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.

Online Behavioral targeted Advertising (OBA) has risen in prominence as a method to increase the effectiveness of online advertising. OBA operates by associating tags or labels to users based on their online activity and then using these labels to target them.

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.

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.

The increasing demand for ubiquitous, high-speed and high-performance Internet access challenges the economic viability of mobile network operators which cannot cope with the rate of increase of wireless traffic. Alternate means are considered to deal with the excessive traffic demand that exploit the increase of wireless networks in unlicensed parts of the spectrum, as well as of handheld devices with multiple radio interfaces.

Due to the surging increase in data traffic demand, operators try to enhance the coverage and network capacity by intensive spatial reuse. The limiting factor in networks with high spatial reuse is aggregate network interference, which depends strongly on the locations of the interferers.

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.

Understanding complex physical systems requires knowledge of the interactions among their constituents, in order to be able to predict emergent behaviors (i.e., of the system as a whole).