Recently, exciting new notions have been emerging in theoretical physics. The quantum nature of gravitation revealed in the physics of black holes, exotic excitations obeying fractional statistics, and integrable structure such as Yangian symmetry in low-dimensional models are some of the subjects presented in this volume.The spectrum of the talks at the School, reflected in the proceedings, is a wide one ranging from the phenomenology of particle physics to that of condensed matter physics, to topics of a mathematical nature. This is an indication that there is a robust interplay of ideas from diverse disciplines of theoretical physics in the Asia-Pacific region.
