The main themes of the talk are the optimization of mobile crowd-sensing and recommender system platforms from the point of view of the system designer. In the first part of the talk, we first discuss optimization of mobile crowd-sensing campaigns in terms of total expected quality for a set of tasks to be accomplished, and in terms of compensation cost to task contributors.

To compete in sectors where the customer experience is increasingly digitized, companies are scrambling to expand their portfolio of innovations – from new products and enhanced processes to complementary services and new business models.

Today's heterogeneous networks comprised of mostly macro cells and indoor small cells will not be able to meet the upcoming traffic demands. Indeed, it is forecasted that at least a 100x network capacity increase will be required to meet the traffic demands in 2020.

Visible light communications are becoming a major short range wireless communication technology. Incorporating communication into existing lighting infrastructure, VLCs are potential candidate for future indoor communications.

The standard interference functions introduced by Yates have been very influential on the analysis and design of distributed power control laws. While powerful and versatile, the framework has some drawbacks: the existence of fixed-points has to be established separately, and no guarantees are given on the rate of convergence of the iterates.

Imagine a network in which you address information: literally, packet-level addressing of *information* rather than hosts. For example, you may request the front page of El País with a request packet addressed to "the front page of El País"! Then the network forwards the request to some server that can produce the right data (possibly cached) and then delivers that data back to you. You don't have to figure out where that information is; the network does that for you.

By 2025 ad fraud will be the second largest form of organized crime, resulting in losses of up to $1 trillion in damages to the society, creating an unprecedented burden to national economies and tax payers.

Programmable networks or Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers new opportunities to manage computer networks: Make networks smart, introduce new service faster.

The availability of data on digital traces is growing to unprecedented sizes, but inferring actionable knowledge from large-scale data is far from being trivial.

Mixing time is a global property of a network that indicates how fast a random walk gains independence from its starting point. Mixing time is an essential parameter for many distributed algorithms, but especially those based on gossip.