Information technology is one of the corner stones of modern society. It is also a key driving force of the western economy, contributing substantially to economic growth by productivity gains and the creation of new products and services. All this was made possible by the uninterrupted exponential growth in computation, communication and storage capacity of the previous decades. Unfortunately, this now seems to have come to an end. Growth is predicted to slow down due to the fundamental laws of physics, and an increasing number of people are getting worried about the adverse effects of the progressively omnipresent use of information technology: loss of privacy, the impact on the job market, security and safety.
Devices will be more and more connected, entangled physically, cognitive and smart and requiring more and more computational, storage and communication resources. To ensure the further growth of information technology and to address these concerns, several key challenges need to be tackled.