With the fast development of the Internet, we are experiencing a shift from the traditional sharing of information and applications as the main purpose of the Web to an emergent paradigm, which locates people at the very center of networks and exploits the value of people's connections, relations, and collaboration. Social networks are also playing a major role in the dynamics and structure of intelligent Web-based networking and collaborative systems.
Virtual campuses, virtual communities, and organizations strongly leverage intelligent networking and collaborative systems by a great variety of formal and informal electronic relations, such as business-to-business, peer-to-peer, and many types of online collaborative learning interactions, including the emerging e-learning systems. This has resulted in entangled systems that need to be managed efficiently and in an autonomous way. In addition, latest and powerful technologies based on grid and wireless infrastructure as well as cloud computing are currently enhancing collaborative and networking applications a great deal but also facing new issues and challenges. The principal purpose of the research and development community is to stimulate research that will lead to the creation of responsive environments for networking and, at longer term, the development of adaptive, secure, mobile, and intuitive intelligent systems for collaborative work and learning.
The aim of the book is to provide latest research findings, innovative research results, methods and development techniques from both theoretical and practical perspectives related to intelligent social networks and collaborative systems, intelligent networking systems, mobile collaborative systems, secure intelligent cloud systems, etc., as well as to reveal synergies among various paradigms in such a multi-disciplinary field intelligent collaborative systems.
