MCSC 2013 - The First International Workshop on Mobile Cloud and Social Computing (MCSC 2013)

Wireless mobile networks, smart phones and cloud computing are converging into the new, rapidly growing field of mobile cloud computing (MCC) enabling the availability of cloud computing services in a mobile ecosystem. Current cloud computing architecture, platforms and services need to evolve, by taking into consideration the specific features of mobile networks that are different from those of fixed IP networks, to better serve cloud applications operating over mobile wireless networks and on mobile devices. Apart from investigating into the mobile IaaS framework, which provides fundamental, infrastructure-level support to MCC, SaaS (software as a service) is particularly attractive to mobile applications. This is because a SaaS can free resource-constrained mobile devices from having many applications installed and executed on them. On a wider spectrum, any enabling technologies that come along with a more user-customized and mobile-device-friendly cloud environment would be of the interest of this workshop. These technologies may concern various mobile devices including not only smart phones and tablets but also wirelessly connected sensors. Issues may include service engineering aspects such as cloud service/application creation, deployment, adaptation, discovery and management and also networking aspects such as bandwidth, delay, security among a massive number of cloud-ready devices.
In the meanwhile, widely spread social networks are also getting into end user’s mobile phones by offering more customized services with a particular aid of user’s context information (e.g. location information), thus rendering the so called mobile social networks. The massive information available on social networks provides good source for human-based computing or social computing. Outsourcing is an active branch of social computing, which usually makes use of web tools to collect the wisdom of a group of distributed people (or crowd) and then aggregate them into a more complete and accurate conclusion on a certain task. Nowadays, with smart devices getting as pervasive as the web, outsourcing can take place in a more mobile, location-aware and thus more realistic world.
There is also a trend of utilizing cloud computing technologies to enable more efficient and cost-effective mobile social computing. The goal of this workshop is to provide a venue to bring together researchers and practitioners in these two extremely active and rather related areas to highlight and systematically address the arising challenges. The workshop welcomes contributions from both academia and industry to disseminate state-of-the-art concepts and techniques in all aspects of mobile cloud computing, mobile social computing and their integration. Communication and network aspects relating to these computing technologies are also important, particularly with emphasis on mobility and dependability.
Topics of Interest
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Computing issues in mobile cloud such as overall system architecture, protocols, algorithms relating to VM (Virtual Machine) selection, migration, scheduling.
Networking issues in mobile cloud such as network routing, resource allocation, scheduling, quality of services
Cross-layer issues in mobile cloud computing and networking such as network-aware cloud and cloud-aware wireless networks
Heterogeneous wireless infrastructure for mobile cloud computing
Media cloud over wireless networks
Implications, opportunities and challenges of social computing caused by mobile wireless networks and smart mobile devices and their technical solutions
Crowdsourcing in mobile environment
Sensing for mobile computing
Network-aware modelling, design and development of mobile social networks
Network-aware social search, data collection, processing, ranking and recommendation
Network-aware middleware, framework for mobile cloud or mobile social computing systems
New aspects of security, privacy and trust in mobile cloud and social computing
Mobile cloud and/or mobile social systems for Internet of Things
Energy efficiency in mobile cloud and/or mobile social computing systems and networks
Testing and evaluation tools
End-to-end performance evaluation and quality of experience
Prototype systems, real-world deployment experiences, and standardization