Call for papers: "Secure and Distributed Big Data Analysis"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology.

Effective big data analysis depends on access to large and high-quality data sets. Advances in genome sequencing technology increasingly delivers these data sets. Sequencing projects such as the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC, 300TB) and UK10K (100 TB) produce data sets whose size already poses challenges on many analysis platforms; the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) project already aims to analyse data on the Petabyte scale.

 

Additionally, data sets of high clinical importance are typically access controlled, placing limits not only on who can use this data, but also on the environment in which this data may be used, to maintain privacy and confidentiality requirements. There is also a growing amount of data held by private institutions, for example by pharmaceutical companies. This data often cannot be made public as a matter of corporate interest; however, some of the data may still be available for analysis in special circumstances or for special collaborations.

 

The analysis problem that emerges from this developing data landscape is one where the analysis algorithm needs to be able move towards the data, instead of expecting to have the data available locally. It requires the algorithm to perform analysis in individual steps, on globally dispersed data, in heterogeneous computing environments, potentially on encrypted data, while maintaining confidentiality and privacy agreements in place for the data.

 

For this special issue, we are soliciting submissions for a thematic collection of technical papers and research and commentary articles that explore the frontier of research and practice in this field.

 

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Algorithms and bioinformatics
• Networking and communications
• Computer architecture and real-time systems
• Database and data mining
• Security and information assurance
• Distributed and parallel systems and algorithms
• Software engineering
• Embedded systems and software
• Web and internet computing
• Grid and scalable computing
• Intelligent information and database systems

 

Important Dates

Submission of manuscripts: 1 February, 2016

Notification to authors: 28 March, 2016

Final versions due: 30 May, 2016