The Lake Louise Winter Institute is held annually to explore recent trends in physics in an informal setting. Pedagogical and review lectures are presented by invited experts. A topical workshop is held in conjunction with the Institute, with contributed presentations by participants. It concentrates on areas related to the invited lectures. Participants are encouraged to present material that includes recent developments in experimental and theoretical physics.

The Lake Louise Winter Institute is held annually to explore recent trends in physics in an informal setting. Pedagogical and review lectures are presented by invited experts. A topical workshop is held in conjunction with the Institute, with contributed presentations by participants. It concentrates on areas related to the invited lectures. Participants are encouraged to present material that includes recent developments in experimental and theoretical physics.

The traditional purpose of the Adriatic Meeting is to present most advanced scienti?c research conducted by the lecturers who take part in the development of their ?elds and, in addition, to provide a school-like atmosphere for young scientists. Dubrovnik, as a geographical centre of this region of Europe, provided a most adequate location for this conference. Having very agreeable surroundings, the conference site nevertheless gave a focus for very strong scienti?c interaction. The subjects chosen for the 8th meeting, in September 2001, were gauge theories, particle phenomenology, string theories and cosmology. We were able to bring together a very good cross section of outstanding scientists who gave extraorinarily good presentations. Certainely one reason for this success is that most of us feel obliged to help the scienti?c life in South East Europe return to its former level. However, there are very exciting new scienti?c developments as well. Part of the meeting was dominated by neutrino physics which has just seen exciting progress by establishing neutrino masses experimentally. This was d- cussed within neutrino masses and grand uni?ed theories (GUTs). General - pects of neutrino physics and CP violation, neutrino mixing and the bayron asymmetry were presented along the same lines. On the theoretical side the idea of the construction of gauge theories on non-commutative spaces and their phenomenological implications is accepted worldwide within the particle physics community.

"The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics has withstood thus far every attempt by experimentalists to show that it does not describe data. We discuss the SM in some detail, focusing on the mechanism of fermion mixing, which represents one of its most intriguing aspect. We discuss how this mechanism can be tested in b-quark decays, and how b decays can be used to extract information on physics beyond the SM. We review experimental techniques in b physics, focusing on recent results and highlighting future prospects. Particular attention is devoted to recent results from b decays into a hadron, a lepton and an anti-lepton, that show discrepancies with the SM predictions - the so-called B-physics anomalies - whose statistical significance has been increasing steadily. We discuss these experiments in a detailed manner, and also provide theoretical interpretation of these results in terms of physics beyond the SM"--