On behalf of the steering and program committees, it is our pleasure to welcome you to the Sixth International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communications, being held on the lovely campus of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.

By the standards of the field, ICAC is an established conference. Nonetheless over the last six years the landscape of autonomic systems research has changed, and we have changed the format of the conference to match.

The most obvious change is the explicit recognition of autonomic communications in our title. The potential for autonomic techniques in networking was first recognized in Europe, and so it is fitting that ICAC has included it explicitly at what is only the conference's second visit to Europe (after Dublin in 2006). The European theme is continued by our inclusion of a special session showcasing some of the large-scale research and development projects in autonomic systems being conducted across the continent, which we hope will act as a way to build trans-Atlantic (and indeed trans-Pacific) collaborations as we move on to tackle larger problems with autonomic systems.

We have, of course, retained -- and indeed strengthened -- ICAC's focus on presenting strong papers on exciting science. This year we accepted 15 full papers from an exceptionally strong field of 97 reviewed full paper submissions. An additional 16 papers were accepted as short presentations and posters to highlight new ideas, and four industrial demonstrations of working tools that are finding industrial acceptance. We are delighted to welcome three keynote speakers from academia and industry, who have kindly given up their time to share their visions for the future of the area. We are equally delighted to host six satellite workshops covering a range of specialized topics including network management, cloud and green computing, all of which are increasingly critical in the modern enterprise world.