Message from the TACS 2006 Chairs

As computer systems become increasingly large and complex, their trustworthiness and self-manageability play an important role in supporting the next-generation science, engineering, and commercial applications. For critical applications, users rely on the confidentiality, correctness, and availability provided by such systems. A complicating factor is that the technology used to develop large and complex systems introduce new kinds of accidental and deliberate faults causing such systems to fail. Designing, analyzing, and evolving such complex systems is non-trivial. Autonomic computing appears to be a promising solution to this problem. It will enable systems to manage themselves by providing self-optimization, self-healing, self-configuration, and self-protection. Trusted and autonomic computing and communications need synergistic research efforts covering many disciplines, ranging from computer science and engineering, the natural sciences, to the social sciences. It requires scientific and technological advances in a wide variety of fields, as well as new software, system architectures, and communication systems that support the effective and holistic integration of the constituent technologies.