Since the massive earthquake struck Japan on March 11, we, the local organizing committee and the scientific program committee have been intensively discussing about its effect on the meeting. In view of the tremendous damage caused by the disaster, we are afraid that we have no alternative but to postpone the meeting until next year.

After 3 weeks passed since the earthquake, the situation in Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant remains as critical as ever, and although Japanese government and the whole nation are working so hard through day and night to resolve the situation, we can not ignore the effect of radioactive materials to your safety. Additionally, we expect substantial power supply shortage in Tokyo area this summer.

Taking the above situation into consideration, we have decided to postpone the meeting until next year. We rescheduled it to July 1-4, 2012, and we changed its location as well to Tsukuba, the science city and academic center of Japan, which is located appx. 60km from Tokyo area.

To those of you who already have registered, the local organizing committee will refund the registration fee to the credit card used for registration.

We hereby cordially invite you all to attend the meeting next year, when we are certain that you will witness a strong recovery of Japan from one of the most severe natural disasters in recent history.

Akimichi Takemura, Chair of LOC
Byeong Park, Co-Chair of SC
Runze Li, Co-Chair of SC