Pervasive 2006 Workshop Proceedings. 4th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (PERVASIVE 2006)

While the Pervasive 2006 Conference programme provides a forum for timely publication of important new results across the field of pervasive computing, the associated workshop programme is designed to provide a forum for people to discuss areas of special interest within pervasive computing with like-minded researchers and practitioners. The Pervasive 2006 workshops have been chosen to afford their participants the opportunity to examine an area with a selected focus in an open environment for the free exchange of views. The focus of these workshops is therefore on speculative ideas, emerging trends, new concepts, and research direction to be pursued in the future. In response to the call for workshops, we received some fifteen proposals covering topics as diverse as socially-driven system design, pervasive gaming, and the theoretical foundations of pervasive computing. Taken together these proposals capture in some small way the diversity of the pervasive computing community as well as its inter-disciplinarily. In an ideal world we would have been able to support all of these proposals but were unfortunately only able to select eight to be hosted in conjunction with Pervasive 2006. Criteria employed in selecting workshops included their ability to attract a critical mass of attendees, to foster interesting discussion, particularly between different disciplines, and the likelihood of the workshops generating a tangible output. We were also keen to foster workshops taking the community in new directions. We hope the set of workshops choose will indeed meet these expectations – we already know that they have attracted a significant number of submissions many of which are collected together in this volume. Of course, the easy part of the process is selecting the workshops. The real work is done by the workshop proposers and organisers and their respective programme committees who have devoted considerable time and energy to shaping the individual workshops. We are indebted to all the proposers for their interest in contributing to Pervasive 2006 and to the organisers for their on-going efforts to make the workshop programme a success. We look forward to a day of interesting and lively discussion about the future of Pervasive computing in Dublin on May 7th 2006.