A Message to TCDE Members

request to the contrary. Technical papers are unre fereed. Committee is open to individuals who demonstrate willingness to actively participate in the various acti vities of the TC. A member of the IEEE Computer Society may join the TC as a full member. A non— member of the Computer Society may join as a par ticipating member, with approval from at least one officer of the TC. Both full members and participat ing members of the TO are entitled to receive the quarterly bulletin of the TO free of charge, until fur ther notice. and there is no budget request from TCDE. A possible outcome of this situation could be that this issue of the Technical Bulletin may be the last one. To get us out of this situation, the Computer Computer Society Technical Activities Board (TAB) appointed a reorganization committee consisting of the undersigned. The primary goal of the reorganization committee is to see how TCDE may be reactivated. In particular, we need to formulate an operating plan for technical activities for 1992, develop an interim budget, and work with TAB to get necessary financing. We also need to develop necessary infrastructures (organizational and financial) so that TCDE remains on sound footing in future. We may also use this opportunity to define sharply the role and objectives of TCDE. We will try our best to devise means for TCDE to continue publishing the Bulletin and sponsoring the Data Engineering Conference. We are writing this to bring you up to date on the current state of affairs and to solicit advise from you on how you would like TCDE to operate in future. Please provide us with input on directional, organizational, and financial issues and what you think should be the role of TCDE. Multimedia is becoming a central theme in computing environments of the future. We have been experiencing tremendous increase in computing power in recent years. This increase in com puting power enables us to handle advanced data types, which we call multimedia, even in personal computers. Multimedia typically include unformatted data types such as images, video, text, audio, and graphics. We expect in the near future that they will become essential elements in multime broadband service (such as ISDN) applications. This issue of the Data Engineering Bulletin is devoted to helping the readers understand how this new technology affects the research in the database and information systems …