Over the past two decades, we have witnessed unprecedented innovations in the development of miniaturized electromechanical devices and low-power wireless communication making practical the embedding of networked computational devices into a rapidly widening range of material entities.
This trend has enabled the coupling of physical objects and digital information into cyber-physical systems and it is widely expected to revolutionize the way resource computational consumption and provision will occur. Specifically, one of the core ingredients of this vision, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), demands the provision of networked services to support interaction between conventional IT systems with both physical and artificial objects. In this way, IoT is seen as a combination of several emerging technologies, which enables the transformation of everyday objects into smart objects. It is also perceived as a paradigm that connects real world with digital world.
The focus of this book is exactly on the novel collective and computational intelligence technologies that will be required to achieve this goal. While, one of the aims of this book is to discuss the progress made, it also prompts future directions on the utilization of inter-operable and cooperative next generation computational technologies, which supports the IoT approach, that being an advanced functioning towards an integrated collective intelligence approach for the benefit of various organizational settings.

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed unprecedented innovations in the development of miniaturized electromechanical devices and low-power wireless communication making practical the embedding of networked computational devices into a rapidly widening range of material entities. This trend has enabled the coupling of physical objects and digital information into cyber-physical systems and it is widely expected to revolutionize the way resource computational consumption and provision will occur. Specifically, one of the core ingredients of this vision, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), demands the provision of networked services to support interaction between conventional IT systems with both physical and artificial objects. In this way, IoT is seen as a combination of several emerging technologies, which enables the transformation of everyday objects into smart objects. It is also perceived as a paradigm that connects real world with digital world. The focus of this book is exactly on the novel collective and computational intelligence technologies that will be required to achieve this goal. While, one of the aims of this book is to discuss the progress made, it also prompts future directions on the utilization of inter-operable and cooperative next generation computational technologies, which supports the IoT approach, that being an advanced functioning towards an integrated collective intelligence approach for the benefit of various organizational settings.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International ICST Conference on Networks for Grid Applications, GridNets 2009, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2009.

The 10 full papers, 3 invited papers and 2 invited keynotes address the whole spectrum of Grid networks and cover various topics such as authorisation infrastructure for on-demand Grid and network resource provisioning, access control requirements for Grid and cloud computing systems, business models, accounting and billing concepts in Grid-aware networks, multiple resource scheduling in e-science applications, percolation-based replica discovery in peer-to-peer grid infrastructures, GridFTP GUI, alarms service for monitoring multi-domain Grid networks, Grid computing to explore the computational resources of the settop boxes, open source cloud computing systems based on large scale high performance, dynamic network services, WDM ring networks, architecture to integrate broadband access networks and wireless Grids, implementation of random linear network coding using NVIDIA's CUDA toolkit, collaboration in a wireless Grid innovation testbed by virtual consortium as well as challenges for social control in wireless mobile Grids