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.

One of the main goals of intermediate energy nuclear physics, which serves an important role as a bridge between nuclear and particle physics, is to construct the theory of strong interaction phenomena in terms of conventional degrees of freedom (nucleons, deltas and mesons) as well as of quark degrees of freedom.The main topics to be discussed at this conference are the interaction of pions and other mesons with nuclei at intermediate energies and the role of mesonic degrees of freedom in nuclear reactions, including photon, hadron and heavy ion induced reactions. Both theoretical and experimental results will be included.Over the past two decades, the Meson Factories, including LAMPF, TRIUMF, and PSI, have provided us with systematic experimental information on hadron-hadron and hadron-nucleus dynamics. Major accelerators of JINR are also suitable for studying problems in Intermediate Energy Nuclear Physics. At the present time, first experiments have been performed with the proton beams at the Moscow Meson Factory of INR. One of the purposes of this conference is to introduce the intermediate-energy physics community to the possibility of utilizing the facilities of JINR and INR during the next decade.