The International Conference on E-commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web) is a mature and well-established forum for researchers working in the area of electronic commerce and web technologies. These are the proceedings of the ninth conference in the series, which, like previous EC-Web conferences, was co-located with DEXA, the International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, which, this year, took place in Turin, Italy. One key feature of EC-Web is its two-fold nature: it brings together both papers proposing technological solutions for e-commerce and the World Wide Web, and papers concerning the management of e-commerce, such as web marketing, the impact of e-commerce on business processes and organizations, the analysis of case studies, as well as social aspects of e-commerce (to understand the impact of e-commerce solutions on day-to-day life and the new opportunities that these behaviors open). The technical program included 12 reviewed papers and two invited papers. Each paper was reviewed by five reviewers, in order to select only the best quality papers. The program included five sessions: "Security in E-Commerce" (with two papers), "Social Aspects of E-Commerce" (with two papers), "Business Process and EC Inf- structures" (with three papers), "Recommender Systems and E-Negotiations" (with four papers) and "Web Marketing and User Profiling" (with three papers). We found the program interesting and we hope participants and readers feel the same. Furthermore, we hope the attendees enjoyed the conference and Turin. June 2008 Giuseppe Psaila Roland R. Wagner

The three volume set LNAI 5177, LNAI 5178, and LNAI 5179, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2008, held in Zagreb, Croatia, in September 2008.

The 316 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing in the broadest sense; topics covered in the first volume are artificial neural networks and connectionists systems; fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy systems; evolutionary computation; machine learning and classical AI; agent systems; knowledge based and expert systems; intelligent vision and image processing; knowledge management, ontologies, and data mining; Web intelligence, text and multimedia mining and retrieval; and intelligent robotics and control.

The three volume set LNAI 5177, LNAI 5178, and LNAI 5179, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2008, held in Zagreb, Croatia, in September 2008.

The 316 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing in the broadest sense; topics covered in the third volume are intelligent data processing in process systems and plants; neural information processing for data mining; soft computing approach to management engineering; advanced groupware; agent and multi-agent systems: technologies and applications; engineered applications of semantic Web; evolvable hardware and adaptive systems; evolvable hardware applications in the area of electronic circuits design; hyperspectral imagery for remote sensing; immunity-based systems; innovations in intelligent multimedia systems and virtual reality; intelligent environment support for collaborative learning; intelligent systems in medicine and healthcare; knowledge interaction for creative learning; novel foundation and applications of intelligent systems; skill acquisition and ubiquitous human computer interaction; smart sustainability; unsupervised clustering for exploratory data anlysis; and use of AI techniques to build enterprise systems.

The 7th International Conference on Adhoc, Mobile and Wireless Networks (AdHoc-NOW 2008) was held at INRIA Sophia Antipolis - M editerran ee, on the French Riviera, during September 10-12,2008. The six previous conferences intheserieswereheldinMorelia(2007), Ottawa(2006), Cancun(2005), Vanc- ver (2004), Montreal (2003) and Toronto (2002). The purpose of this conference is to provide a forum for researchers from academia/industry and practitioners to meetandexchangeideas regardingrecentdevelopmentsintheareasofad-hoc wireless networks. AdHoc-NOW 2008 received 110 submissions submitted by authors form the following 33 countries: Algeria, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, the UK and the USA. Each paper was assigned to three members of the Technical Program Committee (TPC). Based on the reviews, we decided to accept 39 submissions as regular papers, 24 of them with 25 minutes' oral presentation time, and 15 as poster presentations. All of the accepted papers appear in this volume. We thank the three invited speakers at this conference, Srdjan Krco (Er- sson, Ireland), Xuemin (Sherman) Shen (University of Waterloo, Canada), and Stephan Olariu (Old Dominion University, USA) for accepting our invitation to share their insights on new developments in their research areas."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Human Choice and Computers (HCC8), IFIP TC9, held in Pretoria, South Africa on September 25-26, 2008.

