Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Middleware for pervasive and ad-hoc computing
Venue: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 115 (2005)

It is a great pleasure to introduce the ACM/IEEE/IFIP Middleware Workshop Program for Grenoble 2005. This is the fourth time that Middleware has included a Workshop Program, and the levels of interest and the standard of submissions continue to be extremely high. This year we have five workshops. The Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM05) is our most venerable institution, and is now in its fourth incarnation, having started out at Middleware 2000 in New York and run at every Middleware since. Two of the other workshops are also well established, having run previously in Rio and Toronto. These are the Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing (MGC05), and the Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-hoc Computing (MPAC05). MPAC this year is joined by Didier Donsez and his team whose proposal for a workshop on 'Middleware for Sensor-Based Services' has been merged into MPAC. As a consequence, this event is running over two days rather than the usual one day.Another workshop that is continuing a lively tradition is the Doctoral Symposium on Middleware. This popular event has worked particularly well in the past and represents a wonderful opportunity for young reseachers in our field to present their work to a mock thesis committee of mentors and to receive valuable and supportive feeback. This year we also have a new workshop: the 1st Workshop on Aspect Oriented Middleware Development (AOMD05). This highlights what seems to be a promising area of synergistic research that has recently been receiving a lot of attention. We look forward to a productive dialogue on the relationship between aspectisation techniques and middleware techniques.Building on the success of the 2003 and 2004 workshops, this year the workshop sought to build on the results presented in a special issue of the Journal for Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, and to develop a roadmap for research on the essential middleware abstractions and infrastructures for ad-hoc and pervasive computing in general, and sensor-based services in particular.Over the past decade, large-scale ad-hoc and pervasive computing environments have grabbed the attention of the research community as evidenced by the large number of research and development projects in the area. However, despite considerable progress, the promise of pervasive computing still remains elusive. The diversity in currently available devices, networking infrastructure and information content has complicated research efforts, forcing many projects to focus only on point-examples of this technology.This workshop is premised on our belief that underpinning middleware mechanisms are central in weaving together the multitude of sensing, computing, communication and information technologies. In this respect, middleware for pervasive computing and ad-hoc networking provides two core research areas. In particular, pervasive computing middleware will allow you to take advantage of the resources in your environment to tailor your services and applications for seamless access and unrestricted mobility. Ad-hoc networking middleware will permit the formation of ad-hoc communities for new applications. However, such pervasive and ad-hoc environments pose some serious challenges to existing middleware technologies and approaches.