Book excerpt: The triennial International Alloy Conferences (lACs) aim at the identification and promotion of the common elements developed in the study, either experimental, phenomenological, or theoretical and computational, of materials properties across materials types, from metals to minerals. To accomplish this goal, the lACs bring together scientists from a wide spectrum of materials science including experiment, theory, modeling, and computation, incorporating a broad range of materials properties. The first lAC, lAC-I, took place in Athens, Greece, June 16-21, 1996. The present volume of proceedings contains the papers presented at IAC-2, that took place in Davos, Switzerland, August 8-13, 1999. The topics in this book fall into several themes, which suggest a number of different classification schemes. We have chosen a scheme that classifies the papers in the volume into the categories Microstructural Properties; Ordering, Kinetics and Diffusion; Magnetic Properties and Elastic Properties. We have juxtaposed apparently disparate of revealing the dynamic character approaches to similar physical processes, in the hope of the processes under consideration. We hope this will invigorate new kinds of discussion and reveal challenges and new avenues to the description and prediction of properties of materials in the solid state and the conditions that produce them.