KEYNOTE ADDRESS

On behalf of the members and committee of SECED I welcome all those participating in the conference to the University of East Anglia.

To introduce the reasons for having this conference it is first necessary to introduce, to many of you, the Society for Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics, SECED. SECED operates under the aegis of the Institution of Civil Engineers and is the British National Section of the International Association for Earthquake Engineering, IAEE. The function of SECED is to promote co-operation and the advancement of knowledge in its field, in pursuance of which it holds meetings and conferences for discussion and publishes papers and reports. It provides a medium for cooperation between industry and research and a channel through which the many specialists concerned in earthquakes and dynamics can express their views - as was recently done on Eurocode 8 (the European Code for Structures in Seismic Regions). It is also