The 17th Electromagnetic Launch Technology Symposium will be held July 7-11, 2014, at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines in San Diego, California. The Institute for Strategic and Innovative Technologies is pleased to host this event under the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and IEEE's Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society. The Electromagnetic Launch Technology Symposium (EML) is a biennial event that serves as the principal forum for the discussion, interchange, and presentation of research on critical technologies for accelerating macroscopic objects or projectiles to hypervelocities using electromagnetic or electrothermochemical launchers. The EML symposia have a long-standing international reputation as a catalyst for stimulating research in the field of electromagnetic launch. In May 1998, the U.S. EML and the European EML announced their decision to consolidate their symposia. In May 2012, the International Permanent Committee welcomed China as a permanent member of the International EML Technology Symposia. The 17th EML will be the 2nd in the series under this new structure. During the Symposium, researchers share and exchange a wealth of knowledge through oral and poster presentations. We are at the threshold of a new era in the applications of electromagnetic launch technology. Significant developments in hypervelocity electromagnetic launch and in hypervelocity high-G guidance and control components have provided the impetus for exploring advanced electromagnetic launchers capable of providing revolutionary new capabilities. The ability to use electromagnetic energy to controllably propel objects to extremely high speeds has broad and important consequences for many elements of our society, including transportaiton, communications, energy, national defense, and space. The technology for using electromagnetic energy pulses to accelerate materials to extremely high speeds is only now sufficiently advanced that it is being exploited to evaluate the survivability of space structures and the survivability and lethality of military weapons systems. Electromagnetic launchers are now capable of accelerating objects to such high speeds that projectiles are capable of traveling many hundreds of kilometers or penetrating the most advance modern armors, and there is a renewed and growing interest in using electromagnetic launchers to reach sufficiently high speeds to put objects in orbit around the earth. The Symposium's proceedings and a Special Issue of the Transactions in Plasma Science serve as the major archival source of papers published in this field. All technical presentations at the Symposium will be published in the Proceedings by the Institute for Strategic and Innovative Technologies and, following peer review, selected papers will be published by the IEEE as a special issue of the Transactions on Plasma Science.