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				The Durham University Distributed Systems and Services group unites two central research themes within the mainstream of Computer Science - architecture and systems, each linked through a common objective: to support the needs of the next generation of distributed/Internet computing. Grid Computing is one of such examples that enables advanced e-Science and e-Business applications, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale, dynamical interactions and resource sharing across different virtual organisations. Our current research focus and major effort is to develop innovative and advanced technology for building secure and dependable services for such applications. This new technology consists of 1) a service-centric software architecture for building complex Grid applications based on the notion of ultra-late binding, automatic negotiation and our previous experience in service-based software and 2) new generic services for privacy-preserving and fault tolerance so as to facilitate the secure and dependable execution of Grid applications in a ubiquitous and potentially non-trustworthy network environment. Our technology represents the significant trend in the application space – future distributed applications will be based on compositions of secure services discovered and provided dynamically at run time. We have had for many years an established track record and an internationally leading reputation in service-based software architectures and dependable distributed computing. Keith Bennett has led internationally leading work on reverse engineering tools using formal transformations, and more recently has been addressing software which is inherently more adaptable than existing methods. Jie Xu's work on co-ordinated atomic actions, distributed exception handling, and software dependability was internationally known for a breakthrough in architectures for fault-tolerant and secure distributed applications. This work won the BCS Brendan Murphy Prize for 2001. We are leading the EPSRC/DTI e-Demand project on a service-based architecture for dependable e-Science applications and have collaborated with BT, Keele and UMIST through the EPSRC IBHIS project and the EPSRC Interdisciplinary Software Engineering Network “ISEN” (GR/R19625) on the development of the “Software as a Service” architecture. We have also chaired and organised successfully a number of important IEEE conferences and workshops to shape the future research directions, and our work has been published in top US journals and conferences.