Foreword by the Conference Chairs

This 43rd meeting of the German Informatics Society takes place under the motto " Computer Science Adapting to Individuals, Organisations and Environment " (original: " IN-FORMATIK 2013 – Informatik angepasst an Mensch, Organisation und Umwelt "). This motto reflects the ever-growing set of requirements on software and hardware systems to connect with and appropriately react to its users and other individuals, to organizations, as well as to the physical and the virtual environment in ways that are able to adapt to changing and unforeseen situations. Such changes permeate our daily living, our society and, hence, the technical systems that we develop to support our daily routines. The core day of the conference presents an excellent selection of keynotes to reflect on these requirements for adaptability in a range of situations: from autonomous cognition and car driving, over changing customer needs in banking, to the modeling of the human brain being one of the most highly adaptable entities we know. The 37 workshops of the INFORMATIK-2013 cover a wide range of topics, many of which resonate how our society and our technical systems change and how change must be incorporated into the systems we build as computer scientists and computer engineers. Core topics of computer science show up in: • 3 workshops on data management, • 3 workshops on software engineering, • 3 workshops on semantics and reasoning, • 4 workshops on security, and • 3 workshops on technical computer science. The majority of workshops however consider application areas where the changing nature of the subject frequently drives the need for new IT solutions and more sophisticated methods for developing software and hardware systems. More concretely, we see: • 4 workshops on education, • 3 workshops on eGovernment, • 2 workshops on informatics and sustainability, • 5 workshops on IT-based infrastructures, • 3 workshops on information systems, • 2 workshops on social media, and • 2 workshops on informatics and social sciences. 7 Moreover, this delineation into fields of applications and method-oriented workshops is far from being a crip classification. Indeed, a closer look reveals how many of the new methods find their motivation in applications and how new methods are discussed as being a part of a specific field of informatics application. We decided early that such cross-fertilization between methods and applications is a core asset of the INFORMATIK conference series. Thus, we decided to strengthen this bridge by including …