Acknowledgements

We would like to thank John Canning, who soon returns to the United States after a two year stay, for his many contributions benefitting the international research community at NTT Laboratories. Dr. Canning was instrumental in making many of our "global" activities succeed. We specially wish to thank him for his crucial support for Global News. Not only was he a founding editorial board member of Global News, but he and his wife, June Fox, carried out the layout and production process for the first two issues, making this newsletter possible. We would also like to thank him for managing the International Researchers Forum, which introduced many of us to teleconferencing, and the global-list e-mail system.

We welcome Wayne Lui to the editorial board of Global News, and are happy to report that he has accepted responsibility for the managementof the global-list e-mail system.

Furthermore, we wish to thank Mr. Hitoshi Arai and Ms. Noriko Sekiguchi for their excellent layout of the present issue.