COLLABORATECOM

CollaborateCom is an annual international forum for dissemination of original ideas and research results in collaborative computing networks, systems, and applications. A major goal and feature of CollaborateCom is to bring the researchers from networking, systems, CSCW, and collaborative learning, and collaborative education areas together. CollaborateCom 2008 in Orlando, Florida, is the fourth conference of the series and it reflects the accelerated growth of collaborative computing, both as research and application areas.

Concretely, recent advances in many computing fields have contributed to the growing interconnection of our world, including multi-core architectures, 3G/4G wireless networks, web 2.0 technologies, computing clouds, and software as a service, just to mention a few. The potential for collaboration among various components has exceeded the current capabilities of traditional approaches to system integration and interoperability. As the world heads towards unlimited connectivity and global computing, collaboration becomes one of the fundamental challenges for areas as diverse as eCommerce, eGovernment, eScience, and the storage, management, and access of information through all the space and time dimensions. We view collaborative computing as the glue that brings the components together and also the lubricant that make them work together. The conference and its community of researchers demonstrate the concrete progress we are making towards this vision.

The conference would not be successful without help from so many people. We would like to thank the organization committee for their hard work to put together the conference. First, we would like to express our deep gratitude to our Program Chairs: James Joshi from University of Pittsburgh, USA and Prof. Elisa Bertino, from Purdue University, USA. Together with their program committee, they have assembled a strong program from submissions and invited papers. The other committee members made similarly important contributions, including the panel chairs: Dr. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos of CSIRO, Australia, and Prof. Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA; workshop program chairs: Prof. Gail-Joon Ahn of Arizona State University, USA, and Prof. Lakshmish Ramaswamy of University of Georgia, USA; industry program chairs: Dr. Claudio Bartonlini of HP and Dr. Yuecel Karabulut of SAP; tutorial chairs: Prof. Barbara Carminati of University of Insubria, Italy, and Dr. Bugra Gedik of IBM; publication chair Prof. Anna Squicciarini of Penn State University, USA; and publicity chair Dr. Youna Jung of University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Finally, we would like to express our special thanks to our local organization chair, Prof. Lotzi Boloni of University of Central Florida, USA, and conference coordinator and finance chair, Karen Decker of ICST, who did all the hard work. We also thank the steering committee of the CollaborateCom, particularly Prof. Imrich Chlamtac of University of Trento, Italy (chair), and Prof. Ling Liu of Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Without the support and dedication from these volunteers, we would not be able to assemble such an interesting and attractive conference program.