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.

This book of proceedings contains contributions of about 30 prominent scientists who were or are associated with the awardee, Prof J B Natowitz, and are working in the field of heavy-ion reactions.The papers contained in this book represent an up-to-date overview of the most interesting topics related to the formation and decay of hot nuclei and to nuclear dynamics.

This conference brought together the people working on 4π detectors to discuss what had been achieved, whether the results agreed, and to think about possible collaborations to measure the excitation function of several observables. It discussed the similarities and differences in the results obtained at low (100 MeV-1 GeV) and high (10 GeV-200 GeV) energies and outlined what the different fields could learn from each other, especially concerning correlations and particle production. It surveyed the success and also the insufficiency of the present theoretical approaches and discussed the direction in which they have to improve. Finally it gave an account of new developments in data analysis (wavelets, neural networks etc.).

The International Conference on Nuclear Physics at the Turn of the Millennium: Structure of Vacuum and Elementary Matter, held on March 10th to March 16th, 1996 at Wilderness/George, South Africa, is in honor of the 60th birthday of Prof Walter Greiner. Topics included: Supercritical Fields and Pair-Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions; Superheavy Nuclei, Exotic Nuclear States and Decays; Superdense Matter in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions: Collective Flow, Particle Production and the Nuclear Equation of State, Phase Transitions in QCD, Strange Matter and Signatures of the Quark Gluon Plasma.

The Predeal International Summer School, held at the Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, Romania, is a prestigious scientific event. The school first took place in 1969 and since then it has been held every two years.This year the lectures were given by more than 30 outstanding professors, covering timely subjects in theoretical and experimental nuclear physics. In addition, there were special sessions of contributed papers presenting the most recent results in these domains. The aim of the school was thus two-fold: to give basic information on some hot subjects of research in nuclear physics and to present them with the most recent achievements in these fields. This volume contains the proceedings of the school.