Computing systems including hardware, software, communication and networks are growing with ever increasing scale and heterogeneity, and becoming overly complex for even skilled engineering administrators to optimally and efficiently manage under highly dynamic and uncertain runtime situations. Concurrently, pervasive devices and systems are getting more ubiquitous and are being embedded in everyday objects and ambient environments, where the system working conditions are often worst and there is usually no skilled people specifically to manage them. To cope with the growing and ubiquitous complexity in system management, autonomic computing focuses on self-managed computing and communication systems that perform self-awareness, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, self-protection and other self-ware operations with high-level supervision by humans. It is a grand challenge and a long term goal to realize the ultimate autonomic computing and communications vision of fully context-aware self-managing and self-organizing systems.

Any autonomic system must be trustworthy to avoid the risk of losing control and retain confidence that the system will not fail. Trusted computing targets computing and communication systems as well as services that are predictable, traceable, controllable, assessable, sustainable, dependable, privacy protect-able, etc. The emerging ubiquitous communication/network infrastructures, in conjunction with the Internet, enable heterogeneous computers/services, and even their components to be universally connected towards global computing. Trust and/or distrust relationships in such global computing exist ubiquitously in the course of dynamic interaction and cooperation of user-to-system, system-to-system, component-to-component, and user-to-user who are using the systems. It is another grand challenge to make truly trustworthy computing and communication systems that are massively distributed, loosely coupled, greatly heterogeneous, highly dynamic, etc.

Autonomic and trusted computing and communications need joint research efforts covering many disciplines, ranging from computer science and engineering, to the natural sciences to the social sciences. It requires scientific and technological advances in a wide variety of fields, as well as new software, system architectures and communication systems that support the effective integration of the constituent technologies.

JoATC addresses the most innovative research and development in this multidisciplinary area and includes all technical aspects related to autonomic and trusted computing and communications, with emphasis on methodologies, models, semantics, awareness, architectures, middleware, networks, tools, interfaces, designs, implementations, experiments, and evaluations. In addition JoATC addresses non-technical but crucial factors in the practical applications of autonomic and trusted computing and communications related to economics, society, culture, ethics and so on.

The objective of the JoATC journal is to provide an outstanding channel for academics, industrial professionals, educators and policy makers working in the different disciplines to contribute and to disseminate innovative and important new work in the grand challenging fields of autonomic and trusted computing and communications.

Scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, graduate students, managers, and industrial professionals.

JoATC is a refereed international journal, initially published quarterly, providing an international forum to report, discuss and exchange experimental or theoretical results, novel designs, work-in-progress, experience, case studies, and trend-setting ideas. Papers should be of a quality that represents the state-of-the-art and the latest advances in autonomic and trusted computing and communications in terms of methodologies, models, semantics, awareness, architectures, middleware, networks, tools, designs, implementations, experiments, evaluations, applications, non-technical factors and stimulating future trends.

The JoATC journal covers all research and application aspects of the autonomic and trusted computing and communications. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: