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 currently in your hands. They include about 200 papers from the main conference (selected from more than 320 submissions) and about 33 papers from the five collated workshops: Complexity Theory of Art and Music (COART) Causality in Complex Systems (ComplexCCS) Complex Engineering Networks (ComplexEN) Modeling and Analysis of Human Dynamics (MANDYN) Social Physics and its Applications (SPA) Complex sciences are expanding their colonies at such a dazzling speed that it - comes literally impossible for any conference to cover all the frontiers.