The 2013 NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (AHS-2012) will be held June 24 - 27, 2013, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy. The purpose of the conference is to bring together leading researchers from the adaptive hardware and systems community to exchange experiences and share new ideas in the field. The conference expands the topics addressed by the precursor series of NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware, held between 1999 and 2005, with a broader scope. This includes a variety of hardware and system adaptation methods and targeting more industry participation. The NASA/ESA series started with the AHS-2006 conference held in Istanbul, Turkey, and continued annually with AHS-2007 conference held in Edinburgh, UK, AHS-2008 conference held in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, AHS-2009 conference held in San Francisco, USA, AHS-2010 conference held in Anaheim, USA, AHS-2011 conference held in San Diego, USA, and AHS-2012 conference held in Erlangen, Germany. Adaptation reflects the capability of a system to maintain or improve its performance in the context of internal or external changes, such as uncertainties and variations during fabrication, faults and degradations, modifications in the operational environment, incidental or intentional interference, different users and preferences, modifications of standards and requirements, trade-offs between performance and resources. We welcome original contributions in the areas of hardware and software adaptation at different system levels, including, but not limited to, tools and algorithms for adaptive system design (e.g. adaptation-aware compilers), novel applications of adaptive hardware and systems (e.g. intelligent agent machines), and enabling technologies for such systems (e.g. instrumentation platforms, reconfigurable and multi-core architectures). We also welcome novel contributions in the areas of adaptive data transmission for telecommunications (e.g. adapting to power limitations, changing environment, and interferences), data compression techniques (e.g. new image compression techniques for space applications), software/hardware architectures for unmanned autonomous vehicles (e.g. adapting to extreme environments and mission unknowns), etc. While the focus of this conference is on communications and space applications, we welcome original contributions in other application areas such as consumer, medical, defence and security, as the techniques employed can be disseminated across the board. We also welcome papers describing significant applications of adaptive hardware and systems to industrial case studies and demonstrating their capabilities and effectiveness.