Message from the General Chair
It is a pleasure to welcome the participants of EDCC-7 in Kaunas, the second city of the Republic of Lithuania. Kaunas is a university town – we have 12 diverse institutions of higher education with close to 50000 students in the city and its suburbs. The conference is hosted by Vytautas Magnus University. VMU is a general scope university with emphasis on the humanities and social sciences, and with a strong Faculty of Informatics. The University was founded in 1922 as the first university of the Republic of Lithuania that had regained its independence in 1918 after 122 years of captivity within the Russian Empire. After the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union in 1944, the university was closed in 1950. Only the faculties of engineering and medicine were kept functioning as separate Institutes. The reopening of VMU as an autonomous, North American style university took place in 1989, as the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart. The parliament of Lithuania declared the reestablishment of independence on 11 March 1990, and VMU has grown from 180 first-year students in 1989 to over 8000 students today.
EDCC-7, the Seventh European Dependable Computing Conference is preceded by EDCC conferences held in Berlin (1994), Taormina, Italy (1996), Prague (1999), Toulouse (2002), Budapest (2005), and Coimbra, Portugal (2006). We look forward to continuing the tradition of lively and informative meetings in Kaunas in May of 2008. We hope that the participants will take some time to visit Kaunas and the capital city of Vilnius after the conference. A travel agency will be available to arrange such tours – please stay for the weekend and enjoy Lithuanian hospitality a little longer.
The program of EDCC-7 consists of the 17 full-length papers contained in this volume, the panel discussion “How Hard Is Assessing and Measuring Resilience?”, the Keynote panel “Future Challenges to Dependable and Secure Computing”, the Keynote address by Mr. Angelo Marino, Research Programme Officer of the European Commission, and over 20 short papers called “Fast Abstracts” that describe work in progress or state positions on new or controversial issues. Texts of all presentations that are not contained in this volume will be published in the Supplemental Volume of EDCC-7 Proceedings.
The organization of EDCC-7 has required the dedicated volunteer efforts of many colleagues in the fields of dependable and secure computing. My most sincere thanks go to Ricardo Jiménez-Peris, the Chair of the Program Committee and all its members, and to Ernesto Jiménez-Merino, who edited this volume as well as the Supplemental volume of the Proceedings. Thanks to all members of the Organizing Committee whose names appear in the following Program Chair’s message, and to my VMU colleagues Juozas Augutis and Kęstutis Šidlauskas who took on the local arrangements task. Mr. Valdas Kubilius, the Director of the World Lithuanians’ Center and his staff are managing the registration and social events. Thanks to them for taking on the task on very short notice. The Chair of the Steering Committee, my dear colleague Luca Simoncini, was most helpful in many aspects of organizing EDCC-7, including the job of convincing me to take on the General Chair’s position. Should I thank him for that ? That remains to be seen on May 10.
Finally, EDCC-7 has a new and very informative add-on feature. In the morning of May 9 there will be presented a comprehensive overview of the results thus far obtained by the three-year (2006-2008) EC 6th Framework project ReSIST – Resilience for Survivability in IST. ReSIST is a Network of Excellence with 18 academic and industrial partners from 8 countries in Europe. In addition to this overview session, members of the ReSIST project are also presenting regular and short papers and taking part in both panels. Please stay for the free ReSIST session and enjoy an advanced look at their results. Many thanks to ReSIST Coordinator Jean-Claude Laprie and to all his project colleagues for their most valuable contribution.
Algirdas Avižienis, General Chair of EDCC-7
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