CASCON

Welcome to CASCON 2009, the 19th Annual IBM Centre for Advanced Studies Conference. CASCON, the premiere annual computer science and software engineering conference in Canada, is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.

This year's theme of "Computing for a Smarter Planet" embodies the challenges facing our world and the need for innovative software system solutions to help in meeting these challenges. The 88 submitted papers by and large reflect this new way of thinking. It is also reflected by the fact that this year CASCON is "going green", which includes switching from distributing printed proceedings to providing the proceedings on a USB stick.

CASCON is a truly an international conference. There were paper submissions from 17 countries from four continents. Papers from Canada represented 55% of the submissions with 15% coming from India and 9% from the USA. There were 239 listed authors on the submitted papers. 76% of the authors are from academia, 10% from industry and 14% from Government labs.

We followed a rigorous process to ensure that accepted papers met a standard of high quality. Each paper was reviewed by at least three members of our Program Committee, followed by a 10 days on-line discussion period. Ultimately, we accepted 22 papers (25% acceptance rate) and recommended to authors of 14 papers that they submit their work to the Posters track. The resulting program features four sessions on Software Engineering, two sessions on Advanced Systems and Architectures, and a session each on Cloud Computing and SOA, Business Intelligence/Database Technology and Compilers. We hope you will take the opportunity to attend the Papers sessions following the morning keynotes.