The general trend of modern network devices towards greater intelligence and programmability is accelerating the development of systems that are increasingly autonomous and to a certain degree self-managing. Examples range from router scripting environments to fully programmable server blades. This has opened up a new field of computer science research, reflected in this new volume.

This selection of contributions to the first ever international workshop on network-embedded management applications (NEMA) features six papers selected from submissions to the workshop, held in October...