Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems

 

Special Issue on: "Modelling of Emerging Internet Services: Social Networks and Crowdsourcing"

Guest Editors:
Dr. Tobias Hoßfeld and Prof. Dr. Phuoc Tran-Gia, University of Würzburg, Germany

In recent decades the Internet has changed dramatically both in an economic way and in a technical way. By implementing new paradigms, it has evolved from a simple collection of websites providing pure information towards a services and applications platform.

The rise of the peer-to-peer paradigm led to new applications and services which allowed Internet users to share files and user-generated content amongst each other. Later on, the application of the Web 2.0 paradigm empowered Internet users to become application and service developers themselves. Examples of this new generation of websites are blogs, wikis and media-sharing platforms. Thereby users are connected to each other by means of social networks creating new paths for communication and the sharing of information. Prominent examples of such social media networks are Facebook or YouTube.

Today, a newly emerging service platform and business model on the Internet has been established by the crowdsourcing paradigm. In contrast to outsourcing, where a job is performed by a designated worker or employee, crowdsourcing refers to outsourcing a job to a large, anonymous crowd of workers, the so-called human cloud, in the form of an open call. This human cloud is abstracted by a crowdsourcing platform, which distributes the work submitted by an employer amongst human worker resources and acts as mediator between worker and employer. The crowdsourcing paradigm is dramatically changing the future of work and work organisation on the Internet. Work is organised at finer granularity and jobs are split into cheap micro-tasks which can be quickly performed by the human cloud.

Due to increasing interest in social networks and crowdsourcing, there is a lot of ongoing research in this area. However, there are a lot of open research issues. The impact of social networks and crowdsourcing platforms on future Internet traffic is still unknown. Due to the size of these networks and human clouds, these platforms will significantly change Internet traffic in a similar manner to Facebook or other social media networks. Thus it is an important telecommunications priority to model and analyse these communication platforms and evolving complex networks, for example the dynamics and growth of social media networks and crowdsourcing platforms.

Within this context, this Special Issue focuses on the modelling of emerging Internet platforms, in particular social networks and crowdsourcing platforms.

Subject Coverage
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Measurement, modelling and analysis of social networks
• Characterisation and evolution of network topologies and interaction networks
• Detection of user communities and user interactions
• Inference of topology, friend relationships or interactions in social networks
• Population models and structural models for network dynamics
• Measurement methods and approximation techniques, e.g. sampling
• Properties of complex networks, appropriate complex networks metrics
• Information diffusion and epidemic spreading
• Opinion formation and consensus, community formation, collective decisions
• Bio-inspired and socio-physical models
• Measurement, modelling and analysis of crowdsourcing
• Evolution of crowdsourcing platforms, trends, e.g. mobile crowdsourcing
• Use cases for crowdsourcing, e.g. for enterprises or in mobile domains
• Modelling the granularity of work, key components of crowdsourcing
• Modelling and analysis of the human cloud and individual user behaviour
• Models from different perspectives: platform operator, employer, worker
• Quality, cost and completion times of crowdsourcing jobs
• Modelling quality assurance mechanisms, incentive mechanisms
• Classification models for jobs and campaigns, skills and experience of workers
• Modelling recommendation systems and their impact

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page

Important Dates

Full papers due: 30 September, 2011

Notification of acceptance: 30 November, 2011

Final papers due: 15 January, 2012