in the algorithmic and foundational aspects, high-level approaches as well as more applied and technology-related issues regarding tools and applications of wireless sensor networks. June 2009 Jie Wu Viktor K. Prasanna Ivan Stojmenovic Message from the Program Chair This proceedings volume includes the accepted papers of the 5th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems. This year we int- duced some changes in the composition of the three tracks to increase cro- disciplinary interactions. The Algorithms track was enhanced to include topics pertaining to performance analysis and network optimization and renamed "- gorithms and Analysis. " The Systems and Applications tracks, previously s- arate, were combined into a single track. And a new track was introduced on "Signal Processing and Information Theory. " DCOSS 2009 received 116 submissions for the three tracks. After a thorough reviewprocess, inwhichatleastthreereviewsweresolicitedforallpapers, atotal of 26 papers were accepted. The research contributions in this proceedings span many aspects of sensor systems, including energy-e?cient mechanisms, tracking and surveillance, activity recognition, simulation, query optimization, network coding, localization, application development, data and code dissemination. Basedonthereviews, wealsoidenti?edthebestpaperfromeachtrack, which are as follows: BestpaperintheAlgorithmsandAnalysistrack: "E?cientSensorPlacement for Surveillance Problems" by Pankaj Agarwal, Esther Ezra and Shashidhara Ganjugunte. Best paper in the Applications and Systems track: "Optimal Allocation of Time-Resources for Multihypothesis Activity-Level Detection," by Gautam Thatte, ViktorRozgic, MingLi, SabyasachiGhosh, UrbashiMitra, ShriNarayanan, Murali Annavaram and Donna Spruijt-Metz. Best paper in the Signal Processing and Information Theory track: "D- tributed Computation of Likelihood Maps for Target Tracking" by Jonathan Gallagher, Randolph Moses and Emre Ertin.

Euro-Par is an annual series of international conferences dedicated to the p- motion and advancement of all aspects of parallel and distributed computing. th Euro-Par 2009 was the 15 edition in this conference series. Througout the years, the Euro-Par conferences have always attracted high-quality submissions and have become one of the established conferences in the area of parallel and distributed processing. Built upon the success of the annual conferences and in order to accommodate the needs of special interest groups (among the conf- ence participants), starting from 2006, a series of workshopsin conjunction with the Euro-Par main conference have been organized. This was the ?fth year in which workshops were organized within the Euro-Par conference format. The workshops focus on advanced specialized topics in parallel and d- tributed computing. These topics re?ect new scienti?c and technological dev- opments. While the community for such new and speci?c developments is still small and the topics have yet to become mature, the Euro-Par conference o?ers a platform in the form of a workshop to exchange ideas and discuss cooperation opportunities. The workshops in the past four years have been very successful. The number ofworkshopproposalsandthenumberof?nallyacceptedworkshopshavegra- ally increasedsince 2006.In 2008, nine workshopswereorganizedin conjunction with the main Euro-Par conference. In 2009, there were again nine workshop

This volume contains the papers presented at FMICS 2009, the 14th Inter- tional Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems, whichwas held on November 2-3, 2009, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Previous wo- shops of the ERCIM working group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems were held in Oxford (March 1996), Cesena (July 1997), Amsterdam (May 1998), Trento (July 1999), Berlin (April 2000), Paris (July 2001), Malaga (July2002), Trondheim(June2003), Linz(September 2004), Lisbon(September 2005), Bonn (August 2006), Berlin (July 2007), and L'Aquila (September 2008). The aim of the FMICS workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers who are interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. In particular, these workshops bring together scientists and engineers who are active in the area of formal methods and are interested in exchanging their experiences in the industrial usage of these methods. These workshops also strive to promote research and development for the improvement of formal methods and tools for industrial applications. The FMICS 2009 workshop was part of FMweek, the ?rst Formal Methods Week, whicho?eredachoiceofeventsinthearea, includingTESTCOM/FATES, Conferenceon TestingofCommunicatingSystemsandWorkshop on Formal- proaches to Testing of Software;FACS, Formal Aspects of Component Software; PDMC, Parallel and Distributed Methods of veri?Cation; FM2009, Symposium of Formal Methods Europe;CPA, Communicating Process Architectures;FAST, Formal Aspects of Security and Trust;FMCO, Formal Methods for Components and Objects; and the REFINE Workshop. All the information on FMweek can be found at http: //www.win.tue.nl/f

