Special Issue on Pervasive Social Computing

Pervasive Social Computing represents a new paradigm resulting from the convergence of Pervasive Mobile Computing with Social Networking; it aims to take advantage of human social relationships to enable the attainment of users' tasks in different domains. On the one hand, the impressive diffusion of Online Social Networking platforms is making OSNs a pervasive tool for maintaining social relationships between people. On the other hand, the diffusion of mobile personal devices with rich networking and computing capabilities is fostering novel patterns of user interactions through social networks, also depending on the dynamic context and locations of the users. Last but not least, pervasive mobile technologies enable completely novel types of social networking applications and services, such as Mobile Social Networks. The enormous potential of Pervasive Social Computing is leading scientific communities in different disciplines, from computer science to social science, communication science and economy, to analyze, study and provide new theories, models, methods, technological solutions and case studies. Interestingly, more and more Pervasive Mobile Computing technologies are designed using inter-disciplinary approaches that exploit models of the users personal and social behavior to design algorithms, protocols, services and applications. The special issue solicitation targeted this multi-disciplinary research environment, focusing on a range of topics relevant to Pervasive Social Computing (PSC), including architectures and algorithms, mobile pervasive networking for PSC, analysis of users' interactions in PSC, pervasive sensing technologies, security, privacy and trust, context awareness in PSC, services and applications in PSC.