Message from the General Chairs

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 2009 in Washington D.C., is the fifth conference of the series and it reflects the accelerated growth of collaborative computing, both as research and application areas.

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, social web, and cloud computing, 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: Prof. Weisong Shi from Wayne State University, USA, Prof. Juan Quemada from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain, and Prof. Eun K. Park University of Missouri, 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: Prof. Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, Prof. Isabel Cruz, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and Prof. Wolfgang Prinz , Frauenhofer-FIT, Germany; workshop program chairs: Prof. Gail-Joon Ahn of Arizona State University, USA, and Prof. Heri Ramampiaro, NTNU, Norway; industry program chairs: Dr. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, CSIRO, Australia; tutorial chairs: Prof. Barbara Carminati of University of Insubria, Italy, and Dr. Keke Chen, Wright State University, USA; publication chairs: James Caverlee, Texas A&M, USA, and Heri Ramampiaro, NTNU, Norway, and Publicity Chairs: Prof. Anna Squicciarini of Penn State University, USA, and Heri Ramampiaro, NTNU, Norway.

Finally, we would like to express our special thanks to our local organization chair, Prof. Songqing Chen, George Mason University, USA, and the conference coordinator, Gergely Nagy 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.

In our efforts to increase the quality of the conference, this year, we have also introduced the Best Paper award and the Student Travel supports. We express our deep gratitude to the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh for providing support for the Student Travel.

General Co-Chairs,
Tao Zhang (Telcordia Technologies, USA),
James Joshi (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

Washington D.C., November 12, 2009