The objective of SAPERE is the development of a highly-innovative theoretical and practical framework for the decentralized deployment and execution of self-aware and adaptive services for future and emerging pervasive network scenarios. The framework will be grounded on a foundational re-thinking of current service models and of associated infrastructures and algorithms. In particular, getting inspiration from natural ecosystems, the project will demonstrate and experiment the possibility of modelling and deploying services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, and of enforcing self-awareness and autonomic behaviours as inherent properties of the ecosystem, rather than as peculiar characteristics of its individuals only.