A series of recent developments highlight the increasingly important role online platforms in impacting data privacy today's digital economy. Revelations and parliamentary hearings about violations Facebook's app service partner ecosystem, EU Court Justice judgments on joint responsibility platform users, rise smartphone ecosystems where behaviour is governed by distribution operating systems, ...

With the advances in processing, memory, and connectivity technologies, applications are becoming increasingly distributed, data-centric, and web based. These applications demand support for large number of users at high performance, requiring extreme scale, high availability, and low latency data access. Such applications are known as Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications. Distribu...

Due to the growing need to process large graph and network datasets created by modern applications, recent years have witnessed a surging interest in developing big graph platforms. Tens of such big graph systems have already been developed, but there lacks a systematic categorization and comparison of these systems. This article provides a timely and comprehensive survey of existing big graph ...

This chapter provides an overview of web-based information and communications technology platforms that collect and display sensor based information. We focus on collective sensing platforms that allow to extend the collected sensor information, e. g., using tags or other annotations. We provide an overview on such platforms and discuss critical issues such as big data and sensor cloud storage....

Throughout much of the history of biology, the cell membrane was functionally defined as a semi-permeable barrier separating aqueous compartments, and an anchoring site for proteins. Little attention was devoted to its possible regulatory role in intracellular molecular processes and neuron electrical signaling. This article reviews the history of membrane studies and the current state of the a...