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This book traces the origins of the present information technology revolution, the technological features that underlie its impact, the organisations, the companies and technologies which are governing the current and future growth. It explains how the technology works, how it fits together, how the industry is structured and what the future might bring.

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In most schools the dominant supporting technology has been either the stand-alone personal computer or a modest local network. The situation is changing rapidly as a rising number of schools provide access to the Internet for their staff and pupils, opening avenues for communication and networking hitherto not possible. This book reflects on this change. It aims to further the vision of how these new technologies could improve and transform aspects of education. Yet in parallel it asks serious questions about the realities of an interface between the social, cultural and pedagogical contexts of education and the actual affordances that these new information and communication technologies offer. The chapters in this book provide a heady mix of foresight and practical reporting, of planning for the future but at the same time respecting the problems education already has with current technologies. The richness of the points presented here stems in part from the range of experience of the international authors - from academics and administrators, to teachers and curriculum designers. This mix ensures that the central questions on communications and networking in education are considered not simply from a variety of personal perspectives, but also from different cultural and environmental experiences. And yet interest also lies in the commonality of reporting and discussion based on activity in the field. All the contributions draw heavily on research and experience in devising and running projects and experimental activities in a range of schools and teacher-training institutions and environments. The opinions expressed are thus grounded in knowledge gained from work embedded in the reality of today's educational settings. This must be the only sound base upon which to consider the issues of the future. This book is essential reading for all professionals involved in all aspects of information and communication technologies in education. Teachers, lecturers, researchers, students and administrators will find it invaluable.

In 1996 the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) establ- hed its rst Technical Committee on foundations of computer science, TC1. The aim of IFIP TC1 is to support the development of theoretical computer science as a fundamental science and to promote the exploration of fundamental c- cepts, models, theories, and formal systems in order to understand laws, limits, and possibilities of information processing. This volume constitutes the proceedings of the rst IFIP International C- ference on Theoretical Computer Science (IFIP TCS 2000) { Exploring New Frontiers of Theoretical Informatics { organized by IFIP TC1, held at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan in August 2000. The IFIP TCS 2000 technical program consists of invited talks, contributed talks, and a panel discussion. In conjunction with this program there are two special open lectures by Professors Jan van Leeuwen and Peter D. Mosses. The decision to hold this conference was made by IFIP TC1 in August 1998, and since then IFIP TCS 2000 has bene ted from the e orts of many people; in particular, the TC1 members and the members of the Steering Committee, the Program Committee, and the Organizing Committee of the conference. Our special thanks go to the Program Committee Co-chairs: Track (1): Jan van Leeuwen (U. Utrecht), Osamu Watanabe (Tokyo Inst. Tech.) Track (2): Masami Hagiya (U. Tokyo), Peter D. Mosses (U. Aarhus).

Physicalsystemswhichrightthemselvesafterbeingdisturbedevokeourcuriosity becausewe wantto understand howsuchsystemsareableto reactto unexpected stimuli. Themechanismsareallthe morefascinatingwhensystemsarecomposed of small, simple units, and the ability of the system to self-stabilize emerges out of its components. Faithful computer simulations of such physical systems exhibit the self-stabilizing property, but in the realm of computing, particularly for distributed systems, wehavegreaterambition. We imaginethat all manner of software, ranging from basic communication protocols to high-level applications, could enjoy self-corrective properties. Self-stabilizing software o?ers a unique, non-traditional approach to the c- cial problem of transient fault tolerance. Many successful instances of modern fault-tolerant networks are based on principles of self-stabilization. Surprisingly, the most widely accepted technical de?nition of a self-stabilizing system does not refer to faults: it is the property that the system can be started in any i- tial state, possibly an “illegal state,” and yet the system guarantees to behave properly in?nite time. This, and similar de?nitions, break many traditional approaches to program design, in which the programmer by habit makes - sumptions about initial conditions. The composition of self-stabilizing systems, initially seen as a daunting challenge, has been transformed into a mana- able task, thanks to an accumulation of discoveries by many investigators. - search on various topics in self-stabilization continues to supply new methods for constructing self-stabilizing systems, determines limits and applicability of the paradigm of self-stabilization, and connects self-stabilization to related areas of fault tolerance anddistributed computing.

Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems is an emerging and exciting interdisciplinary area of research and development involving artificial intelligence, computer science, software engineering, and developmental biology, as well as cognitive and social science. This book surveys the state of the art in this emerging field by drawing together thoroughly selected reviewed papers from two related workshops; as well as papers by leading researchers specifically solicited for this book. The articles are organized into topical sections on - learning, cooperation, and communication - emergence and evolution in multi-agent systems - theoretical foundations of adaptive agents

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the first International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, AH 2000, held in Trento, Italy, in August 2000.The 22 revised full papers presented together with 35 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. Among the topics covered are hypertext, user modeling, machine learning, natural language generation, information retrieval, intelligent tutoring systems, cognitive science, web-based education, etc.

Started by small group of well known scientists with the aim of sharing knowledge, experiences, and results on all aspects of cluster computing, the initiative of a workshop on cluster computing received more attention after IFIP WG 10.3 and IEEE Romania Section accepted our request for sponsorship. Moreover, the application for a NATO ARW grant was successful, leading to a greater interest in the workshop. In this respect, we have to say that we chose Romania in order to attract scientists from Central and Eastern European countries and improve the cooperation in the region, in the field of cluster computing. We had an extremely short time to organize the event, but many people joined us and enthusiastically contributed to the process. The success of the workshop is wholly due to the hard work of the organizing committee, members of the program committee, key speakers, speakers from industry, and authors of accepted papers. The workshop consisted of invited and regular paper presentations, followed by discussions, on many important current and emerging topics ranging from sheduling and load balancing to grids. The key speakers devoted their time and efforts to presenting the most interesting results of their research groups, and we all thank them for this. All papers were peer reviewed by two or three reviewers.

The rapid growth of the Internet and related services is changing the way we work, act, and even think in a manner that far exceeds the prediction set by?eld experts not long ago. It is now common belief that the Internet and its various applications covering both hardware appliances and software products will play an increasingly important role in everybody's daily lives. It is also our strong belief that the importance of the collaborative research and development e?orts focusing on the Internet among academia, industry, and regulating government bodies cannot be overemphasized. It is our great pleasure to hold the First International Workshop on - vanced Internet Services and Applications (AISA) 2002. The workshop is aimed to provide an international forum to share new ideas and research results in the area of the list of workshop topics. Under the main theme “Advances in Int- net Services and Applications”, the workshop topics include QoS architecture, reliability, security, web acceleration, reverse/proxy caching schemes, content delivery network, distributed/fault-tolerant architecture, storage/backup so- tions, media and streaming server, switching technology, and home networking. We have solicited papers on these topics and attracted paper submissions from technically renowned organizations.

This book presents the revised version of seven tutorials given at the NETWORKING 2002 Conference in Pisa, Italy in May 2002.The lecturers present a coherent view of the core issues in the following areas:- peer-to-peer computing and communications- mobile computing middleware- network security in the multicast framework- categorizing computing assets according to communication patterns- remarks on ad-hoc networking- communication through virtual technologies- optical networks.

