This volume contains the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry (ACRI 2002) that was held in - neva on October 9–11, 2002. After more modest beginnings in 1994 as a largely Italian conference, over the years ACRI has gradually become—rmly established as one of the premier conferences in the field of cellular automata in Europe and beyond. Althoughthe field of cellular automata is a relatively old and established one, these simple but powerful systems and their newer variations continue to attract the interest of researchers after more than half a century since the seminal work of Ulam and Von Neumann. The ACRI series of conferences has the ambition of being an internationally renowned forum for all those interested in the theory and applications of cellular systems. The contributions collected in this volume concern cellular automata in - rious fields such as theory, implementations and applications. In addition, several  fields of research (e. g. the multi-agents approach) adopt methodologies that show strict affinities to cellular automata, but without the label “Cellular Automata”. Therefore, one of our intentions was to enlarge the cellular automata community to include new related techniques.