We welcome you to the First International Conference on Arts and Technology (ArtsIT 2009), hosted by CSIE of the National Ilan University and co-organized by the National Science Council, ICST, College of EECS at National Ilan University, Software Simulation Society in Taiwan, ISAC, TCA, NCHC, CREATE-NET, and Institute for Information Industry. ArtsIT2009 was held in Yilan, Taiwan, during September 24-25, 2009. The conference comprised the following themes: * New Media Technologies (Evolutionary systems that create arts or display art works, such as tracking sensors, wearable computers, mixed reality, etc. ) * Software Art (Image processing or computer graphics techniques that create arts, including algorithmic art, mathematic art, advanced modeling and rend- ing, etc. ) * Animation Techniques (2D or 3D computer animations, AI-based animations, etc. ) * Multimedia (Integration of different media, such as virtual reality systems, audio, performing arts, etc. ) * Interactive Methods (Vision-based tracking and recognition, interactive art, etc. ) The conference program started with an opening ceremony, followed by three keynote speeches and four technical sessions distributed over a period of two days. Two poster sessions, one hour each, were scheduled before the afternoon oral sessions. An Int- active Arts Exhibition was held in conjunction with ArtsIT 2009. Twelve well-known digital arts teams from Taiwan exhibited 15 artworks in this event, including 10 int- active installation arts, 4 video arts, and 1 digital print. The conference received around 50 submissions from 15 different countries.

The First International Conference on Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime (ICDF2C) was held in Albany from September 30 to October 2, 2009. The field of digital for- sics is growing rapidly with implications for several fields including law enforcement, network security, disaster recovery and accounting. This is a multidisciplinary area that requires expertise in several areas including, law, computer science, finance, networking, data mining, and criminal justice. This conference brought together pr- titioners and researchers from diverse fields providing opportunities for business and intellectual engagement among attendees. All the conference sessions were very well attended with vigorous discussions and strong audience interest. The conference featured an excellent program comprising high-quality paper pr- entations and invited speakers from all around the world. The first day featured a plenary session including George Philip, President of University at Albany, Harry Corbit, Suprintendent of New York State Police, and William Pelgrin, Director of New York State Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination. An outstanding keynote was provided by Miklos Vasarhelyi on continuous auditing. This was followed by two parallel sessions on accounting fraud /financial crime, and m- timedia and handheld forensics. The second day of the conference featured a mesm- izing keynote talk by Nitesh Dhanjani from Ernst and Young that focused on psyc- logical profiling based on open source intelligence from social network analysis. The third day of the conference featured both basic and advanced tutorials on open source forensics.

Micromechanical manufacturing based on microequipment creates new possibi- ties in goods production. If microequipment sizes are comparable to the sizes of the microdevices to be produced, it is possible to decrease the cost of production drastically. The main components of the production cost - material, energy, space consumption, equipment, and maintenance - decrease with the scaling down of equipment sizes. To obtain really inexpensive production, labor costs must be reduced to almost zero. For this purpose, fully automated microfactories will be developed. To create fully automated microfactories, we propose using arti?cial neural networks having different structures. The simplest perceptron-like neural network can be used at the lowest levels of microfactory control systems. Adaptive Critic Design, based on neural network models of the microfactory objects, can be used for manufacturing process optimization, while associative-projective neural n- works and networks like ART could be used for the highest levels of control systems. We have examined the performance of different neural networks in traditional image recognition tasks and in problems that appear in micromechanical manufacturing. We and our colleagues also have developed an approach to mic- equipment creation in the form of sequential generations. Each subsequent gene- tion must be of a smaller size than the previous ones and must be made by previous generations. Prototypes of ?rst-generation microequipment have been developed and assessed.

This volume contains the proceedings of the third international conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (PReMI 2009) which was held at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India, during December 16-20, 2009. This was the third conference in the series. The first two conferences were held in December at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata in 2005 and 2007. PReMI has become a premier conference in India presenting state-of-art research findings in the areas of machine intelligence and pattern recognition. The conference is also successful in encouraging academic and industrial interaction, and in prom- ing collaborative research and developmental activities in pattern recognition, - chine intelligence and other allied fields, involving scientists, engineers, professionals, researchers and students from India and abroad. The conference is scheduled to be held every alternate year making it an ideal platform for sharing views and expe- ences in these fields in a regular manner. The focus of PReMI 2009 was soft-computing, machine learning, pattern recognition and their applications to diverse fields. As part of PReMI 2009 we had two special workshops. One workshop focused on text mining. The other workshop show-cased industrial and developmental projects in the relevant areas. Premi 2009 attracted 221 submissions from different countries across the world.

th This two-volume set constitutes the Proceedings of the 16 International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2009), held in Bangkok, Thailand, during December 1-5, 2009. ICONIP is a world-renowned international conference that is held annually in the Asia-Pacific region. This prestigious event is sponsored by the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA), and it has provided an annual forum for international researchers to exchange the latest ideas and advances in neural networks and related discipline. The School of Information Technology (SIT) at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), Bangkok, Thailand was the proud host of ICONIP 2009. The conference theme was "Challenges and Trends of Neural Information Processing," with an aim to discuss the past, present, and future challenges and trends in the field of neural information processing. ICONIP 2009 accepted 145 regular session papers and 53 special session papers from a total of 466 submissions received on the Springer Online Conference Service (OCS) system. The authors of accepted papers alone covered 36 countries and - gions worldwide and there are over 500 authors in these proceedings. The technical sessions were divided into 23 topical categories, including 9 special sessions.

Following two successful events in Guilin, People's Republic of China (KSEM 2006) and in Melbourne, Australia (KSEM 2007) the third event in this conference series was held for the first time in Europe, namely, in Vienna, Austria. KSEM 2009 aimed to be a communication platform and meeting ground for research on knowledge science, engineering and management, attracting high-quality, state-of-the-art publications from all over the world. It offers an exceptional opportunity for presenting original work, technological advances, practical problems and concerns of the research community. The importance of studying "knowledge" from different viewpoints such as science, engineering and management has been widely acknowledged. The accelerating pace of the "Internet age" challenges organizations to compress communication and innovation cycles to achieve a faster return on investment for knowledge. Thus, next-generation business solutions must be focused on supporting the creation of value by adding knowledge-rich components as an integral part to the work process. Therefore, an integrated approach is needed, which combines issues from a large array of knowledge fields such as science, engineering and management. Based on the reviews by the members of the Program Committee and the additional reviewers, 42 papers were selected for this year's conference. Additionally, two discussion panels dealing with "Knowware: The Third Star after Hardware and Software" and "Required Knowledge for Delivering Services" took place under the auspices of the conference. The papers and the discussions covered a great variety of approaches of knowledge science, management and engineering, thus making KSEM a unique conference.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis, IWCIA 2009, held in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in November 2009.

The 32 revised full papers and one invited paper presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on digital geometry: curves, straightness, convexity, geometric transformations, metrics, distance transforms and skeletons, segmentation, thinning, skeletonization, image representation, processing, analysis, reconstruction and recognition, digital tomography, image models based on geometry, combinatorics, arithmetics, algebra, mathematical morphology, topology and grammars, as well as digital topology and its applications to image modeling and analysis.

INSTICC organized the third edition of VISIGRAPP that took place in Funchal- Madeira, Portugal in January 2008 after successful previous editions. This book - cludes selected papers from VISIGRAPP 2008, the Joint Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP) and Computer Graphics Theory and - plications (GRAