On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, McGill University's Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM) invited outstanding researchers from academia and R\&D environments to discuss the state of the art in research areas of interest to CIM. The response is documented in the papers assembled here, under the umbrella of the {\em International Symposium on Brain, Body and Machine}, held in Montreal on November 10—13, 2010. Areas of interest include heuristic algorithms, computer vision, medical imaging, haptics, human-machine interaction, systems and control, robot design and control, and multibody system dynamics. Applications cover a road spectrum, from shape identification and reconstruction to drug-dose regulation and body-motion detection and control. Contributors come from research laboratories based all over the world, not only from academia, but also from government agencies and industry.