In parallel with Petrol as a driving resource in this world, Data is becoming an increasingly decisive resource in modern societies, economies, and governmental organizations. Gradually and steadily, it is being world-wide recognized that data and talents are playing key roles in modern businesses.

As an interdisciplinary area, Data Science draws scientific inquiry from a broad range of subject areas such as statistics, mathematics, computer science, machine learning, optimization, signal processing, information retrieval, databases, cloud computing, computer vision, natural language processing, etc. Data Science is on the essence of deriving valuable insights from data. It is emerging to meet the challenges of processing very large datasets, i.e. Big Data, with the explosion of new data continuously generated from various channels, such as smart devices, web, mobile and social media.

Data Systems are posing many challenges in exploiting parallelism of current and upcoming computer architectures. Data volumes of applications in the fields of sciences and engineering, finance, media, online information resources, etc. are expected to double every two years over the next decade and further. With this continuing data explosion, it is necessary to store and process data efficiently by utilizing enormous computing power. The importance of data intensive systems has been raising and will continue to be the foremost fields of research. This raise brings up many research issues, in forms of capturing and accessing data effectively and fast, processing it while still achieving high performance and high throughput, and storing it efficiently for future use. Innovative programming models, high performance scalable computing platforms, efficient storage systems and expression of data requirements are at immediate need.

DSS (Data Science and Systems) was created to provide a prime international forum for researchers, industry practitioners and domain experts to exchange the latest advances in Data Science and Data Systems as well as their synergy. 2018 is the 4th event following the success in 2015 (DSDIS-2015), 2016 (DSS-2016), and 2017 (DSS-2017).

DSS-2018 will be hosted in Exeter, the capital city of Devon and provides the county with a central base for education, medicine, religion, commerce and culture. The city is also home to the magnificent Exeter Cathedral, which dates back to Norman times. Exeter is also ideally placed to base a trip to branch out visiting places such as the famous Dartmoor National Park and the unspoilt beaches of the North and South Devon coastlines.

Prospective authors are invited to submit their papers to DSS-2018. All accepted papers are expected to be included in IEEE Xplore and will be indexed by Engineering Index (EI). The authors of selected best papers will be invited post conference to extend their contributions for special issues of prestigious journals to be planned in conjunction with the conference.