TOOLS Eastern Europe 2002 was the third annual conference on the technology of object-oriented languages and systems. It was held in Eastern Europe, more specifically in Sofia, Bulgaria, from March 13 to 15. In my capacity of program chairman, I could count on the support from the Programming Technology Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to set up the technical program for this con ference. We managed to assemble a first class international program committee composed of the following researchers: ¿ Mehmet Aksit (Technische Hogeschool Twente, Netherlands) ¿ Jan Bosch (Universiteit Groningen, Netherlands) ¿ Gilad Bracha (Sun Microsystems, USA) ¿ Shigeru Chiba (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) ¿ Pierre Cointe (Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France) ¿ Serge Demeyer (Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen, Belgium) ¿ Pavel Hruby (Navision, Denmark) ¿ Mehdi Jazayeri (Technische Universitiit Wien, Austria) ¿ Eric Jul (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) ¿ Gerti Kappel (University of Linz, Austria) ¿ Boris Magnusson (University of Lund, Sweden) ¿ Daniela Mehandjiiska-Stavreva (Bond University, Australia) ¿ Tom Mens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) ¿ Christine Mingins (Monash University, Australia) ¿ Ana Moreira (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) ¿ Oscar Nierstrasz (Universitiit Bern, Switzerland) ¿ Walter Olthoff (DFKI, Germany) ¿ Igor Pottosin (A. P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, Russia) ¿ Atanas Radenski (Winston-Salem State University, USA) Markku Sakkinen (University of Jyvilskyl!l. , Finland) ¿ ¿ Bran Selic (Rational, Canada) ¿ Andrey Terehov (St.