This bookis the resultof merging two workshopsseries, namely, oneon comp- erized guidelines and protocols and the other one on knowledge management for healthcareprocedures. Themergeresultedinthe KR4HCworkshop: Knowledge Representationfor HealthCare: Data, Processes, andGuidelines. This workshop was held in conjunction with the 12th Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2009), in Verona, Italy. The book included, in addition to the full-length workshop papers, invited peer-reviewed advanced papers on lessons learned in these ?elds. The KR4HC workshop continued a line of successful guideline workshops held in 2000, 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008. Following the success of the ?rst - ropean Workshop on Computerized Guidelines and Protocols held in Leipzig, Germany, in 2000, the Symposium on Computerized Guidelines and Protocols (CGP 2004) was organized in Prague, Czech Republic in 2004 to identify use cases for guideline-based applications in health care, computerized methods for supportingtheguidelinedevelopmentprocess, andpressingissuesandpromising approachesfordevelopingusableandmaintainablevehiclesforguidelinedelivery. In 2006 an ECAI 2006 workshop at Riva del Garda, Italy, entitled "AI Te- niques in Health Care: Evidence-BasedGuidelinesand Protocols"wasorganized to bring together researchers from di?erent branches of arti?cial intelligence to examine cutting-edge approaches to guideline modeling and development and to consider how di?erent communities can cooperate to address the challenges of computer-based guideline development.

QUANTUMCOMM 2009--the International Conference on Quantum Communi- tion and Quantum Networking (from satellite to nanoscale)--took place in Vico Equense near Naples, Italy, during October 26-30, 2009. The conference made a significant step toward stimulating direct dialogue between the communities of quantum physics and quantum information researchers who work with photons, atoms, and electrons in pursuit of the common goal of investigating and utilizing the transfer of physical information between quantum systems. This meeting brought together experts in quantum communication, quantum inf- mation processing, quantum nanoscale physics, quantum photonics, and networking. In the light of traditional approaches to quantum information processing, quantum communication mainly deals with encoding and securely distributing quantum states of light in optical fiber or in free space in order to provide the technical means for quantum cryptography applications. Exciting advances in the area of quantum c- munication over the last decade have made the metropolitan quantum network a re- ity. Several papers presented at this meeting have demonstrated that quantum crypt- raphy is approaching the point of becoming a high-tech application rather than a - search subject. The natural distance limitation of quantum cryptography has been significantly augmented using ideas of global quantum communication with stab- orbit satellites. The results presented at this conference demonstrated that practical secure satellite communication is clearly within reach.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS), held November 21-23, 2008 in Detroit, Michigan USA. SSS started as the Workshop on Self-Stabilizing Systems (WSS), which was ?rst held at Austin in 1989. From the second WSS in Las Vegas in 1995, the - rum was held biennially, at Santa Barbara(1997), Austin (1999), Lisbon (2001), San Francisco (2003) and Barcelona (2005). The title of the forum changed to the Symposium on Self-Stabilizing Systems (SSS) in 2003. Since 2005, SSS was run annually, and in 2006 (Dallas) the scope of the conference was extended to cover all safety and security-related aspects of self-* systems. This extension followed the demand for self-stabilization in various areas of distributed c- puting including peer-to-peer networks, wireless sensor networks, mobile ad-hoc networks, robotic networks. To re?ect this change, the name of the symposium changed to the International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS). This year we received 43 submissions from 13 countries. Most submissions were from the USA and France. Each submission was carefully reviewed by three to six Program Committee members with the help of external reviewers. For the ?rst time a rebuttal phase allowed the authors to react to the reviews beforethediscussionofthepaperswithintheProgramCommittee. Outofthe43 submissions,17excellentpaperswereselectedforpresentationatthesymposium, whichcorrespondsto anacceptancerateof40%. Itcanbenotedthatthehighest acceptance rate was for papers with keywordssensor networks (86%), MANETs (67%), andsecurityof sensorandmobile networksprotocols (67

The Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) is a forum for the discussion of topics relating to computer systems and languages that are able to bootstrap, implement, modify, and maintain themselves. One property of these systems is that their implementation is based onsmall but powerfulabstractions;examples include (amongst others) Squeak/Smalltalk, COLA, Klein/Self, PyPy/Python, Rubinius/Ruby, andLisp.Suchsystemsaretheenginesoftheirownreplacement, giving researchers and developers great power to experiment with, and explore future directions from within, their own small language kernels. S3 took place on May 15-16, 2008 at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany. It was an exciting opportunity for researchers and prac- tioners interested in self-sustaining systems to meet and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development. S3 provided an - portunity for a community to gather and discuss the need for self-sustainability in software systems, and to share and explore thoughts on why such systems are needed and how they can be created and deployed. Analogies were made, for example, with evolutionary cycles, and with urban design and the subsequent inevitable socially-driven change. TheS3participantsleftwithagreatersenseofcommunityandanenthusiasm for probing more deeply into this subject. We see the need for self-sustaining systems becoming critical not only to the developer's community, but to e- users in business, academia, learning and play, and so we hope that this S3 workshop will become the ?rst of many.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 6th International ICST Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness and of the Third International ICST Workshop on Advanced Architectures and Algorithms for Internet DElivery and Applications. Both events were held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in November 2009. To each of these events is devoted a specific part of the volume. The first part is dedicated to the proceedings of ICST QShine 2009. The first four chapters deal with new issues concerning the quality of service in IP-based telephony and multimedia. A second set of four chapters addresses some important research problems in mul- hop wireless networks, with a special emphasis on the problems of routing. The following three papers deal with recent advances in the field of data mana- ment and area coverage in sensor networks, while a fourth set of chapters deals with mobility and context-aware services. The fifth set of chapters contains new works in the area of Internet delivery and switching systems. The following chapters of the QShine part of the volume are devoted to papers in the areas of resource management in wireless networks, overlay, P2P and SOA arc- tectures. Some works also deal with the optimization of quality of service and energy consumption in WLAN and sensor networks and on the design of a mobility support in mesh networks.

As software systems become increasingly ubiquitous, issues of dependability become ever more crucial. Given that solutions to these issues must be considered from the very beginning of the design process, it is reasonable that dependability and security are addressed at the architectural level. This book has originated from an effort to bring together the research communities of software architectures, dependability and security.

This state-of-the-art survey contains expanded and peer-reviewed papers based on the carefully selected contributions to two workshops: the Workshop on Architecting Dependable Systems (WADS 2008), organized at the 2008 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2008), held in Anchorage, Alaska, USA, in June 2008, and the Third International Workshop on Views On Designing Complex Architectures (VODCA 2008) held in Bertinoro, Italy, in August 2008. It also contains invited papers written by recognized experts in the area. The 13 papers are organized in topical sections on dependable service-oriented architectures, fault-tolerance and system evaluation, and architecting security.

Scheduled transportation networks give rise to very complex and large-scale networkoptimization problems requiring innovative solution techniques and ideas from mathematical optimization and theoretical computer science. Examples of scheduled transportation include bus, ferry, airline, and railway networks, with the latter being a prime application domain that provides a fair amount of the most complex and largest instances of such optimization problems. Scheduled transport optimization deals with planning and scheduling problems over several time horizons, and substantial progress has been made for strategic planning and scheduling problems in all transportation domains.

This state-of-the-art survey presents the outcome of an open call for contributions asking for either research papers or state-of-the-art survey articles. We received 24 submissions that underwent two rounds of the standard peer-review process, out of which 18 were finally accepted for publication.

The volume is organized in four parts: Robustness and Recoverability, Robust Timetabling and Route Planning, Robust Planning Under Scarce Resources, and Online Planning: Delay and Disruption Management.

