Several trends happening in recent years have significant impact on service oriented computing. Production and processing of large volumes of data (big data) are now a norm in most industries. In order to create value from this data, analytics systems and services turned from a nice to have feature to a necessity. Typically, such analytics services are designed in various forms of rich blending of automated services with humans, including expert work as well as an integration with social systems. Finally, cloud became the major model from the technology point of view (delivery, deployment, implementation) as well as from the business point of view. More recently cyberphysical systems emerge with humans in the loop that are composed of physical entities such as mechanisms controlled or monitored by computer-based algorithms. Big data analytics is important for orchestrating the physical entities along a mission. Humans in cyberphysical systems are supported by big-data analytics in their decision making about mission modifications.

Given this context, we use the term intelligent service clouds as a broad category of (1) cloud deployed, defined, operated or enabled services or ecosystems which may (2) leverage the power of automated and human-centric services, (3) in order to enable creation of insights or value, (4) potentially operating with big data. Here intelligent may refer to many possible capabilities – e.g., the ability to generate insights; or the ability to enable new types or styles of collaborations within or between enterprises; or the ability of services to adapt to changing environments, etc. These trends brought together present new opportunities and challenges for service oriented systems, add new dimensions to services technology, enable new service models when delivering value, call for re-imagining service approaches to integration, composition, data integration and linkage, infrastructure for support massive and scalable data processing as a service.

The workshop on “Intelligent Service Clouds” follows the increasing interest in big data, cloud, analytics services and rich combinations with human driven services. The goal of the workshop is to provide a platform for exploring this exciting landscape and new challenges in the context of intelligent service clouds. It aims at bringing together researchers from various communities interested in the challenges. We will solicit contributions that study fundamental as well as practical aspects. At the fundamental, solution side we will seek approaches that study adequate service models addressing above characteristics, mechanism for specification, discovery, composition, delivery and scaling of intelligent cloud services, data, computational, security and privacy aspects of analytics services, and cloud environments for analytics services, and address specific technical intelligent service-oriented cloud solutions, e.g., analytics;  mining, visualization; self-management; security; trust mechanisms; collaboration mechanisms. At the practical, problem side we are interested in case studies in which intelligent service-oriented cloud computing technologies are applied in socio-technical systems/processes like smart logistics, smart manufacturing, healthcare, commerce, public administration, etc.