Dear colleagues, 

with our third newsletter we would like to announce that the final program for this year's VLDB is ready: You will find it on the VLDB 2003 Web site at

     http://www.vldb.informatik.hu-berlin.de/progr_program.html.

We have gone through considerable effort to make the invited talks true highlights of the conference.  Evangelos Eleftheriou (IBM Research, Switzerland) will provide an overview of the nanotechnology-based storage technology, which might impact our field in about 10 years from now.  Nelson Mattos (IBM, SVL Laboratory, CA, USA), well known in the database community, will talk about information integration from an industrial perspective, one of the main challenges of today. Finally, Scott Shenker (ICSI, UC Berkeley, CA, USA), one of the key people in networking, will argue that data-centric networking (or network-oriented data management) is one of the directions of the future. We will feature the invited speakers in one of the following newsletters.

Most important, the registration process is about to start. You can find the online registration form on our VLDB 2003 Web site. You can register for the conference and/or most of the co-located workshops. Payment is either by credit card (online or offline) or by bank transfer. Please note the instructions on the form. Due to German law, you must send a signed printout of the registration to the conference organizer EVEN if you choose online credit card payment. See the detailed instruction attached to the forms.

For those of you, who need a visa for Germany, it is MOST IMPORTANT to register as soon as possible. You will get a letter from the LOCAL organizing chair confirming your registration. This is sufficient for applying for the visa. Although you typically get the visa from a German consulate within a few days, it is wise to register already in July.

Payments will have to be made in Euro because that is the only way to limit our financial exposure. Unfortunately, those of you who come form US$ countries will face higher registration fees than we had envisaged even a year ago. We feel extremely sorry, and just hope that the high quality of the program will compensate for the higher expenses.

Please note, that you will have access to the online proceedings starting on July 1, 2003, after you have registered. You will get the account and a password included with the E-mail confirmation of your registration.

Through the VLDB Web site you may also make your hotel reservations. On the site you will find a short description of how to get from each of the hotels to the conference venue. Public transportation is well organized in Berlin. Included in the conference package is a ticket for subway, busses and the local fast trains
("S-Bahn") valid during the entire conference. So even a hotel that is not in walking distance will do.

There is another important point: The hotel reservation is handled through an agency, which is independent of the conference organization. They have allocated plenty of rooms in the hotels. Depending on time, though, as we already noticed, these rooms may turn out to be more expensive than booking directly on the Web, e.g., through http://www.hrs.de. Please check carefully!

In the next newsletter, we will feature the conference program and provide you with more impressions about Berlin.

See you in September,

Peter C. Lockemann, Johann-Christoph Freytag, Heinz Schweppe, 
Alfons Kemper, Bernhard Mitschang


P.S. You can find an online archive of the newsletters at 
     http://www.vldb.informatik.hu-berlin.de/news_newsletter_main.html.

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