The Asian Computing Science Conference (ASIAN) series was initiated in 1995 to provide a forum for researchers in computer science in Asia to meet and to promote interaction with researchers from other regions. The previous?ve conferences were held, respectively, in Bangkok, Singapore, Kathmandu, Manila, and Phuket. The proceedings were published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series of Springer-Verlag. This year's conference (ASIAN2000) attracted 61 submissions from which 18 papers were selected through an electronic program committee (PC) meeting. The themes for this year's conference are: – Logics in Computer Science – Data Mining – Networks and Performance The key note speaker for ASIAN2000 is Jean Vuillemin (ENS, France) and the invited speakers are Ramamohanarao Kotagiri (U. Melbourne, Australia) and Alain Jean-Marie (LIRMM, France). We thank them for accepting our - vitation. This year's conference is sponsored by the Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand), INRIA (France), the National University of Singapore (Singapore), and UNU/IIST (Macau SAR, China). We thank all these institutions for their continued support of the ASIAN series. This year's conference will be held in Penang, Malaysia. We are much obliged to Universiti Sains Malaysia and Penang State Government for providing the conference venue and to Dr. Abdullah Zawawi Haji Talib for making the local arrangements. We also wish to thank the PC members and the large number of referees for thesubstantialworkputinbytheminassessingthesubmittedpapers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems, ADBIS 2001, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, in September 2001.The 25 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper and two abstracts of invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on query optimization, multimedia and multilingual information systems, spatiotemporal aspects of databases, data mining, transaction processing, conceptual modeling and information systems specification, active databases, query methods, XML, and information systems design.

In 1992 we initiated a research project on large scale distributed computing systems (LSDCS). It was a collaborative project involving research institutes and universities in Bologna, Grenoble, Lausanne, Lisbon, Rennes, Rocquencourt, Newcastle, and Twente. The World Wide Web had recently been developed at CERN, but its use was not yet as common place as it is today and graphical browsers had yet to be developed. It was clear to us (and to just about everyone else) that LSDCS comprising several thousands to millions of individual computer systems (nodes) would be coming into existence as a consequence both of technological advances and the demands placed by applications. We were excited about the problems of building large distributed systems, and felt that serious rethinking of many of the existing computational paradigms, algorithms, and structuring principles for distributed computing was called for. In our research proposal, we summarized the problem domain as follows: “We expect LSDCS to exhibit great diversity of node and communications capability. Nodes will range from (mobile) laptop computers, workstations to supercomputers. Whereas mobile computers may well have unreliable, low bandwidth communications to the rest of the system, other parts of the system may well possess high bandwidth communications capability. To appreciate the problems posed by the sheer scale of a system comprising thousands of nodes, we observe that such systems will be rarely functioning in their entirety.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 8th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics, PCI 2001, held in Nicosia, Cyprus in November 2001. The 31 revised full papers presented were carefully selected and improved during two months of reviewing from 104 conference papers. The papers cover the areas of databases, data mining and intelligent systems, e-learning, human computer interaction, image processing, networks and systems, software and languages, and theoretical computer science.

With advances in the Internet and technologies around the World-Wide Web, research on design, implementation, and management of Internet- and W- based information systems has become increasingly important. As more and more information of diverse type becomes available on the Internet and Web, query and retrieval as well as the management of information over the Internet become more complex and extremely di?cult. Novel approaches to develop and manage Internet and Web information systems are in high demand. Following the successful conferences in 2000, 2001 and 2002, WAIM 2003 continued to provide a forum for researchers, professionals, and industrial practitioners from around the world to share their rapidly evolving knowledge and to report on new advances in Web-based information systems. WAIM 2003 received an overwhelming 258 submissions from Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, USA, and Vietnam. Through careful review by the program committee, 30 papers were selected as regular papers, and 16 papers as short papers. As indicated by these numbers, WAIM 2003 is extremely selective: 11 and 17 areas, respectively, including text management, data mining, information?ltering, moving objects, views, bioinformatics, Web and XML, multimedia, peer-to-peer systems, service networks, time-series streams, and ontologies. Two invited talks by Sushil Ja- dia (George Mason University, USA) and Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore) were on access control models and peer-to-peer systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2001, held in Xi'an, China, in July 2001.The 21 revised full papers and 12 short papers presented together with 4 research experience papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimedia databases and high-dimensional indexing, information retrieval and text indexing, data mining, semistructured data management, data warehousing and federated databases, Web information management and e-commerce, spatio-temporal and high-dimensional information management, data mining and constraint management, data integration and filtering, and workflow and adaptive systems.

