Preface: Volume 62

Abstract

This volume contains the Proceedings of the Workshop TOSCA 2001. This is the final workshop of the Project TOSCA, Teoria delle Concorrenza, Linguaggi di Ordine Superiore e Strutture di Tipi (Theory of Concurrency, Higher Order Languages and Types). The Project TOSCA was financiated by the Italian Ministery of Education, University and Research (MIUR) and by the Italian Universities of: L'Aquila, Bologna, Catania, Firenze, Genova, Insubria, Pisa, Roma, Torino, Udine. The overall project leader was Ugo Montanari (University of Pisa). The Workshop was held at the University of Udine (Italy), November 19-21, 2001.The project TOSCA ran from November 1999 to November 2001. The goal was to integrate methods and results from concurrency theory, higher order systems and tools, and type theories into a uniform setting. The scientific expertise of the various groups involved in the project was established well before the TOSCA project. However, communication and dissemination of ideas between these groups was unsatisfactory. One of the results of TOSCA has been the fostering and establishing of joint collaborations, sharing of techniques and, more generally, cross-fertilization.More than 80 researchers were involved in the project. The significance of the scientific impact of TOSCA is evident from the impressive number of papers (more than 280), published by the members of the project in many important international journals and in the proceedings of the most important conferences in the area. It is not possible to gather all these outcomes in a single volume; however, these papers are available from the TOSCA web page.Originally, the TOSCA project was organized in seven themes: 1.Modules, Objects and Reflection (coordinator: Eugenio Moggi, Genova);2.Process Algebras and Their Applications (Roberto Gorrieri, Bologna);3.Algebraic and Categorical Foundations (Nicoletta Sabadini, Insubria);4.Automata and Verification (Andrea Maggiolo-Schettini, Pisa);5.Types for Mobile Processes (Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini, Torino);6.Coordination Languages and Mobile Computing (Rocco De Nicola, Firenze);7.Abstract Syntax and Logical Frameworks (Furio Honsell, Udine).Later, these themes have been grouped in three areas: 1.Network Aware Programming (themes 1,6; coordinator: Rocco De Nicola);2.Process Algebras and Applications (themes 2,4,5; coordinator: Roberto Gorrieri);3.Computational Metamodels (themes 3,7; coordinator: Furio Honsell).In order to evaluate the integration achieved among the various groups in each area, a number of case studies have been selected in three focused workshops, which have been held during the second year of the project. The final workshop TOSCA 2001 was devoted to the presentation of these case studies. The contributions are all original, and they are classified in the three areas above.The Program Committee of TOSCA 2001 was composed by Rocco De Nicola (Firenze), Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini (Torino), Roberto Gorrieri (Bologna), Furio Honsell (Udine, chair), Andrea Maggiolo-Schettini (Pisa), Eugenio Moggi (Genova), Ugo Montanari (Pisa), Nicoletta Sabadini (Milano).This volume contains the final versions of the papers presented at the workshop. Around 20 papers were submitted, 14 of them were selected after a regular refereeing process. The papers were reviewed by the program committee members and by Alessandro Aldini, Fabio Alessi, Lorenzo Bettini, Marco Bellia, Viviana Bono, Maria Grazia Buscemi, Nadia Busi, Michele Bugliesi, Alberto Ciaffaglione, Mario Coppo, Silvia Crafa, Gianluigi Ferrari, Ferruccio Damiani, Ugo de'Liguoro, Joëlle Despeyroux, Fabio Gadducci, Giorgio Ghelli, Stefania Gnesi, Anna Labella, Ruggero Lanotte, Salvatore La Torre, Michele Loreti, Stefano Mazzanti, Maria Chiara Meo, Marino Miculan, Angelo Montanari, Luca Paolini, Marco Pistore, Rosario Pugliese, Ivano Salvo, Ivan Scagnetto, Simone Tini, Fabio Tudone, Betti Venneri, Gianluigi Zavattaro, Elena Zucca.There were three invited lectures at the workshop, one for each area: Boxed Ambients by Giuseppe Castagna, Cryptographic Analysis in Cubic Time by Flemming Nielson, Bialgebraic Semantics by Gordon Plotkin. This volume includes the papers accompanying the first two invited lectures.We feel that the TOSCA project has been very fruitful in establishing new collaborations across the various preexisting research groups. This is witnessed by the papers of this volume, which are mainly joint works between researchers of different areas and universities. We are confident that many collaborations started during the project will fruitfully continue in the future.We are very grateful to Ugo Montanari, the project leader, to all members of the project and to Vladimiro Sassone and Luigi Toscano for the implementation of the web server of the project. We also are grateful to Mike Mislove, Managing Editor of the ENTCS series, for his assistance with the use of the ENTCS style files. Thanks also to the University of Udine for the support in organizing the workshop, and to the Forum Publisher for its help in preparing the preliminary volume.April 20, 2002 Marina Lenisa, Marino Miculan