Five years ago, David Garlan visited Argentina for the first time and gave a lecture at the School of Computer Science at UBA about one of his research subjects: Self Healing Systems. That concept was new to me and to many attending the conference, and sparked a lot of curiosity. Basically, what Garlan was proposing is that increasing complexity in systems and other factors make it necessary to have self repair and self optimizing mechanisms, considering that human intervention will be more and more difficult due to how difficult it will be to diagnose what is happening with a system and apply a repair to fix an anomalous situation. As I kept reading more about the subject, I realized there’s a lot of research going on about it, and that many consider this a new era in computer science: the fact that systems decide changes in their behavior to adapt to faults or changes in their operating or user environments, without human intervention. Autonomic Computing has a lot to do with other interesting topics such as context awareness and task based computing.