The symposium is organized by the Department of Mining Engineering and Metallurgy of the National University of Athens and the Department of Metallurgy and Mining of the University of Idaho. It is intended that this symposium will be the first in a series of symposia on system simulation, artificial intelligence techniques, virtual reality and other related topics, as they apply in mining.

The complete proceedings are published on CD-ROM with an accompanying book which contains abstracts (including full title, authors' names and e-mail addresses as well as a keyword index) of all the papers. Also included are the full texts of keynote lectures and a short introduction about the experience gained with this new way of holding a conference.