Dear Sir,

Thanks for your comments on the reviewing procedure. In fact, to identify the subjects of each paper and distribute them to relevant experts might be the most difficult task for conference organization. Because we have receive most paper in the last days, we did not have sufficient time to preview all 473 papers and make proper divsion of them. Furthermore, we are not familier to the special fields of many TPC members. That's why we listed all the papers to you for your choice. Acturally, what we expected was that you may select some papers (say 10-20) to review and inform us about your choices, so that we may distribute the remainders to other reviewers. As matter of fact, we were working very hard to preview the papers in the meanwhile, contact authors for different kinds of problems, such as the error in opening the files, lack of figures or pages, viruses in files, etc.; answer various questions to authors; and so forth. Nevertheless, we've asked some professors to preview the papers and to divide the papers into certain categories.

Up to now,

(1) we have got elctronic files for most of the papers, which were prevously only have hard copies, but there're still some papers do not have E-file yet.

(2) most of the papers have been asigned to at least two reviewers, but we still need the third reviewer.

And,

We'd like to ask TC6 to help us to be informed about TC6 members special fields, so taht we may distribute some papers for them to review. WE DO NEED THE CONTRIBUTIONS FROM TC6. For this purpose, I need your earliest reply.

We're going to have a meeting on March 25 with TCP members who are able to come, to determine which papers will be accepted.

Because we are not experienced in organizing such conference, we would be very grateful to your suggestions and helps.

Here are anwers to some of your questions:

• a lot of manuscripts are available only as hardcopy version and could be requested by regular mail from the organisors (less than three weeks before the end of the evaluation deadline)

We may send them by EMS if required. Please indicate which ones you'd like to have. Also we may send them by fax.

• the attempt to get at a least one of the electronically submitted papers fails due to continuous timeout

We've made some efforts to have a Web-site for you to read the papers, but I am reported there're some administration problem. Anyway, we'll try out best to solve the access problems. In fact, we may send compressed files to you according your requiste. Have you the list of paper's titles? Would you make a selection from the topics and indicates the relevant numbers?

• apparently no PC member knows which paper should be reviewed by whom and how many papers should be reviewed per PC member; it might be that 342 papers would not get a single review whereas 51 manuscripts would get more than ten reviews, who knows???

We invited some experts to do the review tasks, now we have already asigned more than 400 papers to more than 50 experts (including TPC members), each have got 10-20 papers, and most papers have got two reviewers.

Yours sincerely

GONG Ke Tsinghua University Beijing 100084 China