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	Invitation

At dawn of the new century, the sciences and technologies of information and communication (STIC) transform our world, condition its economic and societal development, give birth to new infrastructures for exchanges and interactions, education, health, world security, scientific research.

After the rail, road, electricity, telephone infrastructures, information is a new infrastructure. Compared to its predecessoors, the informational infrastructure is more powerful, more complex but richer, has more capacity, has stronger economic and social implications, hereby progressively shaping the Knowledge Society.

The technological evolution of STIC during the last decades is far from being completed. The challenges posed to the STIC community for pursuing the evolution share a dramatic jump in complexity, be it for the fall of elementary hardware dimensions towards nanometric scales, for producing software of warranted quality, for providing the informational infrastructure with protections and with human-machine interaction modes that enable the emerging paradigm of Ambient Intelligence to support the knowledge society.

The 18th IFIP World Computing Congress will cover the above-mentioned challenges via co-located established conferences whose topics range from theoretical informatics (with Theoretical Computer Science - TCS) to the relation ship between informatics and society (with Virtual Enterprises - PRO-VE, e-Commerce, e-Business and e-Government - I3E, and History of Computing in Education - HCE), through hardware and software technologies (with Networked Embedded Systems - NES - and Smartcard Research and Advanced Applications - CARDIS), and non-functional aspects relating to our dependency on networked information systems (with Human Error and System Development - HESS - and Security - IFIPSEC).
In addition, besides the usual workshops, tutorials, exhibition, the Toulouse Congress will feature topical days or sessions offering synthetic and prospective views on topics of dramatic interest for the emergence of Ambient Intelligence.

Toulouse possesses the right mix of qualities for making WCC2004 a great success:

• a wide diversity of computing and communication activities, both industrial and in research or higher education,
• a strong involvement of local bodies, backed by the population,
• dynamic universities gathering 110 000 students,
• a friendly life style and a mild climate at that time of year,
• prestigious sites for organizing the social program, a wide variety of places of interest, natural, historical and cultural sites, not to mention high quality, regional gastronomy.

The attendees to WCC2004 will have the opportunity of enjoying this mix of qualities, hereby sharing during a week l'Esprit de Toulouse.

Jean-Claude LAPRIE Congress Chair	Reino KURKI-SUONIO Programme Chair