In the last decades, the Internet changed dramatically in an economic way, but also in a technical way. The Internet evolved from a simple collection of websites providing pure information towards a service and application platform by implementing new paradigms. The rise of the Peer-to-Peer paradigm led to new applications and services which allowed Internet users sharing files and user generated content among each others. Later on, the application of the Web 2.0 paradigm empowered Internet users to become application and service developer themselves. Examples of this new generation of websites are blogs, wikis or media-sharing platforms. Thereby, the users are connected to each other by means of social networks creating new path to communicate and share information. Prominent examples for such social media networks are Facebook or YouTube.

Nowadays, a newly emerging service platform and business model in the Internet is established by the crowdsourcing paradigm. In contrast to outsourcing, where a job is performed by a designated worker or employee, crowdsourcing means to outsource a job to a large, anonymous crowd of workers, the so-called human cloud, in the form of an open call. This human cloud is abstracted by a crowdsourcing platform, which distributes the work submitted by an employer among the human worker resources and acts as mediator between worker and employer. The crowdsourcing paradigm is changing dramatically the future of work and work organization in the Internet. The work is organized at a finer granularity and jobs are split into cheap micro-tasks, that can be fast performed by the human cloud.

Due to the increasing interest in social networks and crowdsourcing, there is a lot of ongoing research in this area. However, there are a lot of open research issues. The impact of social networks and crowdsourcing platforms on future Internet traffic is still unknown. Due to the size of these networks and the human cloud, these platforms will change significantly the Internet traffic in a similar manner as Facebook or other social media networks today. Thus, it is an important telecommunications issue to model and analyze these communication platforms and the evolving complex networks, like the dynamics and the growth of social media network and crowdsourcing platforms.

On this background, this Special Issue focuses on modeling of emerging Internet platform, in particular social networks and crowdsourcing platforms. Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:

Measurement, modeling and analysis of social networks
* characterization and evolution of network topologies and interaction networks
* detection of user communities and user interactions
* inference of topology, friend relationships or interactions in social networks
* population models and structural models for network dynamics
* measurement methods and approximation techniques like sampling
* properties of complex networks, appropriate complex networks metrics
* information diffusion and epidemic spreading
* opinion formation and consensus, community formation, collective decisions
* bio-inspired and socio-physical models

Measurement, modeling and analysis of crowdsourcing
* evolution of crowdsourcing platforms, trends like mobile crowdsourcing
* use cases for crowdsourcing, e.g. for enterprises or in mobile domains
* modeling the granularity of work, key components of crowdsourcing
* modeling and analysis of the human cloud and individual user behavior
* models from different perspectives: platform operator, employer, worker
* quality, costs, and completion times of crowdsourcing jobs
* modeling quality assurance mechanisms, incentive mechanisms
* classification models for jobs and campaigns, skills and experience of workers
* modeling recommendation systems and their impact

Papers must address original work not submitted or published elsewhere. Submission of previously published conference/workshop papers must be clearly identified and a statement from the authors explaining how such work has been further extended should also be submitted. Camera-ready papers may not exceed 7000 words or 20 pages of IJCNDS. Detailed instructions for authors are found at http://www.inderscience.com/guidelines. Submission of papers in the form of a single PDF attached to an e-mail to the guest editors.

Guest Editors
Dr. Tobias Hoßfeld and Prof. Dr. Phuoc Tran-Gia
University of Würzburg, Institute of Computer Science
hossfeld@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
trangia@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de


Important Dates
Full papers due September 30, 2011
Notification of acceptance November 30, 2011
Camera-ready papers due January 15, 2011
Tentative date of appearance Fall 2012