Symposium S, 'Nanostructured Metal Oxides for Advanced Applications', was held April 1-5 at the 2013 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco, California. Metal oxides represent an appealing and assorted class of materials, whose properties cover the entire range from metals to semiconductors to insulators and almost all aspects of material science, chemistry and physics in a very broad application area. In the past few years, progress has been made on the synthesis, structural, physical, and chemical characterization of self-assembled and hierarchically assembled metal oxide nanostructures that exhibit size-dependent properties. In these proceedings, attention is paid to the synthesis, structural and functional characterization of self-assembled nanostructures and architectures of all metal oxides with application potentials, with particular consideration given to the capability to tailor and control material properties via surface and structural modifications.