This book contains the best papers of the Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2008), held in Porto, Portugal, which was organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Communication and Control (INSTICC), co-sponsored by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology (IICREST). The purpose of ICSOFT 2008 was to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in information technology and software development. The conference tracks were "Software Engineering", "Information Systems and Data Management", "Programming Languages", "Distributed and Parallel Systems" and "Knowledge Engineering". Being crucial for the development of information systems, software and data te- nologies encompass a large number of research topics and applications: from imp- mentation-related issues to more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from databases and data-warehouses to management information systems and kno- edge-base systems; next to that, distributed systems, pervasive computing, data qu- ity and other related topics are included in the scope of this conference.

Research and development of autonomics have come a long way, and we are - lighted to present the proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Workshop on Modeling Autonomic Communications Environments (MACE 2009). As in the last three years, this workshop was held as part of Manweek, the International Week on Management of Networks and Services, which took place in the cult- ally rich city of Venice in Italy. Manweek is now an umbrella of ?ve workshops and conferences focusing on di?erent aspects of network and service mana- ment, including MACE, distributed operations and management (DSOM), - basedmanagement(IPOM),towardsmultimediaandmobilenetworks(MMNS), and virtualization and middleware for next generation networks (NGNM). F- ther information of Manweek and the individual workshops and conferences can be found athttp://www.manweek.org. MACE started as an experiment, in 2006, and created a small community that now ?nds itself attracted back each year by a feeling of excitement and anticipation to share new advances and development. Certainly, MACE is not as shiny or practiced as other well-known conferences and workshops, but we consider this a feature of the workshop itself. New ideas, a little rough around theedges(andsometimesmorethanalittle),oftenquiteun?nished,popoutand provoke extensive discussion. Science needs this kind of exploratory adventure, and we have been strongly motivated to continue preserving this atmosphere of exploration and discussion in this year's technical program.

Software development for the automotive domain has become the enabling te- nologyforalmostallsafety-criticalandcomfortfunctionso?eredtothecustomer. Ninety percentofallinnovations inautomotive systems aredirectly or indirectly enabled by embedded software. The numbers of serious accidents have declined in recent years, despite constantly increasing tra?c; this is correlated with the introduction of advanced, software-enabled functionality for driver assistance, such as electronic stability control. Software contributes signi?cantly to the - tomotive value chain. By 2010 it is estimated that software will make up 40% of the value creation of automotive electrics/electronics. However, with the large number of software-enabled functions, their int- actions, and the corresponding networking and operating infrastructure, come signi?cant complexities both during the automotive systems engineering p- cess and at runtime. A central challenge for automotive systems development is the scattering of functionality across multiple subsystems, such as electronic control units (ECUs) and the associated networks. As an example, consider the central locking systems (CLS), whose functionality is spread out over up to 19 di?erent ECUs in some luxury cars. Of course, this includes advanced functi- ality, such as seat positioning and radio tuning according to driver presets upon entry, as well as unlocking in case of a detected impact or accident. However, thisexampledemonstratesthatmodernautomotivesystemsbridgecomfort-and safety-critical functionality. This induces particular demands on safety and - curity, and, in general, software and systems quality. The resulting challenges and opportunities were discussed, in depth, at the second Automotive Software Workshop San Diego (ASWSD) 2006, on whose results we report here.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems, SSS 2009, held in Lyon, France, in November 2009.

The 49 revised full papers and 14 brief announcements presented together with three invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 126 submissions. The papers address all safety and security-related aspects of self-stabilizing systems in various areas. The most topics related to self-* systems. The special topics were alternative systems and models, autonomic computational science, cloud computing, embedded systems, fault-tolerance in distributed systems / dependability, formal methods in distributed systems, grid computing, mobility and dynamic networks, multicore computing, peer-to-peer systems, self-organizing systems, sensor networks, stabilization, and system safety and security.

