DISC, the International Symposium on Distributed Computing, is an annual conference for the presentation of research on the theory, design, analysis, implementation, and application of distributed systems and network. DISC 2004 was held on October 4-7, 2004, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. There were 142 papers submitted to DISC this year. These were read and evaluated by the program committee members, assisted by external reviewers. The quality of submissions was high and we were unable to accept many dese- ing papers. Thirty one papers were selected at the program committee meeting in Lausanne to be included in these proceedings. The proceedings include an extended abstract of the invited talk by Ueli Maurer. In addition, they include a eulogy for Peter Ruzicka by Shmuel Zaks. The Best Student Paper Award was split and given to two papers: the paper “Efficient Adaptive Collect Using Randomization”, co-authored by Hagit Attiya, Fabian Kuhn, Mirjam Wattenhofer and Roger Wattenhofer, and the paper “Coupling and Self-stabilization”,co-authored by Laurent Fribourg, Stephane Messika and Claudine Picaronny. The support of the CWI and EPFL is gratefully acknowledged. The review process and the preparation of this volume were done using CyberChairPRO. I also thank Sebastien Baehni and Sidath Handurukande for their crucial help with these matters. August 2004 Rachid Guerraoui Peter Ruzicka 1947-2003 Peter died on Sunday, October 5, 2003, at the age of 56, after a short disease. He was a Professor of Informatics at the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics in Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia. Those of us who knew him through DISC and other occasions mourn his death and cherish his memory