Fig.1. The participants of the MMET*02 conference near the library of Kiev Polytechnic University.

Fig.2. (1-r) Prof. E. Veliev, MMET*02 Chair, Prof. Hoorfar (invited speaker), Villanova University, USA, and Prof. A. Krokhin (invited speaker), Pueblo, Mexico, at the welcome party.

The technical sessions were held in NTUU-KPI (Figure 1), which, with more than 32,000 students, is the largest as well as one of the oldest technical universities in Ukraine. The technical program committee of the 2002 MMET, chaired by Prof. Eldar I. Veliev (Figure 2) from the Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics, National Academy of Sciences (IRE-NAS), and co-chaired by Prof. Alexander I. Nosich (Figure 3) from IRE-NAS and Dr. Ross Stone from Stoneware Limited, did an excellent job of efficiently organizing each conference day. Each day began with a plenary session of invited speakers in the morning, and had three parallel sessions of contributed papers in the afternoon. The sessions included 27 invited and 130 contributed papers (Figures 4-7). Sessions included such general areas as "Time-Domain Methods," "Computational Optoelectronics," "Antenna Analysis and Synthesis," "Printed Antennas and Circuits," "Remote Sensing, Propagation, and Signal Processing," "Function-Theoretic Methods," "Eigenvalue Problems," "Analytical Regularization, Gratings, and Frequency-Selective Surfaces," "Composite Media and Meta-Materials," (Figure 8) and "Scattering and Radar Cross Section."

Fig.3. Prof. A. Nosich, MMET*02 Co-Chair and Dr. Magath from Hamburg, Germany.

A young scientist paper competition was held during the conference. I was very much impressed by the quality of the presentations of all young presenters, especially those from the FSU countries. The results of the competition were announced in the closing ceremony of the conference.

The First Prize was awarded: to Gerogy Ghvedshvilli, from Tblisi, Georgia, for his paper entitled "Drop Shaped Monopole Antenna and its Interaction with the User's Head," co-authored with R. Zaridze, K. Tavzarashvili, G. Saparishvili, and A. Bijamov.

Two Second Prizes were awarded to Svetlana Ivleeva, from Penza, Russia for her paper, "Propagation of Electromagnetic Waves in Open Circular Waveguides with Nonlinear Media," co-authored with Y. Smirnov; and to Mirza Karamehmedovic from Lyngby, Denmark, for his presentation, "Application of the Method of Auxiliary Sources for the Analysis of Plane Wave Scattering by Impedance Spheres," co-authored with O. Breinbjerg.

Three Third Prizes were awarded: to Anna Vyazmitinova from Kharkov, Ukraine, for her presentation "Accurate 'Absorbing' Conditions for Non-Sinusoidal Problems of Diffraction for Compact Objects;" to Alexander Muzychenko from Kharkov, Ukraine, for his presentation, "Estimation of Geometrical Parameters of Perfectly Conducting Cylindrical Object Buried in Dielectric Half-Space by its Scattering Characteristic," co-authored by A. Z. Sazonov and O. I. Sukharevsky; and to Makarov from Novosibirsk, Russia, for his presentation, "Numerical Investigation of Eigenoscillations Near a Honeycomb in a Circular Channel."

Fig.4. Prof. V. Daniele, from Milan, Italy, presenting an invited paper, "Approximated Factorizations for Kernels Involved in the Scattering due by a Wedge at Skew Incidence."

Two achievement awards were also presented at the 2002 MMET conference. Prof. Alexander Lerer, of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, received the Vladimir Sologub Award for "The development of analytical regularization techniques," and Prof. Elman Hasanov, of Istanbul, Turkey, received the Nikolay Khizhnyak Award for "The contribution to the electromagnetic theory."

Special certificates of appreciation were presented to Profs. Anatoly Sorkin and Yoichi Okuno for "The most distant travel to MMET*02" from Krasnoyarsk, Russia, and Kumamoto, Japan, respectively. Finally, Dr. Alexander Sulima, of Kharkov, Ukraine, received a certificate of appreciation for "The earliest registration at MMET*02!"