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Message from the Ambi-sys 2008 Chairs

On behalf of the organizing committee, it is a pleasure to welcome you to Ambi-sys 2008, the 1st International Conference on Ambient Media and Systems. Ambient media and systems represent the vision of an all-encompassing multimedia networking environment with human interaction at its core. The interest shown in this conference and workshops is strong evidence for the future importance of this general area. The Ambi-sys conference brings together researchers and scientists from the disciplines and areas crucial to the development of this area. In its first year, Ambi-sys features an impressive range of high quality contributions to the main conference and three workshops:

• SOMITAS 2008 - First Workshop on Software Organisation and MonIToring of Ambient Systems, http://liris.cnrs.fr/somitas/
• AMDIT 2008 - International Workshop on Ambient Media Delivery and Interactive Television, http://aria.asu.edu/amdit08/
• HAS 2008 - Haptic User Interfaces in Ambient Media Systems, http://hasworkshop.org/

This provides an excellent foundation for the future development of the conference in subsequent years, representing a diverse and innovative program.

Starting a complex international event such as Ambi-sys has required significant dedication and effort from the organizing committee. We wish to express our sincere appreciation to all the Organizing Committee members for their excellent work. In particular, we wish to thank our steering committee chair Imrich Chlamtac for his restless contribution and advise; ChingYao Huang, Jiangchuan Liu, Klaus Moessner and Abdulmotaleb El Saddik for taking care of the technical program; Michael Weber for organizing the panel discussion; K. Selcuk for organizing the workshops; Jeffrey Z. Tao for hard work on the proceedings; Rosa Iglesias for widely broadcasting the call for papers; Pradeep Kumar Atrey and M. Anwar Hossain for hard work in keeping the web site up to date; and Atif Alamri and Mohamad Eid for chairing local arrangements. Last but not least, we wish to thank Kitti Kovacs. Without her personal effort, the conference wouldn't have become reality.

A final word to our sponsors: We gratefully thank the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICST) and Create-Net for sponsoring Ambi-sys. Additionally, we gladly acknowledge the technical sponsoring by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and in particular the SIGCHI.

We wish all the participants a very enjoyable and professionally fruitful experience at Ambi-sys 2008 in the pleasant venue of Quebec City, Canada.