In this paper reported are some of the activities of the Laboratory of Manufacturing Technology of the NTUA in manufacturing engineering, focusing onto some recent trends and developments in advanced manufacturing of advanced materials, mainly emphasizing my long-standing Greek-Ukrainian-Russian-Hungarian scientific cooperation, also with international involvement worldwide, in the principal research and very important engineering topics nowadays, from industrial, research and academic point of view: ultraprecision engineering and nanotechnology and net-shape manufacturing of high-temperature ceramic superconductors. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.