Our conference - opening today - has two aims in view: first, to commemorate some milestones in the development of the studies of close binary systems whose anniversaries fall in these years, as well as to take stock of our present knowledge accumulated through out preceding decades, in order to consider where do we go from here. This summer, 310 years will have elapsed since the first ec lipsing binary - Algol - was discovered in Bologna by Geminiano Montanari (1633-1687) to be a variable star; and 198 years have gone by since John Goodricke of York (1764-1786) established the fact that...