The rapid growth of wireless mobile devices has led to saturation and congestion of wireless channels – a well-known fact. In the recent years, this issue is further exacerbated by the ever- increasing demand for traffic intensed multimedia content applications, which include but are not limited to social media, news and video streaming applications.

Cellular service providers have been struggling with users’ demand since the emergence of mobile Internet. As a result, each generation of cellular network prevailed over its predecessors mainly in terms of connection speed.

The future of network communications is mobile as user's demand for ubiquitous connectivity increases. Wireless has become the primary access technology, leading to an explosion in traffic demand. This challenges network providers to manage and configure new requirements without incrementing costs in the same amount. In addition to the growth in the use of mobile devices, there is a need to operate simultaneously different access technologies.

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.