ICALEPCS2003, the 9^th biennial International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, was held at Hotel Hilton, Gyeongju, Korea from October 13 through October 17, 2003. The Conference was attended by 260 participants, representing 54 scientific institutes from 17 different countries around the world. There were also eight industrial exhibitors.

The Conference was organized by the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory (PAL) and Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) under the auspices of the Nuclear and Plasma Science Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE-NPSS), the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and the Association of Asia Pacific Physics Societies (AAPPS). The European Physical Society Interdivisional Group on Experimental Physics Control Systems (EPS-EPCS) was the traditional co-organizer while the Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI), the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), and the Center for High Energy Physics at Kyungpook National University (CHEP) also played the role of co-organizers and contributed with financial support.

The Conference benefited from several important sponsors: the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF), the Basic Science Institute and the International Affairs Office at POSTECH, the Korea Synchrotron Radiation Users Association, POSCON and POSCO. The organizers of ICALEPCS2003 are grateful to all sponsors for their valuable support.

The Conference was opened by Dr. C. M. Park, President of POSTECH, and a welcome speech was given by Professor W. H. Kwon of Seoul National University. Professor Kwon was also President-elect of International Federation of Automatic Control. He gave a short but excellent lecture on the role of IFAC and the relation with ICALEPCS.

The scientific program, which spanned four and a half days, had a little different format than before. Two apparently incompatible constraints came from the Program Committee: more oral presentations but no parallel sessions. Since getting travel permissions to attend international conferences without an oral presentation becomes nowadays more and more difficult, ICALEPCS2003 tried to increase as much as possible the number of oral contributions. On the other hand, participants wanted to attend all of the oral sessions, with no overlap with parallel ones. We tried to solve this problem by introducing two-days long poster sessions. In each poster session, posters were left mounted from the first day morning till the next day afternoon. A time slot of 90 minutes in the first day was allocated to allow participants to visit the poster. However, during coffee breaks and lunches, participants had additional time to look at the posters of their interest. In this way, we could arrange 214 presentations into 23 invited oral presentations, 49 contributed oral presentations and 142 posters.

Among the poster presentations, there were ten "posters with live demo". In recent conferences, some poster presenters had used notebook computers and networks to show their results to the participants. We extended this idea and created a new poster session named "posters with live demo". In this session, we arranged a dedicated corner in the poster area with a beam projector and tables. Participants could visit the session, according to a pre-arranged schedule, and the poster presenters could show them their work on the projector screen or even miniature models on the table. This session attracted a large number of participants.

After the four-and-a-half days long scientific program, we had a technical tour to POSCO, a world leading steel producer, and Pohang Accelerator Laboratory. Many participants enjoyed watching hot steel slabs becoming a pack of rolled sheet and experienced the tremendous heat and noise.

-	The 2003 EPS-EPCS prize was awarded during the Conference banquet to Dr. Jean-Yves Favez from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
-	The International Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC) met during the Conference and decided that the next ICALEPCS, ICALEPCS2005, will be hosted by CERN and held in Geneva, from 10 through 15 Oct. 2005.

We would like to thank all of the members of the ISAC and Program Committee for their continuous support and stimulating ideas in the preparation of ICALEPCS2003. The success of ICALEPCS2003 is to be attributed to the efforts of the local organizing committee, the PAL staff, and the students of the Accelerator Study Group from the Physics Department of POSTECH. We would like to thank the editorial team led by Dr. J. Choi for their huge mission. This team has actually taken care of the proceedings of three major conferences that PAL recently organized: Linac2002 published in December 2003, ICALEPCS2003 in October 2004, and APAC2004 that will be issued next year. Finally, we thank all participants and industrial exhibitors for having come to Korea. We hope that by participating to ICALEPCS2003 they had the opportunity to enjoy the Korean life and culture.