Acknowledgments

We are sincerely indebted to the contributors of this book for their support and diligent work, without which this book would not have been possible. We express our deep appreciation for their understanding and bearing with our organizational weaknesses. We would like to thank the reviewers of proposal for this book for their comments and suggestions. In particular, we were highly motivated by their support for the view that “interaction” aspect of our goal for the book is a crucial component; their “cautionary note” with regards to the challenge of appropriately hitting the “interaction” note helped us take extra measure to ensure that we achieve that goal. We hope that we have done that.

We express our thanks to the staff of Elsevier Inc. for their support for this undertaking. In particular, we would like to thank Rick Adams, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Elsevier, for all the support and guidance, as well as for providing the needed extra push to keep us in schedule. We thank Gregory Chalson, Assistant Editor at Elsevier, and Monica Gonzalez de Mendoza, Project Manager at Elsevier, for their patience in dealing with electronic transfer of manuscripts and handling publication issues.

We thank Prof. Michael Spring, one of the co-founders of LERSAIS for his wisdom, input and efforts leading to the successful establishment of LERSAIS.

Lastly, we thank our families (Yi thanks his wife Melodee; James thanks his wife Tripti, David thanks his wife Cindy and daughters Meredith and Evelyn; Prashant thanks his wife Deepika) for their support and patience while we worked on this book.

We believe that we (the authors and the editors) have given our best to ensure the readability, completeness and accuracy of each chapter. However, it is possible that some errors and omissions may still have remained undetected. We appreciate any feedback intended to correct such errors. And finally, we believe many more chapters could have been relevant for our book, however, we had to remain within the constraints of the publication process.

Yi Qian
Email: [email protected]

James Joshi
Email: [email protected]

David Tipper
Email: [email protected]

Prashant Krishnamurthy
Email: [email protected]

November, 2007