This book presents the latest innovative research findings, methods, and development techniques related to intelligent social networks and collaborative systems, intelligent networking systems, mobile collaborative systems, and secure intelligent cloud systems. Offering both theoretical and practical perspectives, it also reveals synergies among various paradigms in the multi-disciplinary field of intelligent collaborative systems. With the rapid development of the Internet, we are experiencing a shift from the traditional sharing of information and applications as the main purpose of the Web to an emergent paradigm that places people at the very centre of networks, making full use of their connections, relations, and collaboration. Social networks also play a major role in the dynamics and structure of intelligent Web-based networking and collaborative systems. Virtual campuses, communities and organizations strongly leverage intelligent networking and collaborative systems through a wide variety of formal and informal electronic relations, such as business-to-business, peer-to-peer, and many types of online collaborative learning interactions, including the emerging e-learning systems. This has resulted in entangled systems that need to be managed efficiently and autonomously. In addition, while the latest powerful technologies based on grid and wireless infrastructures as well as cloud computing are currently greatly enhancing collaborative and networking applications, they are also facing new challenges. The principal purpose of the research and development community is to stimulate research that will lead to the creation of responsive environments for networking and, in the long term, the development of adaptive, secure, mobile, and intuitive intelligent systems for collaborative work and learning.

This book focuses on the emerging areas of information networking and its applications, presenting the latest innovative research and development techniques from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Today's networks and information systems are evolving rapidly, and there are new trends and applications in information networking, such as wireless sensor networks, ad hoc networks, peer-to-peer systems, vehicular networks, opportunistic networks, grid and cloud computing, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, multimedia systems, security, multi-agent systems, high-speed networks, and web-based systems. However, since these networks need to be capable of managing the increasing number of users, provide support for different services, guarantee the QoS, and optimize the network resources, a number of research issues and challenges have to be considered in order to provide solutions.