There has been an explosive growth of multimedia computing, communication, and applications since the successful commercialisation of broadband mobile networks such as 4G and 5G. Multimedia data are considered an important part of modern social networking applications where user behaviours are content sharing and streaming to the network. In this context, media big data offers tremendous opportunities for social services, such as recommendations, advertisements, personal assistants, surveillance, games, and smart places. However, since the data are produced by a vast variety of user devices (e.g., mobile phones, wearable devices, cameras, etc.) in the emerging social Internet of things paradigm, the heterogeneity and massiveness of the data force the networks to be more powerful in terms of communication and computation as well as service availability. Over the past decade, cloud-based solutions have been proposed as promising approaches to this end.

However, cloud computing infrastructure suffers from high latency issues that cannot be acceptable for time-sensitive social services. Fortunately, cloudization that moves computing capability from the cloud to the edge of the network, resulting in mobile edge computing technology, might provide appropriate solutions, especially in terms of low latency and context awareness. Despite these advantages, edge-based social media computing techniques and applications must deal with several issues in the context of social media big data eras, such as data heterogeneity, data massiveness, social relationships, and security requirements. Several potential approaches have been studied, applying artificial intelligence, game theory, bio-inspired algorithms, and mathematical optimisation.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collate original and high-quality research articles that discuss the edge-based social media computing techniques and applications. Review articles discussing the current state of the art are also welcomed.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• AI-based computing techniques and applications
• Edge-based social media network architecture and models
• Mobile social multimedia computing and analysis
• Mobile caching policy for social multimedia services
• Availability and reliability of in-network media computing
• Context-aware media computing algorithms and frameworks
• Social network security and policy
• Trust and privacy in social media computing