2008 IEEE Services Computing Contest is announced today

I am chairing 2008 IEEE Services Computing Contest. After several months of consulting and preparation, the Contest is officially launched.

The objective of Services Computing Contest is to promote research and teaching services computing techniques in universities and colleges worldwide. This contest brings together talented students to solve challenges in using Service Computing techniques to build value-added business systems in the era of Web 2.0. Following the two successful contests in 2006 and 2007, the 2008 IEEE International Services Computing Contest has the theme of "Business SOA and Services Mash-up" that the participating teams will utilize the services and data from different sources and integrate them into a new value-added business service to the end users. Each team will submit a paper and build a live system. The finalists will be invited to either the SCC 2008 (Hawaii, USA) or the ICWS 2008 (Beijing, China), at their will, for the final competition. The reasons to organize the final competition in two conferences are to encourage teams from different countries to participate and to solve practical traveling issues. The contest is one competition. The finalists will be announced in the SCC 2008 and the winners will be announced in the ICWS 2008. The papers of the finalists will be published in the proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Congress on Services (SERVICES 2008). This contest is sponsored by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Services Computing, and is supported by IBM Research (Services Computing).