Online Social Networks and Media (OSNEM) are one of the most disruptive communication platforms of the last 15 years with high socio-economic value. Nowadays, OSNEM are regularly used by billions of users to interact, and they are key platforms for (among others) content and opinion dissemination, social and professional networking, recommendations, scouting, alerting, and political campaigns. The use of social technologies has become a sweeping cultural, social and economic phenomenon. Social platforms can exploit the "cognitive surplus" of our society for creating content and support collaboration.
Moreover, the widespread diffusion of mobile personal devices (smartphones and tablets) is boosting the pervasive use of OSNEM services, as well as fostering the design of novel social networking services where users' mobility is one of the key features. OSNEM, thus, represent a challenging environment for computer scientists working in academia and industry, to develop innovative ideas, fostering the design of the new generation of communication platforms and their services. The pervasive penetration of OSNEM in our lives is having very significant impacts also on the type of OSNEM services and, more in general, on societal services. The digital footprints that people leaves in OSNEM provide a unique source to investigate and understand (by exploiting data mining and machine learning techniques) people's behavior (e.g., mobility patterns, opinions and interests spreading), and human relationships in the society. OSNEM can thus become a (social) microscope for understanding the human behavior both in the cyber and in the physical world and hence can be a powerful tool for investigating societal phenomena (the epidemics spreading, the terrorist networks, the diffusion of opinions, the pulse of a city, etc.) and develop innovative services.
OSNEM is a peer-reviewed international journal that publishes high-quality scientific articles (both theoretical and experimental) and survey papers covering all aspects of OSNEM: from OSNEM protocols and applications to the use of data mined from OSNEM for modeling and understanding the human behavior in the cyber-physical world. It is a multidisciplinary journal for the wide community of computer and network scientists working on developing OSNEM platforms and services and using OSNEM as a big data source to mine, learn and model the (online) human behavior. The journal also welcomes contributions applying a wide range of (computer- and network-science) techniques and tools to OSNEM for investigating how social relationships affect other scientific fields, e.g., social and political sciences, economic and financial sciences, medical sciences.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
OSNEM platforms, protocols and applications;
Decentralized, mobile and location-based OSNEM;
Trust, reputation, privacy and security in OSNEM;
Dynamics of trends, information and opinion diffusion in OSNEM;
Recommendations and advertising in OSNEM;
Measurement, analysis and modeling of popular online social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, etc.);
Data mining, and machine learning in OSNEM systems;
Social media analysis and social analytics;
Information extraction and search in OSNEM;
Complex-network analysis of OSNEM;
Measurement, analysis and modeling of social behavior through OSNEM data;
Analysis of the use of OSNEM in the urban context;
Crowdsourcing and online social networks;
Multidisciplinary applications of OSNEM (economics, medicine, society, politics, homeland security, etc.).
