The subject of Neural Networks is being seen to be coming of age, after its initial inception 50 years ago in the seminal work of McCulloch and Pitts. It is proving to be valuable in a wide range of academic disciplines and in important applications in industrial and business tasks. The progress being made in each approach is considerable. Nevertheless, both stand in need of a theoretical framework of explanation to underpin their usage and to allow the progress being made to be put on a firmer footing.This book aims to strengthen the foundations in its presentation of mathematical approaches to neural networks. It is through these that a suitable explanatory framework is expected to be found. The approaches span a broad range, from single neuron details to numerical analysis, functional analysis and dynamical systems theory. Each of these avenues provides its own insights into the way neural networks can be understood, both for artificial ones and simplified simulations. As a whole, the publication underlines the importance of the ever-deepening mathematical understanding of neural networks.

This volume of research papers comprises the proceedings of the first International Conference on Mathematics of Neural Networks and Applications (MANNA), which was held at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from July 3rd to 7th, 1995 and attended by 116 people. The meeting was strongly supported and, in addition to a stimulating academic programme, it featured a delightful venue, excellent food and accommo dation, a full social programme and fine weather - all of which made for a very enjoyable week. This was the first meeting with this title and it was run under the auspices of the Universities of Huddersfield and Brighton, with sponsorship from the US Air Force (European Office of Aerospace Research and Development) and the London Math ematical Society. This enabled a very interesting and wide-ranging conference pro gramme to be offered. We sincerely thank all these organisations, USAF-EOARD, LMS, and Universities of Huddersfield and Brighton for their invaluable support. The conference organisers were John Mason (Huddersfield) and Steve Ellacott (Brighton), supported by a programme committee consisting of Nigel Allinson (UMIST), Norman Biggs (London School of Economics), Chris Bishop (Aston), David Lowe (Aston), Patrick Parks (Oxford), John Taylor (King's College, Lon don) and Kevin Warwick (Reading). The local organiser from Huddersfield was Ros Hawkins, who took responsibility for much of the administration with great efficiency and energy. The Lady Margaret Hall organisation was led by their bursar, Jeanette Griffiths, who ensured that the week was very smoothly run.

The use of neural networks is permeating every area of signal processing. They can provide powerful means for solving many problems, especially in nonlinear, real-time, adaptive, and blind signal processing. The Handbook of Neural Network Signal Processing brings together applications that were previously scattered among various publications to provide an up-to-date, detailed treatment of the subject from an engineering point of view. The authors cover basic principles, modeling, algorithms, architectures, implementation procedures, and well-designed simulation examples of audio, video, speech, communication, geophysical, sonar, radar, medical, and many other signals. The subject of neural networks and their application to signal processing is constantly improving. You need a handy reference that will inform you of current applications in this new area. The Handbook of Neural Network Signal Processing provides this much needed service for all engineers and scientists in the field.

This volume is the first part of the two-volume proceedings of the International C- ference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2005), held on September 11–15, 2005 in Warsaw, Poland, with several accompanying workshops held on September 15, 2005 at the Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toru , Poland. The ICANN conference is an annual meeting organized by the European Neural Network Society in cooperation with the International Neural Network Society, the Japanese Neural Network Society, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. It is the premier European event covering all topics concerned with neural networks and related areas. The ICANN series of conferences was initiated in 1991 and soon became the major European gathering for experts in those fields. In 2005 the ICANN conference was organized by the Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland, and the Nicolaus Copernicus Univ- sity, Toru , Poland. From over 600 papers submitted to the regular sessions and some 10 special c- ference sessions, the International Program Committee selected – after a thorough peer-review process – about 270 papers for publication. The large number of papers accepted is certainly a proof of the vitality and attractiveness of the field of artificial neural networks, but it also shows a strong interest in the ICANN conferences.

The NATO Advanced Study Institute From Statistics to Neural Networks, Theory and Pattern Recognition Applications took place in Les Arcs, Bourg Saint Maurice, France, from June 21 through July 2, 1993. The meeting brought to gether over 100 participants (including 19 invited lecturers) from 20 countries. The invited lecturers whose contributions appear in this volume are: L. Almeida (INESC, Portugal), G. Carpenter (Boston, USA), V. Cherkassky (Minnesota, USA), F. Fogelman Soulie (LRI, France), W. Freeman (Berkeley, USA), J. Friedman (Stanford, USA), F. Girosi (MIT, USA and IRST, Italy), S. Grossberg (Boston, USA), T. Hastie (AT&T, USA), J. Kittler (Surrey, UK), R. Lippmann (MIT Lincoln Lab, USA), J. Moody (OGI, USA), G. Palm (U1m, Germany), B. Ripley (Oxford, UK), R. Tibshirani (Toronto, Canada), H. Wechsler (GMU, USA), C. Wellekens (Eurecom, France) and H. White (San Diego, USA). The ASI consisted of lectures overviewing major aspects of statistical and neural network learning, their links to biological learning and non-linear dynamics (chaos), and real-life examples of pattern recognition applications. As a result of lively interactions between the participants, the following topics emerged as major themes of the meeting: (1) Unified framework for the study of Predictive Learning in Statistics and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs); (2) Differences and similarities between statistical and ANN methods for non parametric estimation from examples (learning); (3) Fundamental connections between artificial learning systems and biological learning systems.

The mystique of biologically inspired (or bioinspired) paradigms is their ability to describe and solve complex relationships from intrinsically very simple initial conditions and with little or no knowledge of the search space. Edited by two prominent, well-respected researchers, the Handbook of Bioinspired Algorithms and Applications reveals the