With this edition, the volume 16 of Sistemas & Telemática ―conformed by the issues 44 to 47, quarterly published during 2018―, is completed. It is the time to express our thankfulness to the authors, for considering S&T as their means to disclose their work, and to the reviewers, for their dedication in the evaluation and feedback received of all the works. For everyone who sent an article and their work was not selected or they are in adjustment process, S&T really appreciate their work and confidence; from our side, we know it is not pleasant to receive a no —or a large amount of observations— as an answer, but all of this is not only a part of this process, it is probably the essential within it. And of course, thank you to the scientific community who uses what S&T publishes on their own works.

It has been a special year, a though one since the editorial decision of the Colombian academy has moved in an unfavorable environment, full of disincentives from the ones who should offer the opposite; as a compensation, we have seen a large support from the outside. Entities such as Redylac and Redib are still supporting —or better, they have increased their bet— for the open diffusion and availability for everyone of science in Ibero-America and the knowledge generated by all of us. We applaud that emphatically. Their support has been —at least for us— magnificent and we have learned many useful things from them. One of the most positive things we highlight is that we have increased significantly the participation of external authors. From the 54 people who wrote in this volume, only 7 are from Colombian institutions, and the numbers of the reviewers are pretty similar.

Getting back to the subject, this issue opens with a work performed by researchers from the South Asian University (New Delhi, India). It is a state of the art reviewing deeply the authentication techniques based on tokens of open source platforms operated under the cloud computing paradigm. The current relevance of this topic does not deserve a broader discussion; cloud computing is not a novel paradigm anymore. This caused that its growing entailed higher risks derived from the unauthorized access possibilities for data, affecting the privacy of people. The article is focused on the use of techniques based on tokens, an option offering larger simplicity and agility in the operations, but it also presents risks necessary to mitigate.

The issue continues with an application of machine learning techniques to sports. Researchers from the Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas del Ecuador report the results of an investigation pointed to support the athletes’ selection process with probability to become high performance ones. The research was made with a database of the Ecuadorian Tae Kwon Do federation by using the “wrapper” and “embedded” methods and the Decision Trees and Support Vector Machine algorithms. The authors expect that their results can be extrapolated to another disciplines.

Next paper in this edition is an article prepared by researchers from two Cuban entities, the Territorial Research Station of the Sugarcane (ETICA, Estación Territorial de Investigaciones de la Caña de Azúcar) and the Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas. Their work is focused on the precision agriculture field and it is applied to a sugarcane crop. It entailed the development of a procedure to obtain and process multispectral images gathered from a drone in order to obtain vegetation indexes; these indexes can be correlated with more or less vegetal strength, the number of stalks, or the plants foliar mass in each parcel. This allowed not only higher precision in the crop care, but also a better resource usage.

The issue finalizes with a work related with the industrial sector, focused on the implementation of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system integrating the generation groups and electrical substation of the Cayo Santa María isolated power supply system located in Cuba. Authors also designed a communications network between the technological objectives at the physical level, they configured a report system with the most relevant measurements and they also coded a web client for monitoring the SCADA parameters from the corporate network. The first results of this work show concrete benefits to the electrical systems.