The Prague Conferences on Information Theory, Statistical Decision Functions, and Random Processes have been organized every three years since 1956. During the eighteen years of their existence the Prague Conferences developed from a platform for presenting results obtained by a small group of researchers into a probabilistic congress, this being documented by the increasing number of participants as well as of presented papers. The importance of the Seventh Prague Conference has been emphasized by the fact that this Conference was held jointly with the eighth European Meeting of...