Analyzing and visual programming internet of things and autonomous decentralized systems

The development of Internet of Things, fueled by cloud computing and big data processing from upper level, and by ubiquitous sensory and actuator devices from the lower level, has taken a sharp turn towards integrating the entire information, computing, communication, and control systems. This special issue selected seven papers from the 2015 IEEE twelfth International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ISADS). These papers cover the latest research on IoT and ADS based system science and system engineering methods; the wearable sensor network development and applications; and data analysis for security and reliability in IoT and ADS applications. As an addition to these selected topics, this guest editorial paper also adds IoT education and dissemination aspects to this special issue. As the IoT research and applications expand explosively into all the domains, schools and universities must prepare students to understand and to be able to program the IoT devices. This paper presents a visual programming environment that allows students without programming background to learn the key concepts of computing and IoT devices, and to program IoT devices into different application systems.