Guest Editorial Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Processing for Computational Social Systems

Great strides have been made in computational methods for social systems. However, real-world modeling problems require novel computational techniques to support modeling and analyses with time and resource constraints. The emergence of parallel architectures, in the form of multicore/manycore processors, and distributed platforms, have led to the formulation of new approaches for large-scale information processing, modeling and simulation, and new tools for analysis. Due to the inherent interdisciplinary nature of the research in computational social systems, techniques that utilize parallel and distributed algorithms, systems, and methodologies continue to evolve in diverse disciplines. This special issue provides a platform to bring together these researchers to showcase innovative research in computational social systems that leverage the emerging trends in parallel and distributed processing, algorithms, computational modeling, and high-performance computing. The call for papers was issued in 2017, with the submission deadline of December 29, 2017.We received a number of strong submissions. The papers went through a rigorous review process and six high-quality papers were selected. The special issue papers are distributed across multiple issues of the TRANSACTIONS, specifically the last two issues of 2018 and this issue. We provide brief descriptions of the papers below.