WETICE Conference: The First 25 Years

This is a milestone year for the IEEE International WETICE Conference. We are celebrating its 25th year - the Silver Jubilee, in Paris, France on June 13-15, 2016. WETICE started in 1992 as a collection of workshops with a common theme of Collaboration Technologies at West Virginia University's Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC), an industry-university partnership funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) in Morgantown, West Virginia, USA. Its original full title was Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises with a "clever" acronym of WETICE. Initially it was held in West Virginia for the first four years, then migrated to other institutions in the US such as Stanford University (1996, 1998, 1999), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, 1997, 2001), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, 2000), and finally to the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2002. It attracted many participants from various European countries practically from its beginning. In 2003 WETICE was held in Europe for the first time in Linz, Austria, and since then it continued to be held in Europe with the exception of Tunisia in 2013. The countries that hosted WETICE very cheerfully and successfully since 2003 are Austria, Sweden, UK, Italy (three times), France (four times), Greece, The Netherlands, Tunisia, and Cyprus. The comments below from the past and present leaders (in various capacities) of WETICE reflect their personal experiences and observations. Some have commented on how they got involved with the conference in the very early stages of their academic careers; others reflected on how the topics addressed by WETICE have evolved. These comments also show how WETICE focused on cutting edge topics and followed them through as they morphed.