Over almost 30 years of existence of the International Drying Symposia (IDS) the number of Brazilian participants increased continuously. The best way to reflect the increasing position of Brazilian drying research was to host the 14 th International Drying Symposium (IDS 2004) in Sao Paulo City, Brazil during August 22-25, 2004; this was the first time the symposium was hosted by a Latin American country. The symposium welcomed 221 participants from 37 countries from the five continents. As in all previous IDS’s, since its first edition in 1978, a truly international forum was guaranteed and interesting and instigating discussions on drying were carried out. IDS 2004 was a little bit smaller in number of participants than the last IDS’s. Nevertheless, the participants were very active: more than 50 people in each one of the three parallel oral sessions. In the poster sessions more than 200 participants discussed the papers for more than 2 hours. And even the closure session had more than 150 participants. The 3-volume hardcover set of proceedings (also in CD-ROM) is constituted by a total of 279 papers (1 plenary lecture, 6 invited keynote lectures and 272 contributed papers) written by 648 authors from 44 countries. There were 26 joint papers with authors from different countries. Figure 1 shows the distribution of authors of IDS 2004 papers by their country of origin. France and Japan, as usual, appeared as the biggest contributors after the host. Figure 1: Country of origin of IDS 2004 authors Figure 2 presents the participants of IDS 2004 also by their country of origin. Surprisingly, Sweden and Poland contributed with the biggest number of participants just after the host. As expected, the host was the greatest but never in previous IDS’s the host presented such a great contribution as in IDS 2004, around 40% of the authors, papers and participants came from Brazil. It is important to remark that Brazil has been always the second/third contributor of IDS’s since IDS’96. Figure 2: Country of origin of IDS 2004 participants The participation of people from industry was again not so big, only 13% of the participants came from industry. In fact, only two IDS’s had high industry participation: IDS’78 and IDS 2000. IDS 2004 was the first IDS that all information, abstract submission, manuscript submission, reviewing process and registration were electronically processed. The system worked quite well since more than 400 persons accessed it and less than 2% found problems of incompatibility. A total of 430 abstracts were submitted to the Conference Secretariat while 316 manuscripts were received. After the reviewing process, 32 were rejected and 284 returned to the authors for corrections. Finally, 276 received the final acceptance, however, 4 were excluded from the program because none of their authors sent the registration form although several messages and faxes were sent to them. So, 272 papers were published in the proceedings and kept in the IDS 2004 program. A total of 25 reviewers work very hard in the reviewing process, being 15 from the Scientific Committee (all members of the Advisory Panel of IDS’s) and 10 from the Organizing Committee. Each manuscript was reviewed by 2 of them. Seventy-eight papers were distributed in 14 oral presentation sessions. Eight presentations were scheduled for the special session of softwares. A hundred and ninety four papers were scheduled for 2 sessions of poster presentations. An impressive characteristic of IDS 2004 was practically the absence of no-shows. 94% of the papers scheduled for oral session were presented against 95% of the posters. By chance the papers not presented in the oral session were scheduled to the end of the sessions, so their absence didn’t hold the participants from moving from one session to another. Figure 3 shows the distribution of the IDS 2004 papers according to their themes. As in previous IDS’s, the predominance of Drying of Food and Agricultural Materials along with Fundamental/modeling& simulation was observed. Figure 3: Themes of the IDS 2004 papers The distribution of the authors, papers and participants of IDS 2004 by their continent of origin can be observed in Figure 4. It is clear that the interest in drying research is still high in Asia and Europe. Of course, South America appears in the first place due to the huge participation of the host. Although the distance could have helped the contribution of North America, this didn’t happen, reinforcing the idea of declining interest in drying research by North Americans. Figure 4: Distribution of authors, papers and participants of IDS 2004 by their continent of origin Having in mind to offer to IDS 2004 attendants different insights of the future of the drying development, it was planned the Open Forum entitled "New trends in drying research and technology", and it happened a very interesting and productive discussion between the audience and the speakers. It was a great pleasure to receive people from different countries in IDS 2004 sharing with them a typical Brazilian ambiance. We are sure the symposium promoted many new contacts and permitted to renew old ones. IDS 2004 website presents information about the symposium including the program and the proceedings. http://www.feq.unicamp.br/~ids2004. The next International Drying Symposium, IDS 2006, will be held in Budapest, Hungary, 20-23 August 2006. http://fft.gau.hu/events/ids2006.html NOTE ♣ 14th International Drying Symposium (IDS 2004) Sao Paulo City, Brazil August 22-25, 2004.