Preface

      This book has been written as an introductory text to cyber‐physical systems conceptualized as a scientific object in itself. The decision to move in this direction was based on my subjective experience of the objective reality of engineering education and academic research, very often overspecialized and too modular. I tried to go beyond such a reductionist view by making evident the complex articulations that constitute cyber‐physical systems as such, as well as the necessary relations to the external world in which they are – or will be – deployed, being them physical or social. My advise to anyone who wants to learn or teach from this book is (i) to follow the chapters in the order they are presented, (ii) do the proposed exercises, and (iii) keep the mind open to understand the articulation of concepts that define the presented theory. Only in this way, the reader or educator can fully enjoy the strength of the theory as the basis of a methodological framework for practical interventions.

      The history of the manuscript is the following. The very first, preliminary version of the manuscript‐to‐be was presented as tutorial notes in the 2017 International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems in Bologna (Italy). Then, this tutorial text was extended to become the lecture notes of a completely new course I had the freedom to develop at LUT as soon as I moved from the University of Oulu to LUT in 2018; the course is called Introduction of IoT‐based Systems. In 2020, I decided to convert those notes into a real book, which Wiley kindly accepted to publish.

I would like to acknowledge all the colleagues with whom I have discussed topics related to this book that in some way or another have helped to shape it, specially the friends at LUT University (Finland), the University of Oulu (Finland), and the University of Campinas (Brazil). Among those persons some deserve special praise, namely (i) Dr. Hanna Niemelä – an associate professor at LUT – for proofreading the whole manuscript and also giving suggestions, (ii) Arthur Sena, M.Sc. – a doctoral student at LUT – for drawing so many figures and helping me in some technical parts of the book, (iii) Dr. Alysson Mascaro – professor of philosophy of law at the University of São Paulo, Brazil – for guiding my studies in critical Marxist philosophy, in particular Althusser, and (iv) Dr. Harun Siljak – assistant professor of embedded systems, optimization and control in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland – for sharing so many ideas about cyber‐physical systems, cybernetics, and information theory (mostly in a revolutionary way). I would also like to thank Dr. Florian Kühnlenz, who at some point in 2014 talked with me about one of my schematic handmade drafts that were randomly placed on my messy table and a few days later presented to me quite an interesting simulation where he implemented those ideas. This was the beginning of his doctoral research at the University of Oulu, which ended up motivating me to dig into the conceptualization of cyber‐physical systems that is now presented