The Call for this Special Issue received a number of submissions. After a two-phase review process we accepted ten high quality papers. This includes one research survey paper that gives an interesting overview of the privacy aspects in cyber physical social environments. The other papers are related to scheduling algorithms and techniques for CPS-DS workflow applications.@en

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the latest Internet evolution that incorporates billions of sensors, actuators, and related software services that collectively distill high value information, perform actions that affect the physical world, and support a variety of applications controlled by different organizations and individuals. IoT's ability to observe and affect the physical world presents a unprecedented opportunity for creating IoT-based smart services and products that address grant challenges in emerging opportunities in areas such as climate change, precision agriculture, smart health, advanced manufacturing, and smart cities. This special issue identifies and addresses some of the key issues that hinder the development of IoT-based solutions. It includes articles that present the latest innovations in IoT security and privacy, IoT data quality and analysis, IoT resources and task management, as well as examples of IoT-based application services and domains.

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In the era of the Internet of Things and social media; communities, governments, and corporations are increasingly eager to exploit new technological innovations in order to track and keep up to date with important new events. Examples of such events include the news, health related incidents, and other major occurrences such as earthquakes and landslides. This area of research commonly referred to as Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) is proving to be an important component of the current generation of Internet-based applications, where it is of critical importance to have early detection and timely response to important incidents such as those mentioned above. The advent of Big data though beneficial to TDT applications also brings about the enormous challenge of dealing with data variety, velocity and volume (3Vs). A promising solution is to employ Cloud Computing, which enables users to access powerful and scalable computational and storage resources in a “pay-as-you-go” fashion. However, the efficient use of Cloud resources to boost the performance of mission critical applications employing TDT is still an open topic that has not been fully and effectively investigated. An important prerequisite is to build a performance analysis capable of capturing and explaining specific factors (for example; CPU, Memory, I/O, Network, Cloud Platform Service, and Workload) that influence the performances of TDT applications in the cloud. Within this paper, our main contribution, is that we present a multi-layered performance analysis for big data TDT applications deployed in a cloud environment. Our analysis captures factors that have an important effect on the performance of TDT applications. The novelty of our work is that it is a first kind of vertical analysis on infrastructure, platform and software layers. We identify key parameters and metrics in each cloud layer (including Infrastructure, Software, and Platform layers), and establish the dependencies between these metrics across the layers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed analysis via experimental evaluations using real-world datasets obtained from Twitter.

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Workload scaling is an approach to accelerating computation and thus improving response times by replicating the exact same request multiple times and processing it in parallel on multiple nodes and accepting the result from the first node to finish. This is not unlike a TV game show, where the same question is given to multiple contestants and the (correct) answer is accepted from the first to respond. This is different than traditional strategies for parallelization as used in, say, MapReduce workloads, where each node runs a subset of the overall workload. There are a variety of strategies that trade off metrics such as cost, utilization, performance, and interprocessor communication requirements. Performance modeling can help determine optimal approaches for different environments and goals. This is important, because poor performance can lead to application and domain-specific losses, such as e-commerce conversions and sales.1 Performance modeling and analysis plays an important role in designing and driving the selection of resource scaling mechanisms. Such modeling and analysis is complex due to time-varying workload arrival rates and request sizes, and even more complex in cloud environments due to the additional stochastic variation caused by performance interference due to resource sharing across co-located tenants. Moreover, little is known on how to multi-scale, i.e. dynamically and simultaneously scale resources vertically, horizontally, and through workload scaling. In this article, we first demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-scaling in reducing latency, and then discuss the performance modeling challenges, particularly for workload scaling.@en