Collaborative computing and applications J.UCS special issue [Editorial]

Evolving from parallel computing, cluster computing, grid computing, to nowadays cloud computing, the distributed computing paradigm has been shifting from parallelization, distribution, sharing, to be able to support full-scale collaboration between systems and people. This new computing paradigm can be called collaborative computing, composing of technologies and techniques to facilitate people, software, and hardware working together via computer-assisted means. A number of well-known technologies are contributing to the emergence of this new computing paradigm, including computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and groupware, software agents and multi-agent systems, web services and semantic web, social networks and ad-hoc networks. This collaborative computing paradigm and related technologies have seen wide applications in many areas. At the same time, it also offers a lot of research and development opportunities across a number of disciplines and has attracted a lot of attention of many researchers around the world. This Special Issue includes original research papers that report recent advances in collaborative computing technologies and applications.