Message to conference participants

This year was something of an experiment - both in terms of the venue and the commitment to have enough poster space to allow all of the posters to be up for the entire conference. The papers were of high quality and the committee was most pleased at how many of the posters were still "up" on the last days of the conference. The increased size of the joint sessions between NSS and MIC papers was also well attended and is indicative of shared interests between the participants. I believe you will find in this collection of papers many advances and discoveries that will promote yet more advances for the future. This year we are also using a different process to produce the conference record CD that should get it into the hands of our attendees more rapidly than has been the case in recent years.