This book provides a comparative analysis of shrinking cities in a broad range of postsocialist countries within the so-called Global East, a liminal space between North and South. While shrinking cities have received increased scholarly attention in the past decades, theoretical, and empirical research has remained predominantly centered on the Global North. This volume brings to the fore a range of new perspectives on urban shrinkage, identifying commonalities, differences, and policy experiences across a very diverse and vivid region with its various legacies and contemporary controversial developments. With chapters written by leading experts in the field, insider views assist in decolonizing urban theory. Specifically, the book includes chapters on shrinking cities in China, Russia, and postsocialist Europe, presenting comparative discussions within countries and crossnational cases on theoretical and policy implications. The book will be of interest to students and scholars researching urban studies, urban geography, urban planning, urban politics and policy, urban sociology, and urban development.

Mobile crowdsensing is a new sensing paradigm that utilizes the intelligence of a crowd of individuals to collect data for mobile purposes by using their portable devices, such as smartphones and wearable devices. Commonly, individuals are incentivized to collect data to fulfill a crowdsensing task released by a data requester. This “sensing as a service� elaborates our knowledge of the physical world by opening up a new door of data collection and analysis. However, with the expansion of mobile crowdsensing, privacy issues urgently need to be solved. In this book, we discuss the research background and current research process of privacy protection in mobile crowdsensing. In the first chapter, the background, system model, and threat model of mobile crowdsensing are introduced. The second chapter discusses the current techniques to protect user privacy in mobile crowdsensing. Chapter three introduces the privacy-preserving content-based task allocation scheme. Chapter four further introduces the privacy-preserving location-based task scheme. Chapter five presents the scheme of privacy-preserving truth discovery with truth transparency. Chapter six proposes the scheme of privacy-preserving truth discovery with truth hiding. Chapter seven summarizes this monograph and proposes future research directions. In summary, this book introduces the following techniques in mobile crowdsensing: 1) describe a randomizable matrix-based task-matching method to protect task privacy and enable secure content-based task allocation; 2) describe a multi-clouds randomizable matrix-based task-matching method to protect location privacy and enable secure arbitrary range queries; and 3) describe privacy-preserving truth discovery methods to support efficient and secure truth discovery. These techniques are vital to the rapid development of privacy-preserving in mobile crowdsensing.

This book investigates in detail large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM) problem, which has gradually evolved from the traditional group decision-making problem and has attracted more and more attention in the age of big data. Pursuing a holistic approach, the book establishes a fundamental framework for LSGDM with uncertain and behavioral considerations. To address the behavioral uncertainty and complexity of large groups of decision-makers, this book mainly focuses on new solutions of LSGDM problems using the interval type-2 fuzzy uncertainty theory and social network analysis techniques, including the exploration of uncertain clustering analysis, the consideration of social relationships, especially trust relationships, the construction of consensus evolution networks, etc. The book is intended for researchers and postgraduates who are interested in complex group decision-making in the new media era. Authors also investigate the similar features between LSGDM problems and group recommendations to study the applications of LSGDM methods. After reading this book, readers will have a new understanding of the LSGDM study under the real complicated context.