Dan C. Marinescu

It was during the Vietnam war when the author landed in the land of free at the most liberal university and listened to the fiery anti wear speeches of Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis. He was coming from a small country on the shores of the Black Sea where an Orwellian experiment to control the entire population of a country was taking place. His stories are about transformations, from the barbaric times brought about to his country by the end of the Second World War and then to life in academia, in the US and Europe as a computer science professor. Some of the stories are about information revolution that cracked the door open to an underworld of darkness and is threatening human society with dangers it is unprepared to face, and the suffocating rate of disruptive technologies that have dramatically increased not only the danger of Valhalla's destruction, but much more.

Papers collected here, from a December 2001 workshop held at the University of Central Florida, examine topics related to process coordination and ubiquitous computing. Papers on coordination models discuss areas such as space-based coordination and open distributed systems, global virtual data stru

Complex Systems and Clouds: A Self-Organization and Self-Management Perspective provides insights into the intricate world of self-organizing systems. Large scale distributed computer systems have evolved into very complex systems and are at the point where they need to borrow self-adapting organizing concepts from nature. The book explores complexity in big distributed systems and in the natural processes in physics and chemistry, building a platform for understanding how self-organization in big distributed systems can be achieved. It goes beyond the theoretical description of self-organization to present principles for designing self-organizing systems, and concludes by showing the need for a paradigm shift in the development of large-scale systems from strictly deterministic to non-deterministic and adaptive.

A new discipline, Quantum Information Science, has emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century at the intersection of Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science. Quantum Information Processing is an application of Quantum Information Science which covers the transformation, storage, and transmission of quantum information; it represents a revolutionary approach to information processing. Classical and Quantum Information covers topics in quantum computing, quantum information theory, and quantum error correction, three important areas of quantum information processing. Quantum information theory and quantum error correction build on the scope, concepts, methodology, and techniques developed in the context of their close relatives, classical information theory and classical error correcting codes.

This book is a collection of articles on topics related to process coordination and ubiquitous computing presented at a mini-workshop held on the campus of the University of Central Florida in December 2001.

Today, an ever-expanding set of human activities, ranging from business processes to healthcare to education and research, is dependent upon the Internet. Most processes involve a workflow, the coordinated execution of multiple activities. In a given application, once the key stages of the workflow have been isolated, an infrastructure to coordinate the handling of individual cases is necessary. Internet-Based Workflow Management shows how to understand, develop, and use societal services for process coordination in an information grid with a rich set of hardware and software resources. In such a semantic web, individual services offered by autonomous service providers can be composed to perform the complex tasks involved in emerging new applications. The book is designed to be accessible to IT practitioners and researchers as well as to those without formal training in computer science. Businesspeople, scientists, engineers, or anyone else involved in the development of Internet-centric applications will find the book an invaluable resource. The coverage includes: *Workflow management *Distributed systems *Modeling of distributed systems and workflows *Networking *Quality of service *Open systems *Software agents *Knowledge management *Planning In the final chapter of the book, Dan Marinescu brings together all these elements in a case study that shows the step-by-step development of middleware for process coordination. This middleware is available under an open source license at www.wiley.com.