LETTER FROM THE CHAIR

Greetings from sunny, but cold, New Jersey.

The TCOS election has concluded with my election as chairman through the end of 1998. David Kotz, who ran for the position at my instigation, has been appointed vice-chair. David is a professor at Dartmouth and has been greatly involved in IOPADS, among other activities. We thank Brian Bershad for his past services as vice-chair over the past few years.

One of my first acts as "real" chair (rather than acting chair, during which I confess I did little) was to move the TCOS mailing lists from UCSC to AT&T, You can access:

        tcos-exec@research.att.com
                the "executive committee" that approves conference
                sponsorship, etc.

        tcos-announce@research.att.com
                announcements of interest to the TCOS community. 
                Please run commercial announcements by me first.

        tcos-discuss@research.att.com
                a more general discussion forum for TCOS, e.g. proposals
                for new conferences.  In terms of membership, this is 
                a subset of announce.

If you are not on tcos-announce or tcos-discuss, but receive this bulletin, please send mail to the corresponding -request address and ask to be subscribed. As usual, do not send subscription requests to the lists themselves.

In addition to the increased use of email, I want to make better use of the Web. While bulletins have been available on the Web for a while, they are also mailed, in paper form, to members. This is extremely costly, considering that TCOS does not receive an allocation on a per-member basis to offset the mailing costs. (Contrast this to ACM SIGOPS, which is a separate membership that individuals pay for.) It is the opinion of the TCOS executive committee that the benefit of individual mailings does not justify the cost, and we have decided to move to only web-based publishing with the next issue. New issues of the bulletin will be made available on the web and announced to tcos-announce. If you receive the bulletin by mail, and do not have access the web, please contact me to discuss alternative arrangements.

The TCOS home page is accessible from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Activities Board page . Please use this URL since the home page for TCOS itself, currently at Purdue, will be moving shortly. It includes links to the bulletin, regional TCOS pages for Europe and the Middle East, conferences of interest, and other miscellaneous links. I would like to find a volunteer to serve as an Asian representative. This would involve hosting a local web page, and organizing local events such as workshops. If you're interested, please contact me and provide information about your background.

As usual, I solicit submissions for the bulletin, offers to guest-edit an issue, and proposals for conferences that TCOS might sponsor or cosponsor.

18 March 1997