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Mobilware 2008

Message from the Technical Program Chair


I am honored and it is really a pleasure for me, too, to welcome you to the First International Conference on Mobile Wireless Middleware, Operating Systems, and Applications (MOBILWARE), in Innsbruck, Austria. The conference has been possible thanks to the sponsorship of ICST and Create-Net, whose resources and conference organization experience were precious and fundamental for the success of the event. I truly hope that you will enjoy and benefit from the papers in the program and that the high technical quality we put together this year will be the best leverage towards the continuous success of this event in the years to come.

We had more than 80 submissions from 28 different countries, reflecting the international interest for the conference topics. After a thorough review process, we finalized an excellent technical program including 42 papers accepted from open call and 5 invited papers, for an overall acceptance rate equal to 53%. Also given that the conference is in its first year, we think that these submission data already represent an excellent result and a manifest practical demonstration of the interest in the MOBILWARE addressed issues. Of course, these data will also work as an encouragement and a strong stimulus to try to still improve the conference popularity and technical excellence in its next editions.

Accepted Papers Statistics
Europe - 29 papers:
Germany (10), Finland (4), France (3), Italy (3), Spain (3), Hungary (2), Turkey (2), Greece (1), The Netherlands (1)
Asia - 10 papers:
Japan (4), R.P. China (2), India (2), Bangladesh (1), South Korea (1)
North America - 5 papers:
USA (4), Canada (1) Africa and Middle East - 3 papers:
Algeria (1), Egypt (1), Iran (1)


The MOBILWARE technical program also includes two excellent keynote speeches that we have invited for their potential to be of extreme relevance for the expected conference audience. Many thanks to the keynote speakers for accepting to relevantly contribute to the quality and the success of the event; I hope that they also appreciate and benefit from the warm atmosphere and the highly interactive community we are trying to create with this conference series.

The technical program well reflects the current priorities in mobile wireless middleware, software support infrastructures, and applications. Several papers address network, systems, and service management issues in dependence of location and context; several contributions relate to support infrastructure properties, such as middleware architectures and security. In addition, a considerable part of the technical program is devoted to consolidated and emerging application areas for mobile services, such as multimedia, wireless sensor and vehicular network applications, and surveillance systems. Also lower-layer issues such as autonomic interface management, advanced forms of vertical handoff, mobility modeling, and application-specific communication encoding have demonstrated to attract the attention of conference authors. I really hope that the overall program will be of genuine interest for the attendants and will provide an exhaustive overview of the primary research directions active in the field.

Moreover, I want to express my sincere gratitude to all the authors who have submitted their papers to this first-year event and to all the reviewers whose accurate work was crucial for the finalization of this high-quality technical program. Thanks to all of them, I believe that finally this collection of selected papers as a whole can pleasantly introduce the MOBILWARE attendants to the challenging arena of middleware supports for mobile services and can help in giving a fresh sketch of currently hot topics and state-of-the-art solutions in the field.

Finally, but crucial as anyone in this conference organization, I would like to sincerely thank: Linda Jiang Xie and Tuna Tugcu for their generous trust in my work and for their coordination support; Antonio Manzalini for the organization of the associated industry event called Mobile Service InDustry B2B Event (M-SIDE), which significantly contributes to the visibility and to the quality of MOBILWARE'08; Carlo Giannelli for his careful and tireless work as Publication Chair; Zsuzsa Kaszab for her continuous support and crucial suggestions about logistics and publication contacts; and, least but definitely not last, Imrich Chlamtac who trusted in the challenge of starting this new conference and gave us the opportunity to have a Special Issue of the ACM Mobile Networks and Applications Journal with selected best contributions from MOBILWARE. My warmest wishes to all of you to really enjoy the conference!

Paolo Bellavista
Technical Program Chair, MOBILWARE 2008