This book offers a presentation of some new trends in operator theory and operator algebras, with a view to their applications. It consists of separate papers written by some of the leading practitioners in the field. The content is put together by the three editors in a way that should help students and working mathematicians in other parts of the mathematical sciences gain insight into an important part of modern mathematics and its applications. While different specialist authors are outlining new results in this book, the presentations have been made user friendly with the aid of tutorial material. In fact, each paper contains three things: a friendly introduction with motivation, tutorial material, and new research. The authors have strived to make their results relevant to the rest of mathematics. A list of topics discussed in the book includes wavelets, frames and their applications, quantum dynamics, multivariable operator theory, $C*$-algebras, and von Neumann algebras. Some longer papers present recent advances on particular, long-standing problems such as extensions and dilations, the Kadison-Singer conjecture, and diagonals of self-adjoint operators.