Call for Papers

A Special Issue of the Parallel Processing Letters Journal on

"Community Structures in Networks: Methods and Applications"


Networks in various application domains exhibit an internal structure:
they consist of tightly connected components that are more loosely
connected to the rest of the network. These components, known as communities,
offer to the network structural properties that have proven valuable in
various application domains. Mining such community structures is a valuable
tool that can enhance the functionality of networks and applications. The
uncovering of such structures is a fundamental problem in complex networks
and occurs in a variety of forms.

The advent of Web 2.0 technology has accelerated the need to analyse network
structures like web communities, social network relations, and in general
user’s collective activities. The newly emerging applications came along
with a different set of problem parameters and demands due to the enormous
data size and complexity, rendering prohibitive the static handling of
data and raising the demand for flexible solutions.

Although community finding in networks is an old problem with a richness
of solutions, novel emerging applications brought the problem into the
surface with a revised set of demands and a whole new set of assumptions
and parameters. What was known to be an isolated problem in complex network
theory came to evolve in a whole new area of research, raining new issues
and opening a multitude of new perspectives.

The aim of this special issue is to capture the latest developments in the
state-of-the-art for community finding. Furthermore, it aims to expose novel
and emerging results and ideas in the field, especially in terms of algorithm
design and novel techniques development, performance measurements and
benchmark studies, and especially Web 2.0 applications that exploit community
finding to their benefit, and strengthen new directions in the field.

Topics for potential articles of this special issue include, but are
certainly not limited to the following:

- New methods and techniques for community finding
- Distributed and local perspective algorithms for community finding
- Community finding in scale-free and complex networks
- Self-adaptive and bio-inspired algorithms for community mining
- Mining communities in dynamic networks (whose structure evolves over time)
- Self-organization of community structures
- Evolution of community structures
- Novel applications for community finding algorithms
- Web based application of community finding
- Advertising systems based on community finding algorithms
- Communities in mobile and wireless networks
- Community finding for content delivery and distribution
- Community structures in social networks
- Mining Web communities
- Community finding in semantic networks
- Community finding for content distribution
- Effect of community finding on social networking platforms
- Community structures to facilitate search
- Applications - storage, streaming, caching, downloading, collaborative, P2P
- Crawling online tools for automated mining of community structures
- Benchmark methods for testing community finding algorithms
- Exploring communities to tune the performance of distributed systems
- Performance measurements on real networking platforms
- Community finding algorithms for image analysis and multimedia applications

____________________________________________________________________________

Guest Editors

Prof. Paraskevi Fragopoulou
Department of Applied Informatics and Multimedia
Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
fragopou@ics.forth.gr

Prof. Artur Andrzejak
Institute of Computer Science
Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg, Germany
artur.andrzejak@informatik.uni-heidelberg.de

Dr. Costas Panagiotakis
Department of Commerce and Marketing
Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
cpanag@csd.uoc.gr

Dr. Carlo Mastroianni
ICAR-CNR, Institute of High Performance Computing and Networking
National Research Council, Rende (CS), Italy
mastroianni@icar.cnr.it
____________________________________________________________________________

Important Dates

Paper submission:
30-09-2011

Acceptance notification:
30-11-2011

Final papers:
15-01-2012

Tentative publication:
March 2012
____________________________________________________________________________

Submission Format and Guidelines

All submitted papers must be written in English and contain original work
which has not been published by or is currently under review for any other
journal or conference. Papers must not exceed 16 pages including figures,
tables, and references. All manuscripts and any supplementary material should
be submitted by email to one of the Guest Editors.

For more information on submission format and guidelines, potential authors
should refer to the journal’s official page:
http://www.worldscinet.com/ppl/mkt/guidelines.shtml