Electronic Commerce, as a gamut of activities involving electronic transactions performed over a network via software that may be more or less autonomous, is an emerging reality. Strategic studies have shown that electronic commerce is a major growth industry. The book is devoted to the challenges and opportunities that electronic commerce opens for agent technology. For some time, electronic commerce has attracted the avid attention of agent-builders and agent technology researchers, and these have decisively contributed to advancing the state of the art in the field. The second-generation software agents now entering the scene hold great promise for the further advancement of electronic commerce. This book originates from a workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Trading held at Agents'98 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 1998. The eleven carefully reviewed and revised papers present a unique survey of software agents in the context of electronic commerce.

In this book we present a collection of papers around the topic of Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Most of the papers originate from the third workshop on Agent{Mediated Electronic Commerce held in conjunction with the Autonomous Agents conference in June 2000. After two previous workshops, one during the Autonomous Agents conference in 1998 in Minneapolis and the second one in conjunction with the International Joint Conference On Arti cial Intelligence in 1999, this workshop continued the tradition of the previous ones by setting the scene for the assessment of the challenges that Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce faces as well as the opportunities it creates. By focusing on age- mediated interactions, specialists from di erent disciplines were brought together who contribute theoretical and application perspectives in the narrowly focused topic that nevertheless involves wide ranging concerns such as: agent architec- res, institutionalization, economic theory, modeling, legal frameworks and policy guidelines. The main topics for the workshop were: { Electronic negotiation models for agents { Formal issues for agents that operate in electronic market places { Virtual trading institutions and platforms { Trading strategies for interrelated transactions (respectively auctions) The workshop received 12 submissions of which 7 were selected for publication in this volume. Although the number of submissions was less then expected for an important area like agent-mediated electronic commerce there is no reason to worry that this area does not get enough attention from the agent community.

One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in agent technology is that the concept of an agent, as an autonomous system capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have a state and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting semi-autonomous agents. This book brings together revised versions of papers presented at the First International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2000, held in Limerick, Ireland, in conjunction with ICSE 2000, and several invited papers. As a comprehensive and competent overview of agent-oriented software engineering, the book addresses software engineers interested in the new paradigm and technology as well as research and development professionals active in agent technology.

Since the 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into what is now one of the most active areas of research and development activity in computing generally. One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in the agent-based computing paradigm certainly is that the concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. This recognition has led to the growth of interest in agents as a new paradigm for software engineering.This book reflects the state of the art in the field by presenting 14 revised full papers accepted for the second workshop on this topic, AOSE 2001, together with five invited survey articles. The book offers topical sections on societies and organizations, protocols and interaction frameworks, UML and agent systems, agent-oriented requirements capture and specification, and analysis and design.

Over the past three decades, software engineers have derived a progressively better understanding of the characteristics of complexity in software. It is now widely recognised thatinteraction is probably the most important single char- teristic of complex software. Software architectures that contain many dyna- cally interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and eng- ing in complex coordination protocols, are typically orders of magnitude more complex to correctly and e?ciently engineer than those that simply compute a function of some input through a single thread of control. Unfortunately, it turns out that many (if not most) real-world applications have precisely these characteristics. As a consequence, a major research topic in c- puter science over at least the past two decades has been the development of tools and techniques to model, understand, and implement systems in which interaction is the norm. Indeed, many researchers now believe that in future computation itself will be understood as chie?y a process of interaction.

The papers in this volume were selected for presentation at the Eleventh Annual International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2000), held on 18{20 December, 2000 at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Previous meetings were held in Tokyo (1990), Taipei (1991), Nagoya (1992), Hong Kong (1993), Beijing (1994), Cairns (1995), Osaka (1996), Singapore (1997), Taejon (1998), and Chennai (1999). Submissions to the conference this year were conducted entirely electro- cally. Thanks to the excellent software developed by the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, we were able to carry out virtually all communication via the World Wide Web. In response to the call for papers, a total of 87 extended abstracts were submitted from 25 countries. Each submitted paper was handled by at least three program committee members, with the assistance of a number of external reviewers, as indicated by the referee list found in the proceedings. There were many more acceptable papers than there was space available in the symposium program, which made the program committee's task extremely di cult. Finally 46 papers were selected for presentation at the Symposium. In addition to these contributed papers, the conference also included two invited presentations by Dr. Jean-Daniel Boissonnat, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France and Professor Jin-Yi Cai, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Wisconsin, USA. It is expected that most of the accepted papers will appear in a more complete form in scienti c journals.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Ant Algorithms, ANTS 2002, held in Brussels, Belgium in September 2002.The 17 revised full papers, 11 short papers, and extended poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The papers deal with theoretical and foundational aspects and a variety of new variants of ant algorithms as well as with a broad variety of optimization applications in networking and operations research. All in all, this book presents the state of the art in research and development in the emerging field of ant algorithms

