Online social networks (OSNs) are structures that help users to interact, exchange, and propagate new ideas. The identification of the influential users in OSNs is a significant process for accelerating the propagation of information that includes marketing applications or hindering the dissemination of unwanted contents, such as viruses, negative online behaviors, and rumors. This article presents a detailed survey of influential users’ identification algorithms and their performance evaluation approaches in OSNs. The survey covers recent techniques, applications, and open research issues on analysis of OSN connections for identification of influential users.

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The automotive industry is growing day by day and personal vehicles have become a significant transportation resource now. With the rise in private transportation vehicles, getting a free space for parking one's car, especially in populated areas, has not only become difficult but also results in several issues, such as: (i) traffic congestion, (ii) wastage of time, (iii) environmental pollution, and most importantly (iv) unnecessary fuel consumption. On the other hand, car parking spaces in urban areas are not increasing at the same rate as the vehicles on roads. Therefore, smart car parking systems have become an essential need to address the issues mentioned above. Several researchers have attempted to automate the parking space allocation by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies. Significant work has been done in the domains of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Cloud Computing, Fog Computing, and Internet of Things (IoT) to facilitate the advancements in smart parking services. Few researchers have proposed methods for smart car parking using the cloud computing infrastructures. However, latency is a significant concern in cloudbased applications, including intelligent transportation and especially in smart car parking systems. Fog computing, bringing the cloud computing resources in proximate vicinity to the network edge, overcomes not only the latency issue but also provides significant improvements, such as on-demand scaling, resource mobility, and security. The primary motivation to employ fog computing in the proposed approach is to minimize the latency as well as network usage in the overall smart car parking system. For demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach for reducing the lag and network usage, simulations have been performed in iFogSim and the results have been compared with that of the cloud-based deployment of the smart car parking system. Experimental results exhibit that the proposed fog-based implementation of the efficient parking system minimizes latency significantly. It is also observed that the proposed fog-based implementation reduces the overall network usage in contrast to the cloud-based deployment of the smart car parking. INDEX TERMS Fog computing, smart car parking, fog-based smart car parking, image processing.

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We propose a cloud based framework that effectively manages the health related Big-data and benefits from the ubiquity of the Internet and social media. The framework facilitates the mobile and desktop users by offering: (a) disease risk assessment service and (b) consultation service with the health experts on Twitter. The disease risk assessment is performed through a collaborative filtering based approach whereas the hubs and authorities based approach is employed to identify the health experts from Twitter. The framework is implemented as Software as a Service (SaaS) to provide the disease risk assessment and expert user interaction services. Experimental results exhibit that the proposed framework achieves high accuracy as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of disease risk assessment and expert user recommendation.

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