Multimedia communication requires several things. First, it requires that people have a reason to communicate in multimedia. Applications in education, health, entertainment, and business services are emerging, but exactly what will appeal most to the markets is still unclear. This volume of 63 papers focuses on some of these applications and reviews ways of analyzing these markets in the section "Markets, Applications and Services." Second, communicating in multimedia requires the technical systems that will allow users to create and send messages and respond to others. The authoring systems, network architectures and coding, and many examples of applications development are reviewed in the section "Multimedia Communications Technologies." Third, both applications and technologies function within a policy and regulatory context in each country and internationally. Many policies of the past are being challenged by these new developments and require addressing the basic principles behind them and rethinking how these principles apply to new ways of communicating. These issues are discussed in the section "Policy and Regulatory Issues." The theme, "Forging the Link: Market-Technology-Policy," is reflected in the many discussions which attempt to bring these three areas together and to think about how they influence and direct each other. The proceedings also contains a list of conference committees and members, transcripts of 10 plenary speaker addresses and 6 tutorials. (MAS)