Big Data Research for Social Sciences and Social Impact

Dear Colleagues,

Social good is generally an action or application that benefits society. In the past, it was usually driven by governments and non-profit organizations. With the advancement of social media via computer-mediated technologies like WeChat, WhatsApp, Weibo, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, billions of registered users utilize social interactions through social media. As a result, everyone can contribute to society easily and achieve social good.

Tremendous growth of digital information (from granular data to aggregated data) is available for numerous social sciences and social impact applications, for instance, environmental protection, healthcare and education. Data analytics are ubiquitous and purpose-oriented in different forms: Descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. Typical challenges for adopting big data technologies for social sciences and social impact are data handling and storage, data quality, computational power of computer, algorithm customization for special application and security. More importantly, it seems that the humans have an infinite need of utilizing the value of big data for social impact and thus applications on social good. We have to prioritize the applications and more research efforts will be devoted to more important issues.

This Special Issue aims to consolidate recent advances in big data for social good. Pilot studies and projects are especially welcome.

Topics of interest for this Special Issue include (but are not limited to):

• Innovative applications of data analytics to social sciences and social impact problems like energy, healthcare, education, food, poverty, injustice, and inequalities in society
• Machine learning algorithms for big data applications for social sciences and social impact
• Advanced techniques for handling unstructured, unlabeled and/or missing data
• Data quality control of big data for social good
• Big data research driven policy making for social impact
• Standardization for big data infrastructure and framework
• Big data implications to society
• Big data driven KPIs research for International Benchmarking
• Social inclusive economic development and growth through big data applications
• Human centric big data research
• Ethical issues on social research of big data
• Sustainability for social impact research
• Sustainable data-driven ecosystems for international collaboration
• Multi-objective optimization
• Meta-analysis
• Security and privacy
• Co-simulation

Prof. Anna Visvizi
Prof. Miltiadis D. Lytras
Dr. Kwok Tai Chui
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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