DOA-SVI 2011 PC co-chairs' message

Welcome to the 12th International Symposium on Distributed Objects, Middleware and Applications (DOA 2010), held in Crete, Greece, October 2010. The DOA conference series has become a key forum for presenting and discussing new perspectives and exciting research results. Over the years, DOA topics have included new computing paradigms like Web Services and SOA, cloud computing, virtualization, and many others, dealing with new new problems and ideas as well as with the design and deployment of practical applications. DOA has always managed to reach the right balance between theoretical and practical aspects of IT research. Hopefully, this year is no exception. Much interest has focused on the emerging paradigm of cloud computing, with papers covering topics as diverse as virtualization management, cloud-based service environments and cloud encryption and security; but other key topics of distributed computing, especially the ones related to services, continued to be well represented among DOA submissions. Contributions based on experimental work were particularly encouraged, with early results also accepted where they were considered to be sufficiently important to a wider audience. The quality of submissions this year was very high, again following a well-established DOA tradition. All of the papers passed through a rigorous selection process, with at least three reviewers per paper and much discussion on the relative merits of accepting each paper throughout the process. At the end, we decided to accept 12 regular papers of the original 27 submissions. Two more submissions were accepted as posters. Putting together a conference like DOA is always a team effort, and many different contributions need to be acknowledged. First of all we would like to gratefully acknowledge the work of all of the authors, whether or not their paper was accepted. Thanks for choosing DOA to present your research work. Secondly, we are grateful to the dedicated work of the leading experts in the field from all over the world who served on the Program Committee and whose names appear in the proceedings. Thanks for helping us in putting together an excellent program. Finally, we would like to thank the whole OTM team for its support and guidance, including the General Co-chairs Tharam Dillon and Robert Meersman, the Publication Chairs, and the secretariat. The proceedings you hold in your hand are the result of the hard work that everyone has put into DOA. We hope you enjoy them and maybe consider submitting something in the future.