Cloud, IoT and Data Science

Abstract

x organizations. For instance, businesses can use data science tools and techniques to gather, clean, analyse and visualize customer data in order to increase marketing and sales, adjust products' prices, and garner customers satisfaction. In other words, data science can act as a bridge between raw data and business insights to pave the way for making intelligent decisions about business activities. This necessitates further research to explore the intersection of cloud, IoT and data science and the opportunities and challenges that arise from their convergence.A position paper by Helal et al. ( 2020) provided a summary of experts' visions and opinions on IoT, data science and machine learning and raises thought provoking research questions of how to gather and process data in a way that can be used to build smart and adaptive systems which are secure, reliable and easier to use. In addition, the paper identified other research challenges such as the demand for dealing with spikes in cloud services and energy management of IoT when accessed by large number of applications in domains such as smart cities. Furthermore, the book by Dash et al. ( 2021) reported on research related to soft computing techniques in data science, IoT, and cloud computing and explored interesting research topics such as fault tolerance, network architectures, big data and statistical methods among others.This special issue has been organized to solicit papers via an open call as well as selected papers from the 8th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud-2021) and the 2nd International Conference on Deep Learning, Big Data and Blockchain (DBB-2021), which were held online during 23.-25. August 2021. The conferences were attended by a large number of participants from different countries across the world. The conferences featured several technical sessions of research papers, industry talks, and keynote talks. Various workshops and symposia were also organized alongside the main conferences.The remainder of this editorial is organized as follows. Section 2 first illustrates the theme of the special issue. It then summarizes the work presented in each of the research article that appeared in this special issue. Section 3 reports Muhammad Younas