| We are pleased to announce the publication of the special issue focusing on privacy issues in big data mining infrastructure, platforms, and applications. Te integration of extensive parallel computation power, scalable platforms, and advanced communications has profoundly unleashed the potentials of big data mining in recent years. A large number of cloud data centers have been established around the globe and provide necessary tools and infrastructure to utilize economical, ondemand, rapid-elasticity computation and storage services. With these, an increasingly huge amount of data of various types and formats has been collected from many diferent sources such as online social media, Internet of Tings (IoT), mobile devices, and genome projects via both wired and wireless communication channels. Unlocking the value of big data through analytics and mining has been regarded as the key enabler of many innovation and marketing strategies which, in turn, has pushed more eforts and support to the big data related R&D. As an evidence, for example, Gartner has recently reported that most of the world’s largest 200 companies have plans to invest in the development of intelligent apps as well as utilizing the full toolkit of big data and analytics tools by 2018. New founding from these investments then is to be incorporated to refne the services ofered by companies and improve customer experience. Tis illustrates that an extensive research is expected to be more actively supported for big data mining infrastructure, platforms, and applications that runs both on wired and on wireless communication channels in order to conduct more efcient knowledge discovery and smart decision support. One of the major concerns in big data mining approach is with security and privacy. With big data applications such as online social media, mobile services, and smart IoT widely adopted in our daily life, an enormous amount of data has been generated based on various aspects of the individuals. Without a proper security and privacy protection in all aspects of computing environment including communication environment, this can be disclosed intentionally or unintentionally, posing severe threats on the individuals. Moreover, as the storage, delivery, management, processing, and mining of such massive data sets are ofen outsourced to cloud data centers, traditional security solutions confned within a well-defned security perimeter fail to be applied in such open and sharing environments. Tese security and privacy issues pose tremendous barriers to taking advantages from the full use of our huge data assets. As such, it is high time to investigate the security and privacy issues in big data mining by examining big data infrastructure, platforms, and applications in detail. |