The development of the Semantic Grid will be addressed at an international conference this week, highlighting its progress towards a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation which will enable flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. In his invited talk on The Semantic Grid: Past, Present and Future at the 2nd European Semantic Web Conference in Heraklion, Greece, on Wednesday June 1, Professor David De Roure, Head of Grid and Pervasive Computing at the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton, UK will describe his vision of a large-scale, self-managing, collaborative Grid and the advances that are being made towards its realisation. He will trace the development of Grid computing from recognition of its potential role in the need for a common IT infrastructure in 2001 - which resulted in the e-Science programme, through the realisation that in order to be effective in this scenario it would need to be merged with Semantic Web technologies, leading ultimately to the creation of the Semantic Grid. Professor De Roure will highlight some key indicators of success including: the innovative application of five new technologies which include web services, metadata, ontologies and reasoning, semantic web services and software agents; Semantic Grid projects in every continent and 16,000 hits for the term “Semantic Grid” on Google. Professor De Roure commented: "Semantic Grid computing has allowed us to bring resources together to achieve something that was not previously possible. We now look forward to working on some of the remaining challenges, which include for example the intersection between the grid and the physical world through pervasive computing devices and the self-management, self-optimisation and self-healing (so called ‘autonomic’ behaviour) necessary for large scale distributed computing."