This book presents a collection of 31 revised reviewed papers developed from contributions presented at the International Workshop on Future Directions in Distributed Computing, held in Bertinoro, Italy in June 2002. Also included are 7 particularly commissioned invited papers to round the coverage of relevant topics and four section surveys.

The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of distributed systems, exploring next-generation communication infrastrucutures and applications, challenges in distributed information and data management, and challenges and opportunities in applications of distributed computing technologies. All in all, the book is a unique account and proposed agenda of issues to be addressed in future research in distributed computing.