Welcome to IWQOS'97 in New York City Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of research within the field of Quality of Service (QOS). Much of that work has taken place within the context of QOS support for distributed multimedia systems, operating systems, transport subsystems, networks, devices and formal languages. The objective of the Fifth International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQOS) is to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners working in all facets of QOS research. While many workshops and conferences offer technical sessions on the...

This proceedings contains the papers presented at the 2004 IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing (NPC 2004), held at Wuhan, China, from October 18 to 20, 2004. The goal of the conference was to establish an international forum for engineers and scientists to present their ideas and experiences in network and parallel computing. A total of 338 submissions were received in response to the call for papers. These papers werefrom Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, France, G- many, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxemburg, Malaysia, N- way, Spain,...

TRACK 1: Innovative Applications in the Public Sector The integration of multimedia based applications and the information superhighway fundamentally concerns the creation of a communication technology to support the ac- tivities of people. Communication is a profoundly social activity involving interactions among groups or individuals, common standards of exchange, and national infrastruc- tures to support telecommunications activities. The contributions of the invited speakers and others in this track begin to explore the social dimension of communication within the context of integrated,...