Behavioral, Economic and Socio-cultural Computing (BESC) has been emerged as a new scientific field that studies effective methodologies, techniques and technical tools for representing, modeling, analyzing, understanding and managing human behaviors, economic phenomenon and social and cultural characteristics in the connected world. Unlike traditional behavior, economic and social science, which mainly focuses on qualitative and explicit behavior, economic and social appearance and drivers, BESC intends to support explicit behavioral, economic and societal involvement through a conversion from transactional entity spaces to behavior/economic/socio-cultural feature spaces, through a better understanding of interactions between users and computing systems and better modeling of social concepts like trust, credibility, privacy, and, and influence, further genuine analysis of native behavior/economic/social patterns and impacts, and the facilitation of deployment of information technologies in various socially-centric application domains.

This special issue will further strengthen the research capability of participants in Human-Centric Intelligent Systems community. Behavioral, Economic and Socio-cultural Computing is an important and emerging area in computational social science related research. Much effort will be devoted to bringing together in one place researchers cross various research and application domains from different countries and regions, and to stimulating a vivid discussion and exchange of ideas.