I was invited to join the Organizing Committee of the First International Conference on Complex Sciences: Theory and Applications (Complex 2009) as its ninth member. At that moment, eight distinguished colleagues, General Co- chairs Eugene Stanley and Gaoxi Xiao, Technical Co-chairs J·nos Kertész and Bing-Hong Wang, Local Co-chairs Hengshan Wang and Hong-An Che, Publicity Team Shi Xiao and Yubo Wang, had spent hundreds of hours pushing the conference half way to its birth. Ever since then, I have been amazed to see hundreds of papers flooding in, reviewed and commented on by the TPC members. Finally, more than 200 contributions were - lected for the proceedings