This volume contains the proceedings of the 19th annual International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets. The aim of the Petri net conference is to create a forum for the dissemination of the latest results in the application and theory of Petri nets. It always takes place in the last week of June. Typically there are 150 - 200 participants. About one third of these come from industry while the rest are from universities and research institutions. The conferences and a number of other activities are coordinated by a steering committee with the following members: G. Balbo (Italy), J. Billington (Australia), G. DeMichelis(Italy),C. Girault(France),K. Jensen (Denmark), S. Kumagai (Japan), T. Murata (USA), C. A. Petri (Germany; honorary member), W. Reisig (Germany), G. Roucairol (France), G. Rozenberg (The Netherlands; chairman), M. Silva (Spain). The 19th conference has been organized for the rst time in Portugal, by the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the New University of Lisbon, together with the Center for Intelligent Robotics of UNINOVA. It takes place in Lisbon at the same time as EXPO'98, the last world exhibition of the 20th century.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks and International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICANN/ICONIP 2003, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2003. The 138 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 346 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on learning algorithms, support vector machine and kernel methods, statistical data analysis, pattern recognition, vision, speech recognition, robotics and control, signal processing, time-series prediction, intelligent systems, neural network hardware, cognitive science, computational neuroscience, context aware systems, complex-valued neural networks, emotion recognition, and applications in bioinformatics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2000, held in Geneva, Switzerland in July 2000. The 69 revised full papers presented together with nine invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 196 extended abstracts submitted for the two tracks on algorithms, automata, complexity, and games and on logic, semantics, and programming theory. All in all, the volume presents an unique snapshot of the state-of-the-art in theoretical computer science.

The refereed proceedings of the 30th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2003, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands in June/July 2003. The 84 revised full papers presented together with six invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 212 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms, process algebra, approximation algorithms, languages and programming, complexity, data structures, graph algorithms, automata, optimization and games, graphs and bisimulation, online problems, verification, the Internet, temporal logic and model checking, graph problems, logic and lambda-calculus, data structures and algorithms, types and categories, probabilistic systems, sampling and randomness, scheduling, and geometric problems.

Agents in multiagent systems are concurrent autonomous entities that need to coordinate and to cooperate so as to perform their tasks; these coordination and cooperation tasks might be achieved through communication. Communication, also called interaction by some authors, thus represents one of the major topics in multiagent systems. This book presents the state of the art of research on communication in multiagent systems. First, three seminal papers by Cohen and Perrault, by Singh, and by Davis and Smith present background information and introduce the newcomer to the area. The main part of the book is devoted to current research work dealing with agent communication, communication for coordination and argumentation, protocols, and dialogue games and conversational agents. Finally, the last paper deals with the future of agent communication.

LNCS volumes 2073 and 2074 contain the proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2001, held in San Francisco, California, May 27 -31, 2001. The two volumes consist of more than 230 contributed and invited papers that reflect the aims of the conference to bring together researchers and scientists from mathematics and computer science as basic computing disciplines, researchers from various application areas who are pioneering advanced application of computational methods to sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and engineering, arts and humanitarian fields, along with software developers and vendors, to discuss problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, and to shape future directions for research, as well as to help industrial users apply various advanced computational techniques.

