The joint IEEE-NATEA conference on an emerging technology is aimed to provide IEEE and NATEA members with an inexpensive solid overview of a technology that may affect their work and careers in the near future. This annual conference series have been traditionally held at Stanford University on a Saturday. This year the date is July 19th at the Cubberley Auditorium. Over the past 9 years we have covered such topics as RFID, SOC, Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology, and multicore.

This year's conference is entitled "Cloud Computing-the New Face of Computing-Promises and Challenges.”

Cloud Computing denotes the latest trend in application development for Internet services, relying on clouds of servers to handle tasks that used to be managed by individual machines. With Cloud Computing, developers take important services, such as email, calendars, and word processing, and host them entirely online, powered by a vast array (or cloud) of interdependent commodity servers. Cloud Computing presents advantages for organizations seeking to centralize the management of software and data storage, with guarantees on reliability and security for their users. Recently, we have seen many efforts of the commercialization of the cloud, such as Amazon's EC2/S3/SimpleDB, Google's App Engine, Microsoft's SQL Server data services and IBM's "Blue Cloud" service. At the same time, open source projects such as Hadoop and ZooKeeper offer various software components that are essential for building a cloud infrastructure. We hope to bring together eminent researchers and practitioners from key research labs, companies, and open source communities to give us a quick overview of cloud computing. In addition, these speakers will present their views on the opportunities and challenges of cloud computing, either from technology aspect or business aspect.