IMDEA Networks Institute annually holds a by-invitation-only thematic workshop in Madrid. The workshop accompanies a meeting of our Scientific Council comprised of prominent researchers. In addition to talks by Scientific Council members, the workshop includes invited talks by external experts in the research theme of the workshop. The goal of the 2017 event is to foster discussion about future internet applications with particular focus on networking, privacy and security challenges.

This seminar explores the physical, behavioral, and computational limits of crowd-assembly for problem-solving.

The 'big data' scene has brought new improvement opportunities to most products and services, including education. Web-based learning has become very widespread over the last decade, which in conjunction with the MOOC phenomenon, it has enabled the collection of large and rich data samples regarding the interaction of students with these educational online environments. 

Social media is an invaluable source of time-critical information during a crisis. However, emergency response and humanitarian relief organizations that would like to use this information struggle with an avalanche of social media messages, exceeding their capacity to process them.

The second wave of cloud computing, named network cloudification, in the forms of SDN (Software Defined Networking), NFV (Network Function Virtualization), and 5G-MEC (Mobile Edge Computing), is to centralize and virtualize networking into data centers.

We consider online task computing environments such as volunteer computing platforms running on BOINC (e.g., SETI@home) and crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We model the computations as an Internet-based task computing system under the master-worker paradigm. A master entity sends tasks across the Internet, to worker entities willing to perform a computational task. 

Mobile cellular networks are complex system whose behavior is characterized by the superposition of several random phenomena, most of which, related to human activities, such as mobility, communications and network usage. However, when observed in their totality, the many individual components merge into more deterministic patterns and trends start to be identifiable and predictable.

Wireless communication is not only a key technology underlying the mobile revolution, it is also used to connect, monitor, alert, and interact with physical infrastructures such as smart-grids, transportation networks, and even implantable devices. 

Cisco estimates that by 2019 traffic will be 64x than in 2005. Network caching can help cope with this traffic deluge as, by replicating content closer to the users, it reduces bandwidth consumption.