2017 - Special Issue on Multimedia Cloud Computing for Smarter Cities

Smarter Cities promote an instrumented, inter-connected and intelligent urban ‘Systems of Systems’ to improve the quality of life of citizens by providing healthcare, transportation, public safety, energy and various other smarter services. Multimedia plays a vital role in the smarter cities eco-system due to huge presence of multimodal sensors and smart objects in the environment, increased multimedia collaboration among different organizations, and real-time media sharing between socially-connected people. Consequently, high volume of sensorial media, social media, M2M data, IoT data, open data, and mobile phone data become available in smarter cities, which need effective processing, analysis, and sharing in order to make them useful by the citizens, city government, and businesses. The capture, process and analysis of such media data require rich pool of on-demand resources, massive computation capability, and scalable infrastructure that are hardly supported by traditional multimedia computing facilities. Cloud computing fits well as an enabling technology in this scenario as it provides a flexible stack of computing, storage and software services at low cost. As a result, we are witnessing a paradigm shift toward multimedia cloud computing (MCC), where the computationally-intensive components of multimedia systems, services and applications are moving onto the cloud, and the end user’s mobile device is being used as an interface for accessing those services. Thus, MCC helps to solve several issues related to multimedia computing that are contributing to the realization of smarter cities.
Despite the many benefits and opportunities MCC offers for building smarter cities, there are several research and technical challenges that need attention from the research community. Some of these challenges include: How to develop rich and real-time media cloud applications for smart cities? How cloud can provide quality of service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services while performing distributed multimedia processing? What are the best strategies for dynamic resource allocation given the huge volume of multimedia data? How to effectively integrate different systems of systems on MCC for smarter cities? How to optimize cloud infrastructure and server distribution for different multimedia analysis tasks needed for smarter cities? In general, this special issue seeks original research papers providing insights into smart city needs, processes, services, applications, and frameworks using MCC.
Specific topics of interest include, but not limited to, the following:
-- Cloud-based multimedia computing framework for smarter city
-- Efficient capturing, processing, and streaming of sensor data in the cloud
-- Sensor-web and sensor-cloud infrastructures for smarter city
-- Cloud multimedia service discovery, management and scheduling in smarter city
-- City-scale multimedia processing and analysis over the cloud platform
-- On-demand cloud resource allocation for smart city services ?
-- Multimedia cloud computing for smart city healthcare
-- Cloud-based publish-subscribe system for smarter city
-- Sensing and aggregation of multimodal data in smart city cloud
-- Cloud support for situation awareness and decision making in smarter city
-- Mobile and social cloud computing techniques and approaches in smarter city
-- Integration of multimedia systems-of-systems on smarter city cloud
-- Multimedia IoT-Cloud services for smarter city
-- Cloud-based media recommendation in smarter city
-- QoE/QoS/QoI in cloud-based multimedia services for smarter city
-- Cloud-based real-time surveillance and monitoring in smarter city
-- Security and privacy in cloud-based smarter city services
-- Emerging multimedia cloud services and applications for smarter city
Submission Guidelines
Papers submitted to this special issue for possible publication must be original and must not be under consideration for publication in any other journal or conference. If the submission is an extended version of a previously published workshop or conference paper, this should also be explicitly mentioned in the cover letter, as well as the published paper must be cited in the submitted journal version. The papers must be written in English and must not exceed 30 pages (single column, double space, 12 pt font, including figures, tables, and references).Authors must follow the formatting and submission instructions of MMSJ at http://www.springer.com/530 and follow the "Submit Online" link on that page. Please make sure you mention in your cover letter that you are submitting to this special issue.
Important Dates:
-- Submission deadline: October 1, 2016
-- First-round notification: December 15, 2016
-- Revision submission: January 15, 2017
-- Final notification: February 28, 2017
-- Final paper submission: March 15, 2017
-- Publication date: 1 st or 2nd quarter of 2017 (tentative)
Guest Editors
M. Anwar Hossain
King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA; mahossain-AT-ksu.edu.sa
Hussein Al Osman
University of Ottawa, Canada; halosman-AT-uottawa.ca
Wen-Huang Cheng
Academia Sinica, Taiwan; whcheng-AT-citi.sinica.edu.tw
Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
University of Ottawa, Canada; elsaddik-AT-uottawa.ca