As computer systems become increasingly large and complex, their trustworthiness and self-manageability play critical role at supporting next-generation science, engineering, and commercial applications. These systems consist of heterogeneous software/hardware/network components of changing capacities, availability, and in varied contexts. They provide computing services to large pools of users and applications, and thus are exposed to a number of dangers such as accidental/deliberate faults, virus infections, malicious attacks, illegal intrusions, and natural disasters etc. As a result, too often computer systems fail, become compromised, or perform poorly. Therefore, it remains a challenge to design, analyze, evaluate, and improve the performance of trustworthy systems. Trusted computing targets computing and communication systems as well as services that are predictable, traceable, controllable, assessable, sustainable, dependable, and privacy protect-able. The scale and complexity of information systems evolve towards overwhelming the capability of system administrators, programmers, and designers. This calls for the autonomic computing paradigm, which meets the requirement of self-management by providing self-optimization, self-healing, self-configuration, and self-protection. As a promising means to implement trusted and self-managing systems, autonomic computing technology needs to be further explored. On the other hand, any autonomic system must be trustworthy to avoid the risk of losing control and retain confidence that the system will not fail.
Autonomic and Trusted computing and communications need synergistic 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 and coherent integration of the constituent technologies.