Hong Zhang (kddlab!yh.ntts.co.jp!hong@uunet.uu.net), or Zhang Hong in the Oriental fashion, came to Japan about 7 years ago. Japanese call him Chou, which is the same Kanji as Zhang. He's working at NTT Software Corporation in Yokohama, and is learning English and system engineering. Hong is particularly interested in neural networks and machine learning.

Kevin Thompson (kthompso@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov) is working in the AI Research Branch at NASA Ames while getting a Ph.D. in AI from UC Irvine. He's still deciding on a thesis, but has been studying concept learning in relational domains.

John McInerney (john@cs.ucsd.edu, or jmcinerney@igc.org) is a UCSD CS graduate student under Richard Belew. He's been working in function and combinatorial optimization on a hybrid Connection Machine system, and will defend his thesis in December. John enjoys teaching as well as research, and is an active member of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). He is also the lead systems administrator for the Marine Physical Laboratory's computing environment -- 80 Sun workstations and servers plus PCs, Macs, PDPs, and a variety of real-time systems -- a position involving personnel management and technical advising.