This symposium was organized in order to discuss recent developments and future perspectives in intermediate-energy heavy-ion physics. The subjects included sub-barrier fusion, superheavy elements, fission; halo, skin nuclei; multi-fragmentation, collective flow, compression; properties of hot nuclei; high spin and exotic nuclear shapes; nuclear astrophysics; applications; facilities.

Seven years after the first experiments in the new field of Nuclear Physics, the Highly Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics, the Nato-Advanced- Study-Institute on the 'Particle Production in Highly Excited Matter' was held from July 12 till July 24, 1992, at Il Ciocco, Castelvecchio Pascoli, near Lucca in Italy. The school took place at a mo ment when intensive efforts are mounted by the scientific community of Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics to meet the extraordinary challenge of the new upcoming physics opportunities. The gold beams of 10 GeV A at Brookhaven AGS have been sent to the experiments this Summer and we extent our congratulations to the persons and teams who made this possible. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven is under construction and expected to allow experiments to see collisions in the intersec tion regions early 1998. The lead beams at the SPS at CERN scheduled for summer 1994 are eagerly awaited by 6 large experiments, and many scientists are planning the experiments at the planned LHC with heavy ions to be turned on before the year 2000. Seen against this background of rather fierce activity, we were most delighted when NATO accepted our application for an Advanced Study Institute oriented to the main subject of this young and dynamic field of research. We are very grateful to the Scientific Affairs Division of NATO and Dr. L. DaCunha, the director of the Advanced Study Institute program for giving our community this opportunity.

The last decade has been witness to many exciting and rapid developments in the fields of Nuclear Physics and Intermediate Energy Physics, the interface between Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics. These developments involved to a large extent the sub nucleonic degrees of freedom in nuclei. In deep inelastic lepton scattering from nuclei, for example, it was observed that the quark structure of the nucleon is influenced by the nuclear medium. Also, the spin-dependent structure function of the nucleon was found to differ from sum rules based on SU(3) symmetry, a discrepancy referred to as the "spin crisis". In pion electroproduction at threshold and in the production of pions and other mesons in heavy ion collisions at intermediate energies interesting experimental results have been obtained, which triggered lively theoretical discussions. Furthermore, the search for the quark-gluon plasma phase of hadronic matter, a phase that is supposed to have existed in the first few seconds of the Big Bang, has been intensified. Not only were these developments accompanied by technical developments, such as the building of new experimental facilities, but also extensive theoretical efforts have been directed towards understanding these phenomena. These concerted efforts will hopefully lead to an understanding of the transition from the non-perturbative QCD regime to the perturbative one, in which the quark structure of nucleons is better understood. All of the aforementioned developments occur at a high pace, making it difficult to incorporate them into the courses offered to advanced students.