Activities of the Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology (ICST) within the U.S. Department of Commerce during fiscal year 1986 are described in this annual report, which summarizes research and publications by ICST in the following areas: (1) standards and guidelines for computer security, including encryption and message authentication device test systems; (2) software standards, testing of these standards, and standards for information interchange between software programs; (3) software acceptance testing, selection, evaluation, and maintenance; (4) standardization of data elements for geographical locations; (5) standards and technical assistance for information interchange among automated office systems; (6) methods for measuring performance of parallel processing systems, their architectures, and their support environments; (7) implementation of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking standards in off-the-shelf products; (8) development of OSINET, an experimental computer network for OSI standards; (9) evaluation and improvement of the operation of the International Organization for Standardization (IOS) transport protocol for use over satellite channels; (10) standards for data communication and computer interfaces; (11) test methods for computer storage media; and (12) automated speech recognition. The appendix includes lists of ICST conferences, workshops, and publications. (MES)