Chairs´ message

Nowadays, e-commerce describes an engineering discipline and a design science focusing on business process optimization. It draws on a variety of existing areas such as computer science, operations research, and business administration and develops new techniques and methods geared to business process innovation and increasing economic efficiency. The IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology (CEC 2005) is the primary forum for the exchange of information regarding advancements in the state of the art of theory and practice in E-Commerce. CEC 2005 is the 7th annual event and the flagship annual conference of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on e-commerce. The quality of this conference is a direct consequence of the outstanding papers that were received. We received 200 papers from 40 countries, and the Program Committee finally selected 42 full papers. In addition, 48 submissions were selected for short paper presentations. In terms of subject areas, auction and negotiation technology, e-commerce architectures, security and privacy, as well as Web services computing were among the most popular topics. In addition to research paper presentations, the program provides panel discussions, two tutorials, and five keynote speakers.