th The 11 Working Conference of IFIP WG 8.6, Open-IT Based Innovation: Moving Towards Cooperative IT Transfer and Knowledge Diffusion, organized in Madrid in October 22-24, 2008, follows the series started in Oslo in 1995 and continues in the footprints of the past year's conference in Manchester. This year, although the Madrid Conference addresses the usual topics covered in previous WG8.6 conferences, the emphasis is on the issue of open innovation and its relationships with technology transfer and diffusion in the field of information technology. This issue is deeply modifying the way that knowledge is generated, shared, transferred, diffused, and used across the world as a side effect of globalization. It affects the organizational structure, partnerships, roles assumed by stakeholders, and technology transfer and diffusion models and instruments. Industry, academia, and governments are simultaneously concerned. Although the concept applies to all industrial sectors, IT companies were early innovators. The analysis of the contents of this book allows the identification of some trends in technology transfer and diffusion issues as a part of the innovation process. The same problem is addressed in very different ways and extrapolation is not straightforward. Even innovation terminology is not clearly shared by different subcultures in the field.

th The 11 Working Conference of IFIP WG 8.6, Open-IT Based Innovation: Moving Towards Cooperative IT Transfer and Knowledge Diffusion, organized in Madrid in October 22-24, 2008, follows the series started in Oslo in 1995 and continues in the footprints of the past year's conference in Manchester. This year, although the Madrid Conference addresses the usual topics covered in previous WG8.6 conferences, the emphasis is on the issue of open innovation and its relationships with technology transfer and diffusion in the field of information technology. This issue is deeply modifying the way that knowledge is generated, shared, transferred, diffused, and used across the world as a side effect of globalization. It affects the organizational structure, partnerships, roles assumed by stakeholders, and technology transfer and diffusion models and instruments. Industry, academia, and governments are simultaneously concerned. Although the concept applies to all industrial sectors, IT companies were early innovators. The analysis of the contents of this book allows the identification of some trends in technology transfer and diffusion issues as a part of the innovation process. The same problem is addressed in very different ways and extrapolation is not straightforward. Even innovation terminology is not clearly shared by different subcultures in the field.

'Context' is defined as 'any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity'. Nowadays, the increasing availability of communication networks, the miniaturization and progressive reduction in the cost of sensors and the penetration of advanced mobile personal devices make possible to collect and process data from multiple sources and combine them in order to automatically infer knowledge about the user's situation.

Thus, the CONTEXTS Workshop aims at gathering advances on key elements that enable the design and deployment of personalized ubiquitous context-aware services and natural non-intrusive methods for interaction. The Workshop is organized and funded by the CONTEXTS Programme, one of the largest cooperative research initiatives in Madrid, with the participation of institutions from all over Spain and with the support of international experts. The CONTEXTS Programme focuses on advancing the key elements in frontier communications and location technologies, data processing and multisensor fusion and paradigms for intelligent/adaptative management, which make feasible the development of advanced personalized applications for ambient intelligence."

The International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence 2012 (DCAI 2012) is a stimulating and productive forum where the scientific community can work towards future cooperation in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence areas. This conference is a forum in which applications of innovative techniques for solving complex problems will be presented. Artificial intelligence is changing our society. Its application in distributed environments, such as the internet, electronic commerce, environment monitoring, mobile communications, wireless devices, distributed computing, to mention only a few, is continuously increasing, becoming an element of high added value with social and economic potential, in industry, quality of life, and research. These technologies are changing constantly as a result of the large research and technical effort being undertaken in both universities and businesses. The exchange of ideas between scientists and technicians from both the academic and industry sector is essential to facilitate the development of systems that can meet the ever increasing demands of today's society. This edition of DCAI brings together past experience, current work, and promising future trends associated with distributed computing, artificial intelligence and their application in order to provide efficient solutions to real problems. This symposium is organized by the Bioinformatics, Intelligent System and Educational Technology Research Group (http://bisite.usal.es/) of the University of Salamanca. The present edition will be held in Salamanca, Spain, from 28th to 30th March 2012.