The meeting is motivated by the confluence of several exciting issues. The foremost among these is the coming Beam Energy Scan II at the RHIC in Brookhaven. This narrows the scan to a region where there were earlier indications of a possible critical point of QCD. The second development is the study of light hyper-nuclei: their properties are of interest not only in nuclear physics, but also to heavy-ion physics, where the production of these hyper-nuclei are very important probes of the late stage dynamics of the cooling fireball, and neutron stars, where transport properties in the proto-neutron star and the structure of neutron stars could be acted by these components. The third development is the study of transport properties in strongly interacting matter, which has begun to tie together vastly different kinds of physics. Other experiments which will address similar issues are the CBM experiment in FAIR and the NICA in JINR.
