We are pleased to welcome you to the eleventh edition of the Middleware conference. The program this year is a sign of the robustness, activity, and continued growth of the Middleware community. As computing technology around us has evolved rapidly over the past decade, our notions of middleware have also adapted so that we stay focused on the most challenging and relevant problems for the present and future. As a result, this year’s program features papers that belong to both traditional areas as well as new directions. Cloud computing, social middleware, and transactional memory are some of the vanguard areas that you will find in this year’s selection of papers. In addition, topics that have always been central to the community are also prominent this year, including publish-subscribe, multi-cast, reliability, legacy, location-awareness, trust, and security. The community’s wise evolution reflects the dynamic role that middleware continues to play in the development of current software systems. The program underscores the competitive selection process applied by us and the technical program committee: out of 116 papers submitted this year, we accepted 18 for regular publication. In addition Middleware 2010 also includes a new category of “Big Ideas Papers,” which are bold white papers with the potential to drive longer-term innovation in the field. We selected one “big ideas” paper this year. Our industrial track once again brings forth papers that explore middleware foundations in the context of industrial practice. Finally, multiple workshops and a doctoral symposium round o? Middleware this year, making it an attractive conference for students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners. |