ISRERU-4 is in continuation of previous success meetings of Sino-Japan bilateral workshop (25-27 September 2003), Sino-Japan-Korea trilateral workshop on Rare Earth Novel Materials (8-11 July 2006) and ISRERU-3 (9-12 December 2012) in Changchun and ISFM-7 is in continuation of previous successful meetings of ISFM-6, 1-5 August 2014 in Singapore and ISFM-5, 15-20 December 2012 in Australia. The present continuation of these two meetings is expected to be highly beneficial to the worldwide functional materials community.

Both rare earth resource utilization and functional materials have received increasing attention in terms of their applications and development in recent years because of their dominant role in our society. The ISRERU-4 and ISFM-7 aim to assess the current status and to identify future priority and directions in research, design and applications of catalytic materials, ferroelectric and piezoelectric materials, fuel-cell and battery materials, magnetic materials, optical materials, shape memory materials, supercapacitor materials, thermoelectric materials, and other related advanced functional materials. Both conferences provide a platform and an opportunity to promote mutual interaction, information dissemination and exchange of ideas among researchers and are expected to promote fruitful collaborations in research and development of state-of-the-art advanced functional materials.