The 7th IFIP Workshop on Software Technologies for Future Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems (SEUS) followed on the success of six previous editions in Capri, Italy (2008), Santorini, Greece (2007), Gyeongju, Korea (2006), Seattle, USA (2005), Vienna, Austria (2004), and Hokodate, Japan (2003), establishing SEUS as one of the emerging workshops in the ?eld of embedded and ubiq- tous systems. SEUS 2009 continued the tradition of fostering cross-community scienti?c excellence and establishing strong links between researchand industry. The ?elds of both embedded computing and ubiquitous systems have seen considerable growth over the past few years. Given the advances in these ?elds, and also those in the areas of distributed computing, sensor networks, midd- ware, etc. , the area of ubiquitous embedded computing is now being envisioned as the wayof the future. The systems and technologies that will arise in support of ubiquitous embedded computing will undoubtedly need to address a variety of issues, including dependability, real-time, human-computer interaction, - tonomy, resource constraints, etc. All of these requirements pose a challenge to the research community. The purpose of SEUS 2009 was to bring together - searchersand practitioners with an interest in advancing the state of the artand the state of practice in this emerging ?eld, with the hope of fostering new ideas, collaborations and technologies. SEUS 2009 would not have been possible without the e?ort of many people.

This volume serves as the post-conference proceedings for the Second GeoSensor Networks Conference that was held in Boston, Massachusetts in October 2006. The conference addressed issues related to the collection, management, processing, ana- sis, and delivery of real-time geospatial data using distributed geosensor networks. This represents an evolution of the traditional static and centralized geocomputational paradigm, to support the collection of both temporally and spatially high-resolution, up-to-date data over a broad geographic area, and to use sensor networks as actuators in geographic space. Sensors in these environments can be static or mobile, and can be used to passively collect information about the environment or, eventually, to actively influence it. The research challenges behind this novel paradigm extend the frontiers of tra- tional GIS research further into computer science, addressing issues like data stream processing, mobile computing, location-based services, temporal-spatial queries over geosensor networks, adaptable middleware, sensor data integration and mining, au- mated updating of geospatial databases, VR modeling, and computer vision. In order to address these topics, the GSN 2006 conference brought together leading experts in these fields, and provided a three-day forum to present papers and exchange ideas.

The advances in wireless communication technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices have enabled the realization of intelligent environments for people to com- nicate with each other, interact with information-processing devices, and receive a wide range of mobile wireless services through various types of networks and systems everywhere, anytime. This "Internet of Things" will dramatically modify our lives allowing progress in various domains such as health, security, and ITS (intelligent transportation systems). A key enabler of this pervasive and ubiquitous connectivity environment is the - vancement of software technology in various communication sectors, ranging from communication middleware and operating systems to networking protocols and app- cations. The international conference series on Mobile Wireless Middleware, Oper- ing Systems, and Applications (MOBILWARE) is dedicated to addressing emerging topics and challenges in various mobile wireless software-related areas. The scope of the conference includes the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of middleware, operating systems, and applications for computing and communications in mobile wireless systems. MOBILWARE 2009 was the second edition of this conference, which was made possible thanks to the sponsorship of ICST and Create-Net and most importantly the hard work of the TPC and reviewers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the joint International Workshops on Semantic Web, Ontologies and Databases, SWDB-ODBIS 2007, co-located with the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2007, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2007.

The 7 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully selected from 11 submissions. Among the topics addressed are semantics-aware data models and query languages; ontology-based views, mapping, transformations, and query reformulation; and storing and indexing semantic Web data and schemas.

The aim of the FMICS workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers who are interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. In particular, these workshops are intended to bring together scientists and practitioners who are active in the area of formal methods and interested in exchanging their experiences in the industrial usage of these methods. These workshopsalso striveto promoteresearchand developmentfor the improvement of formal methods and tools for industrial applications. The topics for which contributions to FMICS 2008 were solicited included, but were not restricted to, the following: - Design, speci?cation, code generation and testing based on formal methods - Veri?cation and validation of complex, distributed, real-time systems and embedded systems - Veri?cation and validation methods that address shortcomings of existing methods with respect to their industrial applicability (e. g. , scalability and usability issues) - Tools for the development of formal design descriptions - Case studies and experience reports on industrial applications of formal methods, focusing on lessons learned or identi?cation of new research - rections - Impact of the adoption of formal methods on the development process and associated costs - Application of formal methods in standardization and industrial forums The workshop included six sessions of regular contributions in the areas of model checking, testing, software veri?cation, real-time performance, and ind- trial case studies. There were also three invited presentations, given by Steven Miller,Rance Cleaveland,and Werner Damm, coveringthe applicationof formal methods in the avionics and automotive industries.

The two volume set LNCS 5506 and LNCS 5507 constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2008, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in November 2008.

The 260 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous ordinary paper submissions and 15 special organized sessions. 116 papers are published in the first volume and 112 in the second volume. The contributions deal with topics in the areas of data mining methods for cybersecurity, computational models and their applications to machine learning and pattern recognition, lifelong incremental learning for intelligent systems, application of intelligent methods in ecological informatics, pattern recognition from real-world information by svm and other sophisticated techniques, dynamics of neural networks, recent advances in brain-inspired technologies for robotics, neural information processing in cooperative multi-robot systems.

The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19-24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Hybrid Systems Computation and Control (HSCC 2009) held in San Francisco, CaliforniaduringApril13-15,2009. Theannualconferenceonhybridsystems- cuses on researchin embedded, reactive systems involving the interplay between discrete switching and continuous dynamics. HSCC is a forum for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to exchange information on the latest advancements, both practical and theoretical, in the design, analysis, control, optimization, and implementation of hybrid systems. HSCC 2009 was the 12th in a series of successful meetings. Previous versions wereheld in Berkeley(1998), Nijmegen (1999), Pittsburgh(2000), Rome (2001), PaloAlto (2002), Prague(2003), Philadelphia (2004), Zurich (2005), Santa B- bara (2006), Pisa (2007), and St. Louis (2008). HSCC 2009 was part of the 2nd Cyber-Physical Systems Week (CPSWeek), whichconsistedoftheco-locationofHSCCwiththeInternationalConferenceon Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) and the Real-Time and - bedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS). Through CPSWeek, the three conferences had joint invited speakers, poster sessions, and joint - cial events. In addition to the workshops sponsored by CPSWeek, HSCC 2009 sponsored two workshops: - NSV II: Second International Workshop on Numerical Software Veri?cation - HSCB 2009: Hybrid Systems Approaches to Computational Biology We would like to thank the authors of submitted papers, the Program C- mittee members, the additional reviewers, the workshop organizers, and the HSCC Steering Committee members for their help in composing a strong p- gram. We also thank the CPSWeek Organizing Committee, in particular Rajesh Gupta, for their strenuous work in handling the local arrangemen

This volume contains scientific papers and case studies presented at Interactive Sto- telling '08: The First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), held November 26-29, 2008, in Erfurt, Germany. Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) is a cross-disciplinary topic, which explores new uses of interactive technologies for creating and experiencing narratives. IDS is also a huge step forward in games and learning. This can be seen through its ability to enrich virtual characters with intelligent behavior, to allow collaboration of humans and machines in the creative process, and to combine narrative knowledge and user activity in interactive artifacts. IDS involves concepts from many aspects of Computer Science, above all from Artificial Intelligence, with topics such as narrative intelligence, automatic dialogue and drama management, and smart graphics. In order to process stories in real time, traditional storytelling needs to be formalized into computable models by drawing from narratological studies. As it is currently hardly accessible for creators and e- users, there is a need for new authoring concepts and tools supporting the creation of such dynamic stories, allowing for rich and meaningful interaction with the content.

The papers in this volume are the refereed application papers presented at AI-2007, the Twenty-seventh SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2007.

The papers present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on Synthesis and Prediction, Scheduling and Search, Diagnosis and Monitoring, Classification and Design, and Analysis and Evaluation.

This is the fifteenth volume in the Applications and Innovations series. The series serves as a key reference on the use of AI Technology to enable organisations to solve complex problems and gain significant business benefits.

The Technical Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXIV.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing Systems, UCS 2007, held in Tokyo, Japan, in November 2007.

The 16 revised full papers and 8 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on security and privacy, context awareness, sensing systems and sensor network, middleware, modeling and social aspects, smart devices, and network.