I'd like to introduce some volunteers who will be helping me gather the news. They can help alert us to important resources and opportunities.

David Joslin ([email protected]) has offered to monitor comp.ai, comp.ai.jair.*, sci.cognitive, and sci.nanotech. He has EE and CS degrees, and is working on a PhD in AI/planning at UPittsburgh. David has work for HP and BBN for six years as a software engineer.

Jim Blythe ([email protected]) will scan comp.ai.vision, sci.op-research, and lists on knowledge-based scheduling and AI & statistics. Jim is an AI PhD student at CMU, with particular interests in robust temporal planning systems. He's also a keen squash player and marmite-eater (but trying to get over that).

Anandeep Pannu ([email protected]) is a cognitive scientist who will cover comp.ai.genetic, sci.virtual-worlds, and comp.cog-eng. Anandeep is a graduate student at UPittsburgh.

Thomas R. Hester ([email protected]) will forward items from the comp.object, comp.object.logic, and comp.object.database newsgroups. He also has an interest in computational linguistics.

Christopher J. Matheus ([email protected]) will be covering the Internet digests KDD Nuggets (knowledge discovery in databases), AI in Medicine, and Machine Learning. Chris also has interests in PC software sources, multimedia, WWW, and information systems in general.

Charles Morefield ([email protected]) has offered to cover lists on comp.ai.neural-nets, comp.ai.genetic, sci.virtual-worlds, and misc.entrepreneurs; also lists on Lisp, Scheme, and Prolog. His interests include technology investing. Chuck founded and then sold an aerospace company, and is now consulting, doing government research contracts, and serving on a couple of corporate boards.

Gheorghe "Gil" Chita ([email protected]) has been a Computist for over a year. He will forward items from comp.ai.nat-lang, sci.research, comp.ai.philosophy, comp.ai.edu, comp.ai.shells, info.mcl and info.dylan. Gil is from Romania and now Austria, has worked on CASE tools, and is selling a Mac-like C++ programming environment called Sniff.

Other Computists who wish to volunteer are welcome. I'm worried about being flooded with good news items, but that's the nature of this business. These volunteers will help me maintain the Communique's usefulness while I spend more time interacting with our increasing membership and scanning hardcopy publications. (Partying and reading comic books. :-)