Creation Techniques for Software Development and Deployment, Agent-Based Management, Virtual Home Environment, Integrated and Scalable Solutions for Telecommunications Management. This shows that the issues related to communications management, architectures, and service creation are still of great interest, while the virtual home environment is emerging as a new key topic in IS&N. In summary, this book reflects the state of the art in research on IS&N topics, with the focus mentioned above, not only from European Union co-funded projects (mainly in the ACTS programme), but also from research organisations around the globe. February 2000 Jaime Delgado George D. Stamoulis Alvin Mullery Didoe Prevedourou Keith Start Previous IS&N Conferences and Proceedings The first IS&N conference was organised in 1992 in Paris, France. Since then, the IS&N conferences have been held almost every year, with proceedings published as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series of Springer-Verlag. These are as follows. "Towards a Pan-European Telecommunication Service Infrastructure - IS&N94", Hans-Jiirgen Kugler, Al Mullery, Norbert Niebert (Eds.), Aachen, Germany, September 1994, LNCS 851, ISBN 3-540-58420-X. "Bringing Telecommunication Services to the People - IS&N95", Anne Clarke, Mario Campolargo, Nikos Karatzas (Eds.), Heraklion, Greece, October 1995, LNCS 998, ISBN 3-540-60479-0. "Intelligence in Services and Networks: Technology for Cooperative Competition — IS&N97\ Al Mullery, Michel Besson, Mario Campolargo, Roberta Gobbi, Rick Reed (Eds.), Cernobbio, Italy, May 1997, LNCS 1238, ISBN 3-540-63135-6.