The ubiquity of smart phones together with the popularity of social media heralds an era of mobile and social sensing. Mobile and social sensing is becoming a paradigm for collecting observations of the physical phenomena, either directly from human observers, or by means of crowd-sourcing the data measurement tasks using sensors in the smart phones or various other wearables (e.g., Google Glass, Apple Watch, and Fitbit devices). It thus involves massive amount of sensory data collection and/or dissemination where humans can act as sensor carriers (e.g., carrying GPS sensors that share location data), sensor operators (e.g., taking pictures and videos with smart phones), or as sensors themselves (e.g., sharing their observations on social media). This emerging field faces new challenges in data collection, dissemination, fusion, and mining; cognitive modeling; computational social and behavior science; information and coding theory; information processing and knowledge discovery; data dissemination and forwarding, reliability, privacy, and security; and cyber-physical-systems with human-in/on-the-loop. This special issue invites technical papers on both theoretical contributions and systems describing original ideas, exciting results, and real-world experiences in the context of mobile and social sensing.

This special issue will focus on (but not be limited to) the following topics:

Mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive sensing Social sensing and social networks as sensor networks Crowd/participatory and opportunistic sensing Rural sensing Urban sensing and smart city Reliability, privacy, and security in mobile and social sensing Sensing unstructured data in mobile/social domain Modeling, analysis, fusion, and mining of social and mobile sensing data Theory, algorithms, systems, and experiments pertaining to mobile/social sensing Ubiquitous, mobile, and pervasive information processing and knowledge discovery Mobile and Social Sensing Applications (i.e., Internet of Social Things, Internet of Social Vehicles) Data mining in Mobile and Social Sensing