LNCS volumes 2073 and 2074 contain the proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2001, held in San Francisco, California, May 27-31, 2001. The two volumes consist of more than 230 contributed and invited papers that reflect the aims of the conference to bring together researchers and scientists from mathematics and computer science as basic computing disciplines, researchers from various application areas who are pioneering advanced application of computational methods to sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and engineering, arts and humanitarian fields, along with software developers and vendors, to discuss problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, and to shape future directions for research, as well as to help industrial users apply various advanced computational techniques.

Computational Science is the scienti?c discipline that aims at the development and understanding of new computational methods and techniques to model and simulate complex systems. The area of application includes natural systems – such as biology, envir- mental and geo-sciences, physics, and chemistry – and synthetic systems such as electronics and?nancial and economic systems. The discipline is a bridge b- ween ‘classical'computer science – logic, complexity, architecture, algorithms – mathematics, and the use of computers in the aforementioned areas. The relevance for society stems from the numerous challenges that exist in the various science and engineering disciplines, which can be tackled by advances made in this?eld. For instance new models and methods to study environmental issues like the quality of air, water, and soil, and weather and climate predictions through simulations, as well as the simulation-supported development of cars, airplanes, and medical and transport systems etc. Paraphrasing R. Kenway (R.D. Kenway, Contemporary Physics. 1994): ‘There is an important message to scientists, politicians, and industrialists: in the future science, the best industrial design and manufacture, the greatest medical progress, and the most accurate environmental monitoring and forecasting will be done by countries that most rapidly exploit the full potential ofcomputational science'. Nowadays we have access to high-end computer architectures and a large range of computing environments, mainly as a consequence of the enormous s- mulus from the various international programs on advanced computing, e.g.

Computational Science is the scienti?c discipline that aims at the development and understanding of new computational methods and techniques to model and simulate complex systems. The area of application includes natural systems – such as biology, envir- mental and geo-sciences, physics, and chemistry – and synthetic systems such as electronics and?nancial and economic systems. The discipline is a bridge b- ween ‘classical'computer science – logic, complexity, architecture, algorithms – mathematics, and the use of computers in the aforementioned areas. The relevance for society stems from the numerous challenges that exist in the various science and engineering disciplines, which can be tackled by advances made in this?eld. For instance new models and methods to study environmental issues like the quality of air, water, and soil, and weather and climate predictions through simulations, as well as the simulation-supported development of cars, airplanes, and medical and transport systems etc. Paraphrasing R. Kenway (R.D. Kenway, Contemporary Physics. 1994): ‘There is an important message to scientists, politicians, and industrialists: in the future science, the best industrial design and manufacture, the greatest medical progress, and the most accurate environmental monitoring and forecasting will be done by countries that most rapidly exploit the full potential ofcomputational science'. Nowadays we have access to high-end computer architectures and a large range of computing environments, mainly as a consequence of the enormous s- mulus from the various international programs on advanced computing, e.g.

Computational Science is the scientific discipline that aims at the development and understanding of new computational methods and techniques to model and simulate complex systems. The area of application includes natural systems - such as biology environ­ mental and geo-sciences, physics, and chemistry - and synthetic systems such as electronics and financial and economic systems. The discipline is a bridge bet­ ween'classical'computer science - logic, complexity, architecture, algorithm- mathematics, and the use of computers in the aforementioned areas. The relevance for society stems from the numerous challenges that exist in the various science and engineering disciplines, which can be tackled by advances made in this field. For instance new models and methods to study environmental issues like the quality of air, water, and soil, and weather and climate predictions through simulations, as well as the simulation-supported development of cars, airplanes, and medical and transportsystems etc. Paraphrasing R. Kenway (R.D. Kenway, Contemporary Physics. 1994):'There is an important message to scientists, politicians, and industrialists: in the future science, the best industrial design and manufacture, the greatest medical progress, and the most accurate environmental monitoring and forecasting will be done by countries that most rapidly exploit the full potential of computational science'. Nowadays we have access to high-end computer architectures and a large range of computing environments, mainly as a consequence of the enormous sti­ mulus from the various international programs on advanced computing, e.g.