The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction. Proceedings and post-proceedings of refereed international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

WISE 2008 was held in Auckland, New Zealand, during September 1-3, at The Auckland University ofTechnology City Campus Conference Centre. The aim of this conferencewasto providean internationalforum for researchers, professi- als, and industrial practitioners to share their knowledge in the rapidly growing area of Web technologies, methodologies, and applications. Previous WISE c- ferences wereheld in Hong Kong, China (2000), Kyoto, Japan (2001), Singapore (2002), Rome, Italy (2003), Brisbane, Australia (2004), New York, USA (2005), Wuhan, China (2006) and Nancy, France (2007). The call for papers created considerable interest. Around 110 paper s- missions were received and the international Program Committee selected 31 papers out of the 110 submissions (an acceptance rate of 28. 2%). Of these, 17 papers were chosen for standard presentation and the remaining 14 papers for short presentation. The authors of the accepted papers range across 13 co- tries: Australia, China, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland and the USA. The technical track of the WISE 2008 program o?ered nine paper presentation sessions. The selected - pers covered a wide and important variety of issues in Web information systems engineering such as querying; search; ranking; trust; peer-to-peer networks; - formation ?ltering; information integration; agents and mining. A few selected papers from WISE 2008 will be published in a special issue of the World Wide Web Journal, bySpringer. Inaddition, a $1000prizewasawardedto the authors ofthepaperselectedforthe"YahikoKambayashiBestPaperAward. "Wethank all authors who submitted their papers and the Program Committee members andexternalreviewersfor their excellent work.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th Financial Cryptography and DataSecurityInternationalConference, heldinCozumel, Mexico, January28-31 2008. Financial cryptography (FC) and data security has been for years the main international forum for research, advanced development, education, exploration, and debate regarding information assurance in the context of ?nance and commerce. Despite the strong competition from other top-tier related security conf- ences, the Program Committee received a signi?cant number of submissions, indicating a growingacceptance of FC as the premier ?nancialand data security forum. The ProgramCommittee, led by the PCChair Gene Tsudik, achievedan excellent program balance between research, practice, and panel sessions. This year the program included two new additions, namely, a short-paper track and a poster session, both extremely well received. Intimate and colorful by tradition, the high-quality program was not the only attraction of FC. In the past, FC conferences have been held in highly research-synergistic locations such as Tobago, Anguilla, Dominica, Key West, Guadeloupe, Bermuda, and the Grand Cayman. In 2008 we continued this t- dition and the conference was located in sunny Cozumel, Mexico. The ongoing carnival, sailing, submarine trips, and Mayan ruins were just a few of the - merous exciteme

ED-L2L, Learning to Live in the Knowledge Society, is one of the co-located conferences of the 20th World Computer Congress (WCC2008). The event is organized under the auspices of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) and is to be held in Milan from 7th to 10th September 2008. ED-L2L is devoted to themes related to ICT for education in the knowledge society. It provides an international forum for professionals from all continents to discuss research and practice in ICT and education. The event brings together educators, researchers, policy makers, curriculum designers, teacher educators, members of academia, teachers and content producers. ED-L2L is organised by the IFIP Technical Committee 3, Education, with the support of the Institute for Educational Technology, part of the National Research Council of Italy. The Institute is devoted to the study of educational innovation brought about through the use of ICT. Submissions to ED-L2L are published in this conference book. The published papers are devoted to the published conference themes: Developing digital literacy for the knowledge society: information problem solving, creating, capturing and transferring knowledge, commitment to lifelong learning Teaching and learning in the knowledge society, playful and fun learning at home and in the school New models, processes and systems for formal and informal learning environments and organisations Developing a collective intelligence, learning together and sharing knowledge ICT issues in education - ethics, equality, inclusion and parental role Educating ICT professionals for the global knowledge society Managing the transition to the knowledge society

We are very pleased to introduce Open Source Development, Communities and Quality. The International Conference on Open Source Systems has come to its fourth edition - OSS 2008. Now, Free, Libre, and Open Source software is by all means now one of the most relevant subjects of study in several disciplines, ranging from information technology to social sciences and including also law, business, and political sciences. There are several conference tracks devoted to open source software with several publications appearing in high quality journals and magazines. OSS 2008 has been organized with the purpose of being the reference venue for those working in this area, being the most prominent conference in this area. For this th reason OSS 2008 has been located within the frameworks of the 20 World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, in Milan, the largest event of IFIP in 2008. We believe that this conference series, and the IFIP working group it represents, can play an important role in meeting these challenges, and hope that this book will become a valuable contribution to the open source body of research.

