Spray computers: frontiers of self-organization

It is not hard to envision a future in which a network of microcomputers will be literally sold as spray cans, to be sprayed in an environment or on specific artifacts to enrich them with functionalities that, as of today, may appear futuristic and visionary: invisible clothes, intelligent interactive environments, self-assembly materials and self-repairing artifacts. However, the vision of spray computers may also act as a powerful metaphor for a range of other scenarios that are already under formation. These include distributed applications in embedded, possibly mobile, ad hoc networks, as well as distributed service- and data-oriented activities on the Internet. In fact, besides the different physical scale of the components involved and of their interactions (from microcomputers interacting within networks extending across a few meters, to Internet hosts interacting at a world-wide scale), all of these types of networks raise the same challenges for application development and deployment.