Assurance in clouds and their applications including time-critical cloud computations, streaming and the QoS of cloud services.

Assurances and early validation for Big Data, its algorithms, innovative data models, analytic solutions, and applications.

Experiences on the proactive and reactive allocation of cloud resources for Big Data applications.

Dependability challenges in cloud environments and novel techniques including dependable performance for Big Data applications.

Security and availability of the networks for assured cloud computing.

State of the art techniques to provide cloud resiliency, cloud resource management for Big Data, on-demand elasticity for Big Data, reliable and scalable cloud services.

Role of virtualization and multicore hardware in assuring security and reliability.

Validation using experimental and/or formal methods.

Integrity verification and attestation.

Metrics and risk models for assessing assurance of cloud environments.

Game theory and mathematical modelling of cloud computing security.

Assured services, protocols and standards for clouds.

Secure data management and computation outsourcing.

Security and privacy aspects in cloud services, efficient data protection mechanisms for Big Data and data privacy at storage layer.

Usability of assurance provisions, interoperability, use cases.

Cost of assured clouds, energy, trade-offs, budget.

Identity management and authentication.

Policy management access controls, authorization for clouds and Big Data.

Trust and Regulatory Compliance.