New trends and applications in social media analytics

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.