Special issue on intelligent analytics and management of mobile data and social media

In the past decade, we have witnessed the explosive growth of mobile devices, including notebooks, smartphones, sensors, tablets and wearable devices, and social media that allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, to name a few. Now we are experiencing the blending of these two technologies, forming a widely adopted platform that reshapes nearly all aspects of our daily life, e.g., the way we connect people, doing business, entertaining, etc. This inspires enterprises to seek new business models and provides them greater opportunities than ever before to understand their customers, competitors, marketing trend by analyzing and managing data collected or created during the usage of mobile services and social media. However, specific characteristics of these data and media, like high variance in quality and usability, large volume, high velocity, and low permanence make most contemporary data analysis and managing tools awkward to meet the enterprises’ expectations.