Half a century ago, S. Chandrasekhar wrote these words in the preface to his 1 celebrated and successful book: In this monograph an attempt has been made to present the theory of stellar dy- namics as a branch of classical dynamics - a discipline in the same general category as celestial mechanics. ... ] Indeed, several of the problems of modern stellar dy- namical theory are so severely classical that it is difficult to believe that they are not already discussed, for example, in Jacobi's Vorlesungen. Since then, stellar dynamics has developed in several directions and at var- ious levels,...

Today, technologies for engineering and deployment of cooperative information systems have become increasingly critical in the construction of practically all types of large-scale distributed systems. Stimulating forums with different focuses are thus still in need of researchers and professionals from academia and industry to exchange ideas and experience and to establish working relationships. The idea to organize in China an academic event focusing on current topics in the field was born during the IFIP World Computer Congress 2000 that was held in Beijing, China. And here are the...