Social Sensing Applications in Edge Computing Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Social sensing applications are spreading in many different domains. Basically, such applications exploit the social sensing paradigm, a promising sensing approach where humans and devices acting on their behalf collect data, process information, and extract knowledge from the physical world, improving the quality of our lives. This enables an accurate and efficient way to perceive the human being (health checking and reporting using everyday wearable devices and smartphones, contact tracing, etc.) and the surrounding environment (self-reporting of traffic conditions, public safety, etc.). To fulfill their objectives, social sensing applications usually rely on cloud “backends” to perform the heaviest computations, hence neglecting the day-by-day increase of computing power available on our personal devices (AI chips, GPUs, multi-processors, etc.). Indeed, the social sensing paradigm could be mixed with the edge computing paradigm, to push heavy tasks towards the edge of the network and along the cloud-to-thing continuum. This would bring many technological advantages, for instance in terms of a better quality of service, higher privacy, higher reliability, and user engagement.

However, for the successful integration of these computation paradigms, several research challenges need to be tackled, the most urgent being related to resource management (resource sharing among different devices, local resource usage vs. quality of service), heterogeneity (different hardware platforms, runtimes, and networking), privacy and security, robustness and reliability (adaptation to dynamic environments), and cooperativeness (some devices may be more selfish and not want to share resources). This Special Issue welcomes both original papers and thorough surveys witnessing the advantages of empowering social sensing applications with edge computing processes and core functionalities. Envisioned application domains include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Human-centric and human-in-the-loop applications;
• Wearables and eHealth;
• Collaborative smart-city scenarios;
• Emergency and disaster management;
• Media streaming and sharing;
• AI-as-a-service and edge intelligence for social sensing;
• Networking-as-a-service for social sensing

Prof. Dr. Massimo Vecchio
Prof. Pietro Ducange
Dr. Charith Perera
Dr. Mattia Antonini
Dr. Jacek Wodecki
Guest Editors

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