ACM Springer Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET) Journal Special Issue on Mobility and Social Networks Confluence

Mobile devices, wearables and wireless sensor networks have been lately used to monitor and sense real world. On one hand, processing of information that has been sensed in the real world has been used for a wide set of applications. These applications include detection of human activities, environmental and urban state monitoring, estimation of healthcare conditions, proximity and concentrations of people, epidemic trends, network and routing planning and other natural and human-generated situations describing aspects of the physical world. On the other hand, the evolution of the web in terms of user-generated content, crowd sourcing and the proliferation of online social networks have generated tremendous amount of information, describing dynamic interaction among people and their surroundings in both, digital (online) and real worlds, making people-generated information to become a new type of virtual sensor. In this respect, the amount of information available from the connected world, either belonging to virtual or to physical sources, can describe aspects of reality in a detailed manner if both sources are combined. The kind of dynamics that the integration of digital and physical worlds may generate will have an impact at different levels, involving the human- social-environmental dimensions as well as at the network organization. In this regard, a set of novel research challenges will arise for dealing with such integration of information. This Special Issue intends to report advances on applications, methods and approaches envisioning to address the new challenges in this field.

Relevant topics This special issue envisions contributions highlighting the different challenges and opportunities involved in the integration of Mobile Sensing and Social Networking as a bridge between the real and digital worlds. Some relevant topics include:

• Mobility, geo-localization and social networks • Wireless sensor networks, mobile devices and social network sensing • System design implications of mixed physical and social network sensing • Correlation from real & virtual spaces and sensors • Searching the internet of things and social databases • Multi-source information integration • Models of real-virtual dynamics • Case studies and human factors in mixed worlds sensing and mining • Social metrics for network operation • Participatory mobile sensing, crowd sourcing and social media mining integration • Middleware for mobile, WSN and social networks • Web dynamics and grid/cloud computing • Security, privacy, reputation and trust in mixed online-physical worlds • Applications of mixed physical and social network sensing

Guest Editors: Oscar Mayora Ibarra Ryoichi Shinkuma CREATE-NET, Italy Kyoto University, Japan http://www.create-net.org/people/omayora http://cube.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shinkuma/

Schedule: Manuscript submission deadline: April 20th 2012 Notification of acceptance: June 15th 2012 Submission of final revised paper: July 13th, 2012 Publication of special issue: 4th Quarter, 2012 (Tentative)

Submission Procedure: Authors should follow the MONET Journal manuscript format described below at the journal site: http://www.springerlink.com/content/101750/ . Manuscripts should be submitted on line through http://mone.edmgr.com and select "Mobility and Social Networks Confluence" as the article type. A copy of the manuscript should also be emailed to the guest editors to the following emaill: omayora [at] create-net [dot] org. http://www.springer.com/journal/11036