by Aljosa Pasic and Jim Clarke

The emerging service centric ICT paradigm is changing the way infrastructure and applications will be managed and delivered in the next few years. The new challenges brought about by this paradigm and, in particular, the underlying security considerations are the main focus of the IST FP6 coordination action ESFORS (European Security Forum for Web services, software and systems), as well as of the working group "Trust, Security and Dependability" of the NESSI (Networked European Software and Service Initiative) European technology platform. The recent workshop held in Paris on 6-8 September 2006 shows that there is growing mutual interest on research in security and software engineering. The workshop was attended by more than 70 participants coming both from industry and academia. This article presents the main workshop conclusions as well as related technology roadmapping activities.

by Christel Baier and Holger Hermanns

The 17th International Conference on Concurrency Theory was hosted by the University of Bonn, Germany, from 27-30 August 2006. There were 267 registered participants to CONCUR 2006 and its satellite events from nineteen countries around the world.

by Gerhard Chroust

The terrible events between 1914 and 1945, World War I, the world economic crisis and World War II, induced scientists like Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Norbert Wiener, W. Ross Ashby and their colleagues to offer a way out: holistic rather than fragmented thinking. This led to two new sciences: systems theory and cybernetics. In 1980 the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR) was founded as a federation of all systems societies. The celebrations of its 25th anniversary provided a chance to look at the successful history of the IFSR and at the current and future state of the systems sciences.

by Hana Rudová

The 6th International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT) was organised by the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University, a member of the Czech Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (CRCIM). The conference took place in Brno, Czech Republic from 30 August to 1 September and was attended by almost a hundred delegates from 23 countries.