From its early beginnings in the fifties and sixties the field of neural networks has been steadily growing. The first wave was driven by a handful of pioneers who first discovered analogies between machines and biological systems in communication, control and computing. Technological constraints held back research considerably, but gradually computers have become less expensive and more accessible and software tools inceasingly more powerful. Mathematical techniques, developed by computer-aware people, have steadily accumulated and the second wave has begun. Researchers from such diverse areas as psychology, mathematics, physics, neuroscience and engineering now work together in the neural networking field.

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM), with its variants, is the most popular artificial neural network algorithm in the unsupervised learning category. About 4000 research articles on it have appeared in the open literature, and many industrial projects use the SOM as a tool for solving hard real world problems. Many fields of science have adopted the SOM as a standard analytical tool: statistics, signal processing, control theory, financial analyses, experimental physics, chemistry and medicine. This new edition includes a survey of over 2000 contemporary studies to cover the newest results. Case examples are provided with detailed formulae, illustrations, and tables. Further, a new chapter on software tools for SOM has been included whilst other chapters have been extended and reorganised.

RAM-based networks are a class of methods for building pattern recognition systems. Unlike other neural network methods, they learn very quickly and as a result are applicable to a wide variety of problems. This important book presents the latest work by the majority of researchers in the field of RAM-based networks.

November 28-December 1, 1994, Denver, Colorado NIPS is the longest running annual meeting devoted to Neural Information Processing Systems. Drawing on such disparate domains as neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, statistics, mathematics, engineering, and theoretical physics, the papers collected in the proceedings of NIPS7 reflect the enduring scientific and practical merit of a broad-based, inclusive approach to neural information processing. The primary focus remains the study of a wide variety of learning algorithms and architectures, for both supervised and unsupervised learning. The 139 contributions are divided into eight parts: Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Learning Theory, Algorithms and Architectures, Implementations, Speech and Signal Processing, Visual Processing, and Applications. Topics of special interest include the analysis of recurrent nets, connections to HMMs and the EM procedure, and reinforcement- learning algorithms and the relation to dynamic programming. On the theoretical front, progress is reported in the theory of generalization, regularization, combining multiple models, and active learning. Neuroscientific studies range from the large-scale systems such as visual cortex to single-cell electrotonic structure, and work in cognitive scientific is closely tied to underlying neural constraints. There are also many novel applications such as tokamak plasma control, Glove-Talk, and hand tracking, and a variety of hardware implementations, with particular focus on analog VLSI.

This is the third in a series of conferences devoted primarily to the theory and applications of artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. The first such event was held in Innsbruck, Austria, in April 1993, the second in Ales, France, in April 1995. We are pleased to host the 1997 event in the mediaeval city of Norwich, England, and to carryon the fine tradition set by its predecessors of providing a relaxed and stimulating environment for both established and emerging researchers working in these and other, related fields. This series of conferences is unique in recognising the relation between the two main themes of artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms, each having its origin in a natural process fundamental to life on earth, and each now well established as a paradigm fundamental to continuing technological development through the solution of complex, industrial, commercial and financial problems. This is well illustrated in this volume by the numerous applications of both paradigms to new and challenging problems. The third key theme of the series, therefore, is the integration of both technologies, either through the use of the genetic algorithm to construct the most effective network architecture for the problem in hand, or, more recently, the use of neural networks as approximate fitness functions for a genetic algorithm searching for good solutions in an 'incomplete' solution space, i.e. one for which the fitness is not easily established for every possible solution instance.

Optical character recognition and document image analysis have become very important areas with a fast growing number of researchers in the field. This comprehensive handbook with contributions by eminent experts, presents both the theoretical and practical aspects at an introductory level wherever possible.