Organizing Committee: U. Buchenau, J. Feldman, A. Fontana, K. Ngai, G. Ruocco, P. Verrocchio and G. Viliani.
The papers in this Special Issue were presented at the Twelfth International Workshop on Complex Systems, which was attended by more than one hundred scientists from Europe, USA and Asia. There were approximately sixty oral and twenty poster presentations in the fields of soft matter, glasses, systems of biological interest and other complex systems. With the introduction of new materials and techniques, complex systems are a growing field of research.
All participants benefited from the communication of new results, exchange of ideas, discussions, constructive criticism, suggestions for new research and the planning of collaboration between workers from different institutions. In addition, waiving the participation fee ensured that many young investigators and students were able to attend the workshop.
We wish to thank all the members of the Organizing Committee (in particular J. Feldman and K. Ngai, who contacted and invited the American participants) for their assistance, suggestions and services as Guest Editors of this Special Issue. Moreover, we acknowledge the professionalism and dedication of Professor E.A. Davis and the editorial staff of Philosophical Magazine. We also thank the orchestra of the Scuola Musicale Diapason of Trento for their performance during the workshop.
Finally, we acknowledge the financial support of the Physics department of the University of Trento, of the research center IPCF-CNR and of the Office of Naval Research Global (USA) (Grant number N62909-10-1-1027).
We wish to commemorate our dear friend Gabriele Viliani, who has died after a long malady March 9, 2011. Gabriele has been one of the organizers of all the Andalo Meetings since the first edition in the eighties. In the last twenty years he has dedicated its efforts to the study of disordered systems, publishing on this subject more than sixty papers on refereed journals. In addition, from 2002 to 2005 he was the Director of the Section C of INFM (National Institute of Physics of Matter), coordinating the development in the Italian community of the physics of disordered systems. He was professor of Struttura della Materia (Physics of Matter) at the Department of Physics of the University of Trento for more than twenty years. In this role he was greatly appreciated by his students and he formed several generations of scientists in the field of condensed matter. The humanity and the sympathy of Gabriele always hit everyone who met him, and the whole of our community will miss him.