Message from the Symposium Chair

First, on behalf of the conference organization committee, we are delighted to welcome you to the 26 IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2007). The SRDS is a traditional forum for researchers and practitioners who are interested in distributed systems design and development, particularly with properties such as reliability, availability, safety, security, trust, and real time. This year the conference took place in Beijing, the capital city of China. It is the first time that SRDS is held in China. In recent years, with the rapid development of the Chinese economy, China has made tremendous progress in the science and technology research. The Chinese government, as well as many Chinese enterprises, is paying more attention to the IT R&D. The investment has increased from year to year. The reliable and distributed system research is an important and challenging topic for all researchers. It is also continuously supported by the Chinese government. Many Chinese universities and institutes consider it an important research area and devote a lot of effort to this field. Beihang University, founded in 1952, is one of the top Chinese universities in computer science. The School of Computer Science runs two national key labs and one national key lab of defense technology. More than 30 faculties and 100 graduate students are involved in this area. The SRDS 2007 is a great opportunity for researchers all over the world to share their thoughts and ideas. We are happy to see so many important contributions that have been submitted to the conference this year. We have kept the paper acceptance rate at a low level, which reflects our goal to make SRDS an important conference with highquality research. We still insist on a single track program this year so that attendees may discuss with the authors sufficiently without worrying about missing any interesting topics. I would like to thank all members of the Program Committee and external reviewers for their excellent work in reviewing submitted papers—an important factor toward producing a successful conference. I would also thank the Program Committee Co-Chairs, Roberto Baldoni and I-Ling Yen, for their hard work in organizing the review process. Thanks go to Drs. Chunming Hu, Zongxia Du, Tianyu Wo, Peng Tang, Xiaofei Zhang, Leilei and the entire team at Beihang University who were involved in this event. They really did a good job in making the conference a success. Thanks also go to Professor Jie Xu and his colleagues at the University of Leeds for their generous help. We wish to thank our keynote speakers for sharing their insights, as well as the other authors and presenters for their contributions. We also thank IEEE and NSFC for their support. Special thanks to our sponsors, VIA Tech and Inspire. Finally, we thank the Steering Committee for their help and guidance in staging this symposium. Thanks to all of you for attending SRDS 2007. Enjoy the conference, the hotel, the food, the beautiful capital, and the splendid sites of China.