Two UALR professors, Dr. Seshadri Mohan, chair of the department of systems engineering, and Dr. Nitin Agarwal, assistant professor of information science, are the guest editors of the June 2012 edition of IEEE Communications Magazine.

The two were joined by Dr. Ashutosh Dutta, chief technology officer for NIKSUN, a Princeton, N.J.-based company that provides cybersecurity and network performance appliances.

The three guest editors collaborated on an editorial, “Social Networks Meet Mobile Networks,” that addresses the possibilities being created as the use of mobile devices and increased bandwidth escalates.

“These technological advancements have created a favorable environment for launching mobile-aware social computing applications, offering practitioners and researchers key architectural challenges with numerous fledgling opportunities,” the editorial notes.

IEEE Communications Magazine has a monthly circulation of 41,000 copies, making it the most broadly distributed of any of the publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.

The editorial introduced four articles on the subject included in the June issue and concludes that “the advances in both Web paradigm and mobile devices have induced phenomenal socio-technical behavioral changes in the users of these technologies. The advent of social applications has invigorated the user-content creation and sharing at an unprecedented scale. Further, pushing these applications on to mobile devices has intensified content generation by leaps and bounds.

“Users can share whatever they like and wherever and whenever they want. However, the impact of advances in both the sectors and the resulting interaction between them has not been fully explored and understood.”

The guest editors said a plethora of exciting opportunities and intricate challenges exist “to mutually leverage the advancements in each sector to the benefit of the other in offering a rich user experience.”