The Third International Conference on Unconventional Models of Computation took place from October 15 to October 19, 2002. It is being organized jointly by the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, in Auckland, New Zealand, and the Kansai Advanced Research Center of the Communications Research Laboratory.

UMC'2002 was held at the Orbis hall, a multipurpose hall equipped with the latest computer-controlled elevating stage technology, which allows 7 different configurations. Being part of the Kobe Fashion Museum, a disk-shaped building in the center of Kobe's Rokko island, the hall is conveniently located near the Hotel Plaza Kobe and the Kobe Bay Sheraton hotel, which has direct bus connections to/from the Kansai International Airport (about 1 hour), the Shin-Kobe Shinkansen station (about 30 min), and Sannomiya railway-station (about 20 min).

The conference encompasses all areas of unconventional computation, especially quantum computing, DNA-based computation, evolutionary algorithms and other proposals for computation models that go beyond the Turing model.

The UMC02 proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag in the LNCS series and was made available during the conference.