This book is based on the papers presented at the International Conference on Arti?cial Neural Networks, ICANN 2001, from August 21–25, 2001 at the - enna University of Technology, Austria. The conference is organized by the A- trian Research Institute for Arti?cal Intelligence in cooperation with the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Group and the Center for Computational - telligence at the Vienna University of Technology. The ICANN conferences were initiated in 1991 and have become the major European meeting in the ?eld of neural networks. From about 300 submitted papers, the program committee selected 171 for publication. Each paper has been reviewed by three program committee m- bers/reviewers. We would like to thank all the members of the program comm- tee and the reviewers for their great e?ort in the reviewing process and helping us to set up a scienti?c program of high quality. In addition, we have invited eight speakers; three of their papers are also included in the proceedings. We would like to thank the European Neural Network Society (ENNS) for their support. We acknowledge the ?nancial support of Austrian Airlines, A- trian Science Foundation (FWF) under the contract SFB 010, Austrian Society ̈ for Arti?cial Intelligence (OGAI), Bank Austria, and the Vienna Convention Bureau. We would like to express our sincere thanks to A. Flexer, W. Horn, K. Hraby, F. Leisch, C. Schittenkopf, and A. Weingessel. The conference and the proceedings would not have been possible without their enormous contri- tion.

The International Conferences on Arti?cial Neural Networks, ICANN, have been held annually since 1991 and over the years have become the major European meeting in neural networks. This proceedings volume contains all the papers presented at ICANN 2002, the 12th ICANN conference, held in August 28– 30, 2002 at the Escuela T ́ecnica Superior de Inform ́atica of the Universidad Aut ́onoma de Madrid and organized by its Neural Networks group. ICANN 2002 received a very high number of contributions, more than 450. Almost all papers were revised by three independent reviewers, selected among the more than 240 serving at this year’s ICANN, and 221 papers were ?nally selected for publication in these proceedings (due to space considerations, quite a few good contributions had to be left out). I would like to thank the Program Committee and all the reviewers for the great collective e?ort and for helping us to have a high quality conference.

The refereed proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks and International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICANN/ICONIP 2003, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2003. The 138 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 346 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on learning algorithms, support vector machine and kernel methods, statistical data analysis, pattern recognition, vision, speech recognition, robotics and control, signal processing, time-series prediction, intelligent systems, neural network hardware, cognitive science, computational neuroscience, context aware systems, complex-valued neural networks, emotion recognition, and applications in bioinformatics.

"This book covers the current state-of-the-art theories and applications of neural networks with high-dimensional parameters"--Provided by publisher.

"This book is the first book to provide opportunities for millions working in economics, accounting, finance and other business areas education on HONNs, the ease of their usage, and directions on how to obtain more accurate application results. It provides significant, informative advancements in the subject and introduces the HONN group models and adaptive HONNs"--Provided by publisher.

The two-volume set LNCS 2686 and LNCS 2687 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Work-Conference on Artificial and Natural Neural Networks, IWANN 2003, held in Maó, Menorca, Spain in June 2003. The 197 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book and address the following topics: mathematical and computational methods in neural modelling, neurophysiological data analysis and modelling, structural and functional models of neurons, learning and other plasticity phenomena, complex systems dynamics, cognitive processes and artificial intelligence, methodologies for net design, bio-inspired systems and engineering, and applications in a broad variety of fields.