This new volume of the long-established St. Flour Summer School of Probability includes the notes of the three major lecture courses by Erwin Bolthausen on "Large Deviations and Iterating Random Walks", by Edwin Perkins on "Dawson-Watanabe Superprocesses and Measure-Valued Diffusions", and by Aad van der Vaart on "Semiparametric Statistics".

Founded in 1971, the Saint-Flour Probability Summer School is organised every year by the mathematics department of the Universite Blaise Pascal at Clermont-Ferrand, France, and held in the pleasant surroundings of an 18th century seminary building in the city of Saint-Flour, located in the French Massif Central, at an altitude of 900 m.

It attracts a mixed audience of up to 70 PhD students, instructors and researchers interested in probability theory, statistics, and their applications, and lasts 2 weeks. Each summer it provides, in three high-level courses presented by international specialists, a comprehensive study of some subfields in probability theory or statistics. The participants thus have the opportunity to interact with these specialists and also to present their own research work in short lectures.

The lecture courses are written up by their authors for publication in the LNM series."