not only provide novel ideas and state-of-the-art techniques in the field, but also stimulate future research in the sustainable environment.