Guest Editorial: Special Section: Advances in Information Technology

It is true that information technology provides new opportunities for humanity. Today, information technology promises not only to improve our business, but also the effectiveness of learning and health care. Information technology accelerates the global integration of social and economic activities, leading to new applications for the improvement of life quality. It also offers several opportunities to any community to leapfrog to the future with advanced economic and social development. In view of this, this section focused on the effective deployment of information technology.

Reviewing the papers in this topic, it is clear that all fields such as computer science, cloud computing, wireless sensor network, prediction, image annotation, and storage have been involved. And the publications about recent advances in information technology tackled significant recent developments in the fields mentioned above, both of a foundational and applicable character.

In this section, twelve papers have been selected for publication. All selected papers followed the same standard (peer-reviewed by at least three independent reviewers) as applied to regular submissions. They have been selected based on their quality and their relation to the scope of the special section.

In the paper entitled “Improved Community Mining Method Based on LFM and EAGLE” Min Wang et al. propose an efficient and functional complex network community partition algorithm by combining fitness function optimization and community similarity, which can uncover both overlapping and hierarchical community structure of complex networks.

The paper entitled “Fast Multicast Scheme with Secure Network Coding in Cloud Data Centers” Kaixiang Huang et al. propose a novel, fast, and secure network-coding multicast on software-defined networks. This scheme separates the complicated secure multicast management from fast data transmission, the proposed scheme can use traditional cryptography without homomorphy.

The paper entitled “Reliability-Based Controller Placement Algorithm in Software Defined Networking” Jiang Liu et al. studied the problem of controller placement, and the cases with the shortest path and multi-paths have been considered, respectively. simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms better than regular placement stratagem with the Internet2 OS3E and the

Internet Topology Zoo.

The paper entitled “Learn to Human-level Control in Dynamic Environment Using Incremental Batch Interrupting Temporal Abstraction” Yuchen Fu et al. introduce interrupting mechanism to SMDP option on the basis of Qlearning to address dynamic environments. The algorithm, called interrupting Q-learning option, is able to better solve the problem in a dynamic environment which traditional option based methods are unable to deal with. The experiment results show that the appropriate use of interrupting option can accelerate solving tasks in a dynamic environment, and also it will be help for agent to keep stability during the process of learning.

The paper entitled “Design of Online Double Auction Mechanism for Aging Sensitive Commodity” Xiaolong Ma et al. presents an online double auction mechanism DAPA (Double Auction Payment Allocation) for aging sensitive commodity under dynamic environment, and then proposes and implements the corresponding allocation and payment algorithm as well.

The paper entitled “Routing Optimization for Server-Centric Data Center Networks” Huanzhao Wang et al. propose a multi-constrained routing algorithm for server-centric data centers, named Server-Centric Multi-Constrained Routing Algorithm (SCRAT). This algorithm exploits the topology features of the Server- Centric data center to decrease the algorithm complexity and returns optimal and feasible paths simultaneously.

The paper entitled “A Robust Low-overhead Watermarking for Field Authentication of Intellectual Property Cores” Jing Long et al. present a low-overhead watermarking technique by compressing real inserted contents of watermarks. The ownership is split into orderly small watermarks. The watermark positions are generated by the watermarks. Location mapping is performed to each position to make it not leak in verification.

The paper entitled “A Two-step MF Signal Acquisition Method for Wireless Underground Sensor Networks” Wei Liang et al. propose a new signal acquisition method. The acquisition process includes coarse matched filter (MF) location in the first stage and an accurate MF acquisition as a verification mode for the second stage. The performance metrics, including mean acquisition time (MAT) and power consumption, are accuracy. The results indicate that when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) keeping consistent, the MAT of the proposed method is less than the original one.

The paper entitled “A mechanism achieving low latency for wireless datacenter applications” Tao Huang et al. In this paper, a mechanism, named pECN, is proposed to achieve low latency for delay-sensitive flows. pECN makes use of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to maintain a small queue length and a priority-based scheduling mechanism to provide delay differentiated services.

The paper entitled “An Anomaly Detection on the Application-Layer-Based QoS in the Cloud Storage System” Dezhi Han et al. propose an anomaly attack detection method based on the hidden semi-Markov model (HsMM) to secure the cloud storage system from the application-layer-based attacks. In this proposed method, observation serials are constituted by the time intervals between the I/O requests made by normal users and their characterization using the hidden semi-Markov model based on each protocol for application layer.

The paper entitled “K Maximum Probability Attack Paths Dynamic Generation Algorithm” Kun Bi et al. propose an algorithm to dynamically generate the top K attack paths with maximum probabilities for every node of a system. The proposed algorithm does not require generation of the full attack graph to calculate the K attack paths. Instead, it directly processes and analyzes the system input data and dynamically identifies the K attack paths.

The paper entitled “Performance Analyses of Recurrent Neural Network Models Exploited for Online Time-Varying Nonlinear Optimization” Mei Liu et al. analyzed continuous-time and discrete-time ZNN models theoretically via rigorous proof. Compared with the research work done previously by others, this paper analyzes continuous-time and discrete-time ZNN models theoretically via rigorous proof.

In particular, we would like to acknowledge the program committee members of Eighth International Symposium on Information Processing (ISIP 2015). This section contains most of the revised and expanded versions of the selected quality papers presented at the eighth International Symposium on Information Processing (ISIP 2015). We wish to express our deepest thanks to the program committee members for their help in selecting papers for this section and especially the referees of the extended versions of the selected papers for their thorough reviews under a tight time schedule. ISIP 2015 took place on October 24-25, 2015, in ZhangJiajie, China, and was cosponsored by Jishou University; Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, China; Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Russia; South China University of Technology, China; Feng Chia University, Taiwan; Henan Polytechnic University, China; Nanchang Hangkong University, China; and Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, China. In closing, we would like to take this opportunity to thank the authors for the efforts they put in the preparation of the manuscripts and in keeping the deadlines set by editorial requirements. We hope that you will enjoy reading this special section as much as we did putting it together.

We would also like to thank Prof. Mirjana Ivanović, the editor-in chief of ComSIS, for her support during the preparation of this special section in the journal.

Guest Editors

Fei Yu
Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, Moscow, Russia

Chin-Chen Chang
Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan

Degang Sun
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Iftikhar Ahmad
King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia