With the rapid advances in sensing, communication, and storage technologies, distributed data acquisition is now ubiquitous in many areas of engineering, biological, and social sciences. For example, the large-scale implementation of advanced metering systems in the smart grids enables real time collection of a huge amount of distributed data (voltages, phases, etc), the understanding of which is critical in improving the overall performance of the future power systems. More examples of distributed data include high-resolution videos from a network of surveillance systems, interactions on a social network, environmental data from sensor networks.Timely and effectively processing of such large amount of distributed, and possibly corrupted and/or online data requires not only novel data processing techniques, but also a deep understanding of the underlying network properties of physical systems, including the network topology, the processing capability of each distributed node, the nature of the data, etc. These sophisticated characteristics bring new challenges for the design and analysis of optimization and resource management algorithms.This symposium aims to bring together researchers and experts in the fields of signal processing, control, optimization, network sciences, cyber-physical systems to address the emerging challenges related to this topic. Emphasis will be given to theories and applications for distributed signal processing systems, cyber-physical systems as well as advanced distributed control and optimization techniques.