Salah Aidarous is the Director of Product Planning at theNetwork Management Division of NEC America, working on the planningand development of integrated network management systems. Prior toNEC, he was with Nortel Technology (formerly BNR) working on abroad range of assignments in telecommunications networks andservices planning and development. Dr. Aidarous is a senior editorof IEEE Network magazine, senior editor of the Journal onNetwork and Systems Management, chairman of the TechnicalCommittee on Information Infrastructure (TCII), and coeditor and anauthor of Telecommunications Network Management into the 21stCentury: Techniques, Standards, Technologies, and Applications.

Thomas Plevyak is the president of the IEEECommunications Society. His two-year term of office began 1 January1998. Mr. Plevyak is an IEEE Fellow, the past director ofPublications of the IEEE Communications Society, and a formereditor-in-chief of IEEE Communications magazine. He retiredafter 28 years with Bell Laboratories and AT&T Network Systems(now Lucent Technologies), and is now responsible for operationsand network management standards for Bell Atlantic in Arlington,Virginia. Mr. Plevyak is former vice-chairman of the Inter-AmericanTelecommunications Commission (CITEL), Permanent ConsultativeCommittee 1 (PCC.1), a unit of the Organization of American States.He is coeditor and an author of Telecommunications NetworkManagement into the 21st Century: Techniques, Standards,Technologies, and Applications.