We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Section “Network Virtualization and Edge/Fog Computing”. We look forward to his contributions to Future Internet (ISSN: 1999-5903).

Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista is a full professor of distributed and mobile systems at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI), Alma Mater Studiorum—Università di Bologna.

His primary research interests relate to middleware for mobile computing, Internet of Things platforms, efficient integrations of sensors–edge–cloud, edge/fog computing, mobile pervasive applications for Industry 4.0, and smart cities/communities.

In addition to national/EU project participation (he is currently the scientific coordinator of the H2020 IoTwins project—https://www.iotwins.eu/) and publication activities, among the notable services for his community, he is Editor-in-Chief of the MDPI journal Computers (since 2017), Section Editor-in-Chief of MDPI’s Future Internet, and member of the Editorial Boards of IEEE Communication Surveys and Tutorials (since 2019), ACM Computing Surveys (since 2020), IEEE Transactions on Computers (2011-2015), IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (since 2011), IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (2008-2017), IEEE Communications Magazine (2003-2011), Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal (since 2010), Elsevier’s Journal on Network and Computing Applications (since 2015), Springer’s Journal of Network and Systems Management (since 2008), and MDPI’s Sensors (since 2017).

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista, who shared his vision for the journal with us, as well as his views of the research area and open access publishing:

1. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to take the role as its Section Editor-in-Chief?
Future Internet is a journal with a very interesting and exciting focus, with growing visibility and relevance in the international community of researchers and practitioners in the field. I was very happy to have the opportunity to contribute to it, also with my new role as "Network Virtualization and Edge/Fog Computing" Section Editor-in-Chief. This new Section represents a technically challenging, intriguing, and extremely active research sub-field these days, with enormous potential in terms of both novel methodologies/models/algorithms/middleware and innovative efficient applications of it.

2. What is your vision for the journal?
This new Section of the journal has the ambition to become an international reference point for researchers working on future Internet aspects of virtualization and cloud continuum. It will be the home for original technical proposals at the methodological/modeling/algorithmic level, for the presentation of novel middleware and infrastructures of solution (with simulation and experimental evidence of successful deployment), and for the discussion of real application cases and associated performance results about efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability, as well as the home for survey/tutorial papers about emerging trends in the field.

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?
Network virtualization and edge/fog computing will be the center of the future Internet world that we are building. This is pushed not only by technical motivations (reduction in costs, softwarization trends, efficiency, sustainability, and scalability, among others), but also by economical and strategic ones, e.g., increased sovereignty on data and distributed cloud continuum infrastructures. Technically supporting these evolutionary lines with high efficiency and quality control is the most relevant technical challenge for the near future of this field of research.

4. What do you think of the development of open access in the publishing field?
Flexibility and variety of opportunities are a must for future publications. In this variegated and multi-publisher scenario, a very relevant role is played by open access, which guarantees maximum democratic access to research results, crucial for open innovation, and not only this. In addition, it is important to highlight that the future Internet is and will be a very relevant research area also in terms of public funding, which by design requires public results of publicly funded research to be maximally accessible to all citizens and interested stakeholders. Additionally, in this perspective, Future Internet can play a relevant role for the community in the field.

We wish Prof. Dr. Paolo Bellavista every success in his new position, and we look forward to his contributions to the journal.