Content Gazette - September 2016 - 6

Call for Papers
IEEE Signal Processing Society
IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks
Special Issue on Distributed Information Processing in Social Networks
Over the past few decades, online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have significantly changed the way
people communicate and share information with each other. The opinion and behavior of each individual are heavily
influenced through interacting with others. These local interactions lead to many interesting collective phenomena
such as herding, consensus, and rumor spreading. At the same time, there is always the danger of mob mentality of
following crowds, celebrities, or gurus who might provide misleading or even malicious information. Many efforts
have been devoted to investigating the collective behavior in the context of various network topologies and the
robustness of social networks in the presence of malicious threats. On the other hand, activities in social networks
(clicks, searches, transactions, posts, and tweets) generate a massive amount of decentralized data, which is not only
big in size but also complex in terms of its structure. Processing these data requires significant advances in accurate
mathematical modeling and computationally efficient algorithm design.
Many modern technological systems such as wireless sensor and robot networks are virtually the same as social
networks in the sense that the nodes in both networks carry disparate information and communicate with constraints.
Thus, investigating social networks will bring insightful principles on the system and algorithmic designs of many
engineering networks. An example of such is the implementation of consensus algorithms for coordination and
control in robot networks. Additionally, more and more research projects nowadays are data-driven. Social networks
are natural sources of massive and diverse big data, which present unique opportunities and challenges to further
develop theoretical data processing toolsets and investigate novel applications. This special issue aims to focus on
addressing distributed information (signal, data, etc.) processing problems in social networks and also invites
submissions from all other related disciplines to present comprehensive and diverse perspectives.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Dynamic social networks: time varying network topology, edge weights, etc.

Social learning, distributed decision-making, estimation, and filtering

Consensus and coordination in multi-agent networks

Modeling and inference for information diffusion and rumor spreading

Multi-layered social networks where social interactions take place at different scales or modalities

Resource allocation, optimization, and control in multi-agent networks

Modeling and strategic considerations for malicious behavior in networks

Social media computing and networking

Data mining, machine learning, and statistical inference frameworks and algorithms for handling big data
from social networks

Data-driven applications: attribution models for marketing and advertising, trend prediction,
recommendation systems, crowdsourcing, etc.

Other topics associated with social networks: graphical modeling, trust, privacy, engineering applications,
etc.
Important Dates:

Manuscript submission due: September 15, 2016

First review completed: November 1, 2016

Revised manuscript due: December 15, 2016

Second review completed: February 1, 2017

Final manuscript due: March 15, 2017

Publication: June 1, 2017
Guest Editors:

Zhenliang Zhang, Qualcomm Corporate R&D (zhenlian@qti.qualcomm.com)

Wee Peng Tay, Nanyang Technological University (wptay@ntu.edu.sg)

Moez Draief, Imperial College London (m.draief@imperial.ac.uk)

Xiaodong Wang, Columbia University (xw2008@columbia.edu)

Edwin K. P. Chong, Colorado State University (edwin.chong@colostate.edu)

Alfred O. Hero III, University of Michigan (hero@eecs.umich.edu)

www.signalprocessingsociety.org

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SEPTEMBER 2016
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Content Gazette - September 2016
