Proceedings of a Symposium held in Huntsville, Canada, September 17-21, 1997

The seventh "Oxford Conference" on Modeling and Control of Ventilation was held in the beautiful setting of Northem Ontario at the Grandview Inn in Hunstville. This meet- ing was called the Canadian Conference on Modeling and Control ofVentilation (CCMCV) to follow on LCMCV held in London, England, three years ago. The beautiful view over Fairy Lake greeted everyone in the moming and provided an ideal setting for many discus- sions about respiratory physiology and modeling. The Oxford Conferences began in 1971 when Dr. Richard Hercynski (a mathematical modeler with an interest in respiratory physiology) and Dr. Dan Cunningham (a respiratory physiologist with an interest in modeling) decided to organize a meeting "Modelling of a Biological Control System: Tbe Regulation of Breathing" in Oxford, England, in 1978. The meeting was a success, and it spawned aseries of meetings that have continued to today. A second conference was organized at Lake Arrowbead, Califomia, in 1982. After tbis, con- ferences were repeated at tbree-year intervals. My first Oxford Conference was at tbe abbey in Solignac, France, in 1985. Next, we met in tbe cabins overlooking Grand Lake, Colorado, in 1988. In 1991, we traveled to the training institute at the base ofMt. Fuji (or at least they tell us Mt. Fuji was out there--we never saw it because of a typhoon rolling through). Our last meeting was at Royal Holloway College (University of London) where we got to dine in a castle among artwork that required guards and an electronic security system.