Letter from the Outgoing ICDE Steering Committee Chair

the past and current members of the Steering Committee that have served during my time. We have been a great team that worked very well together in selecting future conferences, tracking their planning process and evaluating the final result. Here thanks are also due to Dr. Thomas Risse, my assistant in handling the Chairmans duties. I am so thankful that we together have been able to grow ICDE from a low point in 1998 to its current size, which is close to 600 participants, including the newly introduced workshops. Of course, the Steering Committee contribution was small, the real work has always been with the officers of the respective conferences and I would like to thank them with this short note also. They are too numerous to list but their enthusiasm and never-ending effort have lead to this result. I now want to wish all the members of the Steering Committee, but especially its new Chairman Calton Pu, all the success and may ICDE continue to prosper in the future with Cancun, Mexico coming up next year and Shanghai, China in 2009.