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First, I would like to thank the members of SIGMOD executive committee in giving me their full support with the logistics of DiSC. I was contacted in mid 2003 by Tamer Ozsu to serve as the Editor of DiSC and saw the urgent need to separate infrastructure from content. While content is the responsibility of editors, the infrastructure is maintained by a company named Montra. This separation has enabled us to quickly produce DiSC 2004, meeting an agressive deadline. The executive committee was supportive of this separation and I am thankful for their patience while we realized this separation. Thank you Microsoft for serving as the industrial sponsor of DiSC 2004. The expenses incurred to realize the infrastructure were covered using their generous cash gift. I am indebted to Dr. Jim Gray of Microsoft who immediately came to the cause of this project and issued a check in less than 3 days from my initial correspondance. Jim, your support means alot; thank you! I am also indebted to Montra for designing sigmod.discgenesis.net with only a promise of payment. In particular, Morteza Kabiri, chief architect of Montra L.L.C., implemented a functioning system, placed it into use for four editors, fixed bugs quickly, and maintained the database during this period of uncertainity. (All that with a smile and a positive attitude.) With Microsoft's sponsorship, ACM SIGMOD paid the original bill submitted by Montra in full. Thank you Montra and Morteza for your patience and quality work. The associate editors have done a tremendous job in a short period of time. DiSC'04 is a testament of their quality work. I thank each editor for their contributions. I am thankful to Professor Aidong Zhang, the previous editor of DiSC, for showing me the ropes and helping me to get started. I also want to acknowledge and thank Professor Isabel F. Cruz, the founding editor of DiSC, for introducing the concept of DiSC as a service to the community. I would also like to thank the VLDB endowment, IEEE, Springer, and Kluwer for their permission to include the contents of the conference and workshop proceedings featured in DiSC '04. I was impressed by this collaboration and the overall professional attitude of different contact at these publishers. At the ACM, I would like to thank Deborah Cotton, and Ginger Ignatoff for their logistic help
with copyright issues and careful look at the final version of DiSC'04.
 ©2004 Association for Computing Machinery |
