IEEE Transactions on Computers seeks original manuscripts for a special issue on “Security and Privacy of Deep-Learning-as-a-Service (DLaaS) Computing Systems,” scheduled to appear in 2021.

Deep Learning (DL) as a Service (DLaaS) has become the current trend for end-users or small enterprises for using DL techniques by purchasing computing services from IT corporations. Such a solution has effectively reduced the cost of DL training and DL inference by combining heterogeneous computing models with the specific hardware and system for DL algorithms. Challenging security issues are also introduced, including security issues on dedicated hardware of DLaaS, such as GPGPU, TPU, and ASIC; security and privacy issues on systems or algorithms of DLaaS, such as neural networks, online inferencing, and differential privacy; and special use cases of deploying DLaaS, such as IoT, edge computing, and mobile clouds.

For this special issue, we expect contributions in security and privacy research problems specific to DLaaS computing systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Differential Privacy Attack and Defense in DLaaS Systems
Secure Deep Learning in Cloud Computing, IoT, Edge Computing, and Mobile Cloud Computing
Attack and Defense Methods on Backdoor Attacks in DLaaS Systems
Attack and Defense on Adversarial Examples in DLaaS Systems
Hardware-Level Attack and Defense in DLaaS Systems
Energy-Oriented Attack and Defense in DLaaS Systems
Data-Centric Security in DLaaS Systems
Other Attack and Defense on Systems, Models, and Data Sets in DLaaS Systems
Submitted papers must include new significant research-based technical contributions in the scope of the journal. Papers under review elsewhere are not acceptable for submission. Extended versions of published conference papers (to be included as part of the submission together with a summary of differences) are welcome, but there must be at least 40% new impacting technical/scientific material in the submitted journal version and there should be less than 50% verbatim similarity level as reported by a tool (such as CrossRef). Guidelines concerning the submission process and LaTeX and Word templates can be found here. While submitting through ScholarOne, please select this special issue option. Per TC policies, only full-length papers (12+ pages) can be submitted to special issues, and each author’s bio should not exceed 150 words. Papers that are not published in this special issue will be considered for a regular issue of TC.

Please note the following important dates:
• Open for Submission: November 1, 2020
• Submission Deadline: November 15, 2020
• Reviews Completed: January 15, 2021
• Major Revisions Due: February 15, 2021
• Reviews of Revisions Completed: March 15, 2021
• Notification of Final Acceptance: April 1, 2021
• Publication Materials for Final Manuscripts Due: April 15, 2021
• Publication Date: July 2021

Guest Editors
Please address all correspondence regarding this special issue to Lead Guest Editor Meikang Qiu (qiumeikang@yahoo.com).

Prof. Meikang Qiu (Lead), Texas A&M University, Commerce, USA
Prof. Bhavani Thuraisingham, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Prof. Sun-Yuan Kung, Princeton University, USA
Prof. Elisa Bertino, Purdue University, USA
Coordinating Topical Editor (CTE)
Prof. Hong Jiang, University of Texas at Arlington, USA (hong.jiang@uta.edu)