The trends are clear - computing devices are becoming smaller in size and greater in number. In addition to handheld products like phones and PDAs, devices are increasingly deployed in our environment, homes, cars, clothes and even bodies. They interact with each other through a variety of communications technologies, as well as being interconnected to the global communications and information infrastructure of the Internet, Web and Grid.

     Designing and building these future computing systems is not a solved problem and it demands a broad set of multidisciplinary skills. Furthermore it requires a systems perspective - as we move into this future there will be increasing numbers of deployed, interacting devices, behaving autonomously and interacting to combine their behaviours in various ways. How do we understand and engineer the behaviour of these new systems?

     The Pervasive Systems Centre (PSC) tackles these crucial challenges by drawing multidisciplinary expertise from across ECS research groups, ranging from sensors, wireless communications and electronic systems design to computer science theory and practice. Additionally, ECS brings the systems perspective at all physical scales - from Systems on Chip and biological and nature-inspired systems through to building the next generation Grid and understanding the science of the Web.