With the advent of powerful instruments in various spectral domains many scientists became involved in the study of giant HII regions - i.e. regions as important as 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud or NGC 604 in Messier 33 - and of HII complexes still more active such as isolated extragalactic HII regions, some galactic central regions, chains in large spirals and clumpy irregular galaxies.

In view of the importance of these investigations for the problems of formation and evolution of stars and of galaxies, we organized a Meeting at thelAU XVIIIth General Assembly on”Giant HII complexes outside our Galaxy”with the following program:

1. a- Observational results and their primary interpretations in the X-ray, UV, visible, IR and radio domains.

2. b- Confrontation with related investigations in our Galaxy and general interpretations.