The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation and machine learning. This volume contains the papers presented at the December 2006 meeting, held in Vancouver.

This handbook presents some of the most recent topics in neural information processing, covering both theoretical concepts and practical applications. The contributions include: Deep architectures Recurrent, recursive, and graph neural networks Cellular neural networks Bayesian networks Approximation capabilities of neural networks Semi-supervised learning Statistical relational learning Kernel methods for structured data Multiple classifier systems Self organisation and modal learning Applications to content-based image retrieval, text mining in large document collections, and bioinformatics This book is thought particularly for graduate students, researchers and practitioners, willing to deepen their knowledge on more advanced connectionist models and related learning paradigms.

The reader will find here papers on human-robot interaction as well as human safety algorithms; haptic interfaces; innovative instruments and algorithms for the sensing of motion and the identification of brain neoplasms; and, even a paper on a saxophone-playing robot.

Papers presented at NIPS, the flagship meeting on neural computation, held in December 2004 in Vancouver.The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference is the flagship meeting on neural computation. It draws a diverse group of attendees--physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. The presentations are interdisciplinary, with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, brain imaging, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, emerging technologies, and applications. Only twenty-five percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. This volume contains the papers presented at the December, 2004 conference, held in Vancouver.

As sensors become ubiquitous, a set of broad requirements is beginning to emerge across high-priority applications including disaster preparedness and management, adaptability to climate change, national or homeland security, and the management of critical infrastructures. This book presents innovative solutions in offline data mining and real-time