IIT Kanpur is organizing a three day international symposium "Recent Advances in Modeling Rare Events: Methods and Applications" (RARE2014) at the Vasundhara Sarovar Premiere, Vayalar (Kerala), during May 29 - June 01, 2014 Many distinguished scientists working on the rare event sampling, optimization and related problems in different domains of science are expected for the meeting. The meeting would be a good platform for the participants to discuss the established and novel methods in detail and to form collaborations in order to work towards developing new techniques. This symposium is planned in the spirit of Gordon Research Conferences. Lectures will be covering several major techniques that are recently developed in the framework of molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo and optimizations to model chemical reactions, protein folding, phase transitions and nucleation. Moreover, young researchers get an opportunity to closely interact with the experts of the field. In particular, lectures may discuss