This open access book provides researchers and professionals with a foundational understanding of online privacy as well as insight into the socio-technical privacy issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems, covering several modern topics (e.g., privacy in social media, IoT) and underexplored areas (e.g., privacy accessibility, privacy for vulnerable populations, cross-cultural privacy). The book is structured in four parts, which follow after an introduction to privacy on both a technical and social level: Privacy Theory and Methods covers a range of theoretical lenses through which one can view the concept of privacy. The chapters in this part relate to modern privacy phenomena, thus emphasizing its relevance to our digital, networked lives. Next, Domains covers a number of areas in which privacy concerns and implications are particularly salient, including among others social media, healthcare, smart cities, wearable IT, and trackers. The Audiences section then highlights audiences that have traditionally been ignored when creating privacy-preserving experiences: people from other (non-Western) cultures, people with accessibility needs, adolescents, and people who are underrepresented in terms of their race, class, gender or sexual identity, religion or some combination. Finally, the chapters in Moving Forward outline approaches to privacy that move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions, explore ethical considerations, and describe the regulatory landscape that governs privacy through laws and policies. Perhaps even more so than the other chapters in this book, these chapters are forward-looking by using current personalized, ethical and legal approaches as a starting point for re-conceptualizations of privacy to serve the modern technological landscape. The book's primary goal is to inform IT students, researchers, and professionals about both the fundamentals of online privacy and the issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems. Lecturers or teachers can assign (parts of) the book for a "professional issues" course. IT professionals may select chapters covering domains and audiences relevant to their field of work, as well as the Moving Forward chapters that cover ethical and legal aspects. Academics who are interested in studying privacy or privacy-related topics will find a broad introduction in both technical and social aspects.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, in May 2006, in the context of the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2006.

The 10 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions; they are fully revised to incorporate reviewers' comments and discussions at the workshop. The volume is organized in topical sections on P2P Infrastructure, agents in P2P, P2P search, and applications.

Informatics Education - Supporting Computational Thinking contains papers presented at the Third International Conference on Informatics in Secondary Schools - Evolution and Perspective, ISSEP 2008, held in July 2008 in Torun, Poland. As with the proceedings of the two previous ISSEP conferences (2005 in Klag- furt, Austria, and 2006 in Vilnius, Lithuania), the papers presented in this volume address issues of informatics education transcending national boundaries and, the- fore, transcending differences in the various national legislation and organization of the educational system. Observing these issues, one might notice a trend. The p- ceedings of the First ISSEP were termed From Computer Literacy to Informatics F- damentals [1]. There, broad room was given to general education in ICT. The ECDL, the European Computer Driving License, propagated since the late 1990s, had pe- trated school at this time already on a broad scale and teachers, parents, as well as pupils were rather happy with this situation. Teachers had material that had a clear scope, was relatively easy to teach, and especially easy to examine. Parents had the assurance that their children learn "modern and relevant stuff," and for kids the c- puter was sufficiently modern so that anything that had to do with computers was c- sidered to be attractive. Moreover, the difficulties of programming marking the early days of informatics education in school seemed no longer relevant. Some colleagues had a more distant vision though.

On behalf of the PROFES Organizing Committee, we are proud to present to you the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2008) held in Frascati - Monteporzio Catone, Rome, Italy. Since 1999, PROFES has established itself as one of the recognized international process improvement conferences. The main theme of PROFES is professional so- ware process improvement (SPI) motivated by product and service quality needs. Focussing on a product to be developed, PROFES 2008 addressed both quality en- neering and management topics including processes, methods, techniques, tools, - ganizations, and enabling SPI. Both solutions found in practice and the relevant research results from academia were presented. Domains such as the automotive and mobile applications industry are growing r- idly, resulting in a strong need for professional development and improvement. Nowadays, the majority of embedded software is developed in collaboration, and distribution of embedded software development continues to increase. Thus, PROFES 2008 addressed different development modes, roles in the value chain, stakeholders' viewpoints, collaborative development, as well as economic and quality aspects. - ile development was included again as one of the themes. Since the beginning of the series of PROFES conferences, the purpose has been to bring to light the most recent findings and novel results in the area of process - provement, and to stimulate discussion among researchers, experienced professionals, and technology providers from around the world.

