Welcome all of you to Thailand! It is truly an honor for our Department of Computer Science at Thammasat University to host the 31st Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA31) workshop. With a great pleasure, I invite you to join PRAGMA members and distinct researchers from around the world at this exotic and delightful venue of our home country.

The main mission of PRAGMA is to establish and sustain collaborative, multidisciplinary teams of individuals and institutions from around the Pacific Rim to address their scientific questions of high societal impact using Information Technology. The PRAGMA workshop held biannually has been one of the most important activity of the PRAGMA community in reinforcing the active involvement of participants in scientific expeditions, technology development, student engagement, and outreach to new related communities. In recent years, PRAGMA has grown substantially and progressed into a co-developing international collaboration platform to exchange ideas and knowledges between researchers in IT and other domain fields.

In Thailand we will have the opportunity to take an in-depth look at the latest developments and applications of Information Technology and Computer Science for societal sustainability. This PRAGMA31 workshop will be held in conjunction with the 2016 Asia Pacific Open Data Summit (APODS2016) and is a joint effort by our department and our collaborator, Electronic Government Agency (EGA). Our theme, "Global Sustainability with Data Science and Technology" highlights the common mission that both PRAGMA and APODS communities have in promoting, supporting and utilizing Open Data, Information Science and Communication Technology in all sectors to thoroughly and effectively push forward the collective development in a wide variety of aspects. Our domains of interest include but not limited to disaster mitigation, environmental science, agricultural research, enabling technology for smart cities as well as HPC and cloud computing as collaboration platforms among different agencies. We believe that this workshop will provide an impeccable occasion for us to share our experiences of and aspirations for practical research that is beneficial for our societies and facilitates the long-tail of science world-wide.

I am confident that you will find this experience both exciting and rewarding. On behalf of the local organizing Committee, I am looking forward to enjoying the PRAGMA31 workshop during September 7^th to 10^th in Bangkok with all of you.