SAC

Welcome to the 26th International Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2011). For the past 25 years, SAC has become a major international venue for computing researchers and applied practitioners to convene and share ideas on recent developments in a variety of applied areas of Information Technology. The success of SAC has been the consolidation of a wide range of applied areas into specialized modules called Tracks. Each of the Tracks are then organized and administered by experts in the respective areas by instituting program committees, carrying out blind reviews according to the ACM guidelines, and finally selecting the highly qualified papers for the Track. Since its inception seven years ago, the Poster Sessions at SAC have become a tradition, and this year again the Poster will be an integral part of the Technical Program at SAC 2011.

The open Call for Track Proposals and after prescreening the proposals, 40 Tracks were finally accepted for SAC 2011. The prescreening and selections were made based on the success of those Tracks in the previous SACs as well as targeting new and emerging areas. The Call for Papers for these Tracks attracted 790 final paper submissions from 35 different countries. The submitted papers underwent the blind review process and 237 papers were finally accepted as full papers for inclusion in the Conference Proceedings and presentation during the Symposium. The final acceptance rate for SAC 2011 is 30% for the overall track. In addition to the accepted full papers, 59 papers that received high enough review scores were accepted as short papers for the Poster Program.

The Technical Program Organization of SAC 2011 is made possible through the hard work of many people from the scientific community who have volunteered and committed many hours to make it a success. Much credit goes to all the Track Chairs for making SAC 2011 Technical Sessions a huge success. Some of the popular Tracks had an unprecedented submissions and having three blind reviews for each paper was certainly a major challenge. Once again this year, we follow the previous years' tradition of organizing various tracks into six different themes. The Symposium Proceedings and the technical presentations are focused around these themes to form a series of related track sessions.