The IEEE Tutorialand ResearchWorkshopon Perceptionand InteractiveTe- nologies for Multimodal Dialogue Systems (PIT 2008) is the continuation of a successful series of workshops that started with an ISCA Tutorial and Research WorkshoponMultimodalDialogueSystemsin1999.Thisworkshopwasfollowed by a second one focusing on mobile dialogue systems (IDS 2002), a third one exploring the role of a?ect in dialogue (ADS 2004), and a fourth one focusing on perceptive interfaces (PIT 2006). Like its predecessors, PIT 2008 took place at Kloster Irsee in Bavaria. Due to the increasing interest in perceptive interfaces, we decided to hold a follow-up workshop on the themes discussed at PIT 2006, but encouraged aboveallpaperswithafocusonperceptioninmultimodaldialoguesystems.PIT 2008received37 paperscoveringthe following topics (1) multimodal and spoken dialogue systems, (2) classi?cation of dialogue acts and sound, (3) recognitionof eye gaze, head poses, mimics and speech aswellascombinationsofmodalities, (4) vocal emotion recognition, (5) human-like and social dialogue systems and (6) evaluation methods for multimodal dialogue systems. Noteworthy was the strong participation from industry at PIT 2008. Indeed, 17 of the accepted 37 papers come from industrial organizations or were written in collaboration with them. Wewouldliketothankallauthorsforthe e?ortthey madewiththeirsubm- sions, and the Program Committee - nearly 50 distinguished researchers from industry and academia - who worked very hard to meet tight deadlines and selected the best contributions for the ?nal program. Special thanks goes to our invited speaker, Anton Batliner from Friedrich-Alexander-Universit] atErlangen- N] urnberg."

This book contains the proceedings of the 5th European Public Key Infrastr- ture Workshop: Theory and Practice, EuroPKI 2008, which was held on the NTNU campus Gloshaugen in Trondheim, Norway, in June 2008. The EuroPKI workshop series focuses on all research and practice aspects of public key infrastructures, services and applications, and welcomes original research papers and excellent survey contributions from academia, government, and industry. Simplyput, publickeysareeasiertodistributethansecretkeys.Nevertheless, constructing e?ective, practical, secure and low cost means for assuring auth- ticity and validity of public keys used in large-scale networked services remains both a technological and organizational challenge. In a nutshell, this is the PKI problem, and the papers presented herein propose new solutions and insight for these questions. This volume holds 16 refereedpapers including the presentationpaper by the invited speaker P. Landrock. In response to the EuroPKI 2008 call for papers, a total of 37 paper proposalswere received. All submissions underwenta thorough blind review by at least three PC members, resulting in a careful selection and revision of the accepted papers. The authors came from 10 countries: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Spain, and the USA.Theacceptedpaperswereorganizedintothe topicalsessions: InvitedTalk, Certi?cates, Authentication, Practice, Signatures, Analysis, and Networks.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 6th EuroHaptics 2008 conference held in Madrid, June 10-13, 2008 under the auspices of the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. EuroHaptics conferences have been held in Europe, initially annually, now on a biennial basis, since the first one at the University of Birmingham in 2001. The promotion of the European haptics community by the Eurohaptics Society (www. eurohaptics. org) integrates a multidisciplinary group of researchers with a wide range of interests stemming from backgrounds in technical, scientific, educational and artistic disciplines. The regular congregation of individuals around the topic of haptics has led to many fruitful and successful interactions that have developed across the EuroHaptics conferences. Moreover, this community now enjoys links to researchers around the rest of the world through the WorldHaptics conference series, of which EuroHaptics is proud to be a sponsoring partner. Such links offer increased possibilities for collaboration which can only bring us greater successes in our endeavours to understand the nature of haptics. June 2008 Alan Wing President of EuroHaptics Society IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics (TCH) http: //www. worldhaptics. org/ The IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics (TCH) is co-sponsored by the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society and the IEEE Computer Society. The mission of the TCH is to integrate the diverse interests of the highly interdisciplinary haptics community and to improve communication among the different research areas.

The purpose of this book is to develop capacity building in strategic and non-strategic machine tool technology. The book contains chapters on how to functionally reverse engineer strategic and non-strategic computer numerical control machinery. Numerous engineering areas, such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, control engineering, and computer hardware and software engineering, are covered. The book offers guidelines and covers design for machine tools, prototyping, augmented reality for machine tools, modern communication strategies, and enterprises of functional reverse engineering, along with case studies. Features Presents capacity building in machine tool development Discusses engineering design for machine tools Covers prototyping of strategic and non-strategic machine tools Illustrates augmented reality for machine tools Includes Internet of Things (IoT) for machine tools

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2007, and the co-located 1st International Workshop on Usable Security, USEC 2007, both held in Scarborough, Trinidad/Tobago, in February 2007.

The book includes 17 revised full papers, 1 system presentation paper and the transcriptions of 5 panel sessions from FC 2007. The papers, which were carefully reviewed and selected from 85 submissions, are organized in topical sections on Payment Systems, Anonymity, Authentication, Anonymity and Privacy, Cryptography and Commercial Transactions, Financial Transactions and Web Services, and Cryptography. The book concludes with 5 revised full and 5 revised short papers from the USEC 2007 workshop. This workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners to discuss usability problems and deepen the understanding of users' capabilities and motivations in performing security tasks.

The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication Proceedings and post-proceedings of referred international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication Proceedings and post-proceedings of referred international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

Personal computers have made life convenient in many ways, but what about their impacts on the environment due to production, use and disposal? Manufacturing computers requires prodigious quantities of fossil fuels, toxic chemicals and water. Rapid improvements in performance mean we often buy a new machine every 1-3 years, which adds up to mountains of waste computers. How should societies respond to manage these environmental impacts?
This volume addresses the environmental impacts and management of computers through a set of analyses on issues ranging from environmental assessment, technologies for recycling, consumer behaviour, strategies of computer manufacturing firms, and government policies. One conclusion is that extending the lifespan of computers (e.g. through reselling) is an environmentally and economically effective strategy that deserves more attention from governments, firms and the general public.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Formal Aspects in Security and Trust, FAST 2006, held in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, August 26-27, 2006.

The 18 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The papers focus of formal aspects in security and trust policy models, security protocol design and analysis, formal models of trust and reputation, logics for security and trust, distributed trust management systems, trust-based reasoning, digital assets protection, data protection, privacy and ID issues, information flow analysis, language-based security, security and trust aspects in ubiquitous computing, validation/analysis tools, web service security/trust/privacy, GRID security, security risk assessment, and case studies.

The world moves on Critical Information Infrastructures, and their resilience and protection is of vital importance. Starting with some basic definitions and assumptions on the topic, this book goes on to explore various aspects of Critical Infrastructures throughout the world including the technological, political, economic, strategic and defensive. This book will be of interest to the CEO and Academic alike as they grapple with how to prepare Critical Information Infrastructures for new challenges.

Scientific and technological innovation continues at a rapid pace, but the public is increasingly aware of possible risks and demanding greater involvement in decisions about new technologies. This edited volume brings together leading social scientists who address recent evidence and debates about public engagement and trust in experts. The chapters consider different methods of public consultation and 'deliberation' in relation to a variety of new technologies, including genetically modified foods, mobile telecommunications, nanotechnology, and hydrogen energy.

The integration of robotic systems and artificial intelligence into healthcare settings is accelerating. As these technological developments interact socially with children, the elderly, or the disabled, they may raise concerns besides mere physical safety; concerns that include data protection, inappropriate use of emotions, invasion of privacy, autonomy suppression, decrease in human interaction, and cognitive safety. Given the novelty of these technologies and the uncertainties surrounding the impact of care automation, it is unclear how the law should respond. This book investigates the legal and regulatory implications of the growing use of personal care robots for healthcare purposes. It explores the interplay between various aspects of the law, including safety, data protection, responsibility, transparency, autonomy, and dignity; and it examines different robotic and AI systems, such as social therapy robots, physical assistant robots for rehabilitation, and wheeled passenger carriers. Highlighting specific problems and challenges in regulating complex cyber-physical systems in concrete healthcare applications, it critically assesses the adequacy of current industry standards and emerging regulatory initiatives for robots and AI. After analyzing the potential legal and ethical issues associated with personal care robots, it concludes that the primarily principle-based approach of recent law and robotics studies is too abstract to be as effective as required by the personal care context. Instead, it recommends bridging the gap between general legal principles and their applicability in concrete robotic and AI technologies with a risk-based approach using impact assessments. As the first book to compile both legal and regulatory aspects of personal care robots, this book will be a valuable addition to the literature on robotics, artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, law, and philosophy of technology.