The fast growth of social media platforms and their related applications have dramatically changed the way billions of people relate to each other on the Web. This evolution of social media has blossomed in a plethora of end-user, or user-centered, applications that required innovative and efficient techniques for data processing. This was made possible recently thanks to advances in data science and artificial intelligence in fields like pattern recognition, information fusion, knowledge discovery and data visualization. This special issue provides a set of 12 selected papers (out of 65 submissions) that represent latest advances and developments in these areas.

社交媒体平台及其相关应用程序的快速增长极大地改变了数十亿人在Web上彼此联系的方式。社交媒体的这种发展已经出现在大量需要创新和高效的数据处理技术的最终用户或以用户为中心的应用程序中。最近，由于模式识别，信息融合，知识发现和数据可视化等领域的数据科学和人工智能方面的进步，使得这成为可能。本期特刊提供了12篇精选论文集（从65篇论文中），代表了这些领域的最新进展。