Our ICWS main Web site encountered unexpected network outages last night whole night (1/31/2006), which is our paper submission deadline date. Therefore although our paper submission system was up and we tried our best to help authors submit papers based upon email communications, many authors could not even find our email addresses without conference Web site beging up. So far, we have received numerous emails reporting the outages and their time lost and request extensions.

Meanwhile, due to the fact that our conference theme is heavily interwinded with the frontier of current industrial technologies, we have been notified from significant amount of authors’ concerns on confidentiality. This concern has been an open issue for a couple of years and prevented many industrial authors from submitting papers to ICWS. Only very recently we found corresponding official review policy and we just published the related information and associated link on the conference Web site (in CFP section) .

In order to make the transformation of the supporting systems smooth with adequate time, the Program Committee chairs decided to extend the research paper submission deadline to 2/15/2006. The industry tracks will be extended to 2/15/2006 also. For the submission deadlines of other tracks please follow the corresponding sections of the conference Web site.