Message from the Program Chairs

On behalf of the Program Committee of the Fifth International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom-2009), it is our honor to welcome you to CollaborateCom-2009 in Crystal City, Washington D.C. It has been a great pleasure as Program Committee Co-Chairs to help organize this year’s impressive scientific and technical program and technical proceedings. The proceedings contain papers selected as well as invited for presentation at the conference and two workshops. We hope these proceedings will serve as a valuable reference for both academic and industrial communities.

This year’s conference has been jointly sponsored by Create-Net, IEEE Computer Society, and the International Communication Sciences and Technology Association (ICST). CollaborateCom serves as the principal international forum for bringing together academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, and students interested in systems, networks, and applications that support collaboration. This year, CollaborateCom received 81 submissions, a 15% increase from last year. The Technical Program Committee selected 28 papers (acceptance rate of 34.6%) after a rigorous review and a brief follow up discussion. Most of the papers were reviewed by three or four referees. The authors were asked to address each and every comment made by the referees for improving the quality of their papers. Our program this year includes three keynote speeches, two panels, two tutorials and 12 technical sessions.

We would like to thank many dedicated people who contributed to the success of this event. In particular, we want to express our gratitude to the Program Committee members and the external referees. Their diligent work in reviewing the papers and participating in a follow up discussion has been instrumental in raising the quality of the accepted papers. We extend our sincere and deepest gratitude to Panel Chairs: Prof. Isabel Cruz, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, Prof. Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and Prof. Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany; Workshop Chairs: Prof. Gail-Joon Ahn of University of North Carolina at Charollette, USA and Heri Ramampiaro, NTNU, Norway; Industry Program Chair: Dr. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos of CSIRO, Australia; Tutorial Chairs: Prof. Barbara Carminati of University of Insubria, Italy, and Prof. Keke Chen of Wright State University, USA; Publication Chairs: Prof. James Caverlee, Texas A&M University, USA and Heri Ramampiaro, NTNU, Norway; and Publicity Chairs: Prof. Anna Squicciarini of the Pennsylvania State University, USA and Heri Ramampiaro, NTNU, Norway.

Most importantly, we want to thank the authors for submitting excellent papers; it is because of their work that we have an outstanding program covering a variety of important topics in the area of collaborative systems, applications and technologies.

Our deepest appreciation also goes to the Keynote Speakers Prof. Haym Hirsh of Rutgers University who is currently the Division Director of NSF IIS program, Dr. Nabil Adam, who is currently serving as the Fellow at the Science & Technology Directorate of the US Department of Homeland Security, and Dr. Cynthia K. Pickering, Senior Principal Engineer and Director of IT Research Collaboration Lab at Intel for sharing their insights and experiences with the conference attendees, and to the workshop organizers for their effort in organizing the event. We also extend special thanks to the organizers of the TrustCol-2009 (Prof. Dongwan Shin of New Mexico Technology, USA and Prof. Mohamed Shehad of University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA) and CollaborateSN-2009 (Prof. Babara Carminati of University of Insubria, Italy and Prof. Murat Kantarcioglu of University of Texas at Dallas, USA), and the organizers of the two tutorial sessions, Prof. Murat Kantarcioglu of University of Texas at Dallas and Dr. Alexandre Passant of National University of Ireland, Galway.

We would like to express our deepest thanks to the General Chairs, Prof. James Joshi of University of Pittsburgh, USA and Dr. Tao Zhang of Telcordia Technologies, USA, as well as the steering committee of the CollaborateCom, in particular Prof. Imrich Chlamatac of Unviersity of Trento, Italy (Chair) and Prof. Ling Liu of Georgia Institute of Technology, USA for their continuous help/feedback and unequivocal support throughout the year without which this conference could not have been brought to fruition. Finally, our sincere appreciation and gratitude to our local organization chair, Prof. Songqiang Chen of George Mason University, USA, conference coordinator and finance chair, Gergely Nagy of ICST, and other members of the ICST technical and publication team, who did all the hard work.

Enjoy CollaborateCom!!

PC Co-Chairs
Eun K. Park (University of Missouri, USA),
Juan Quemada (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain)
Weisong Shi (Wayne State University, USA)