"This meeting is dedicated to the memory of Professor Einar Tandberg-Hanssen who passed away in July 2011. He was deeply involved in prominences studies until the end of his life (see his last paper in Solar Physics February 2011). He is the author of the book “The nature of solar prominences”, published in 1995 and which is taken as the authority in the field." Rationale The aim of this IAU Symposium is to present a review of the state-of-the-art of the theoretical, numerical modeling, and space-borne and ground-based observational studies of prominences and their role in the dynamics of Sun-Earth relations. It also aims at opening new perspectives for the people, and especially young ones, working in the field. Prominences have an active role in the Space Weather. Magnetic clouds and the Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) associated to erupting prominences can produce severe perturbations in GPS, in telecommunications and for satellites and space inhabited vessels. So it is time to put together the many efforts made to understand their physics in order to be able to make forecasts about their possible impact on our space environment. Moreover, huge prominences and CME have been detected in solar-type stars (and others) and it is interesting to put the properties of solar prominences in a broader perspective, on one hand, and to present the status of the sophisticated solar analysis to the concerned stellar community on the other hand. In summary, we would like to bring together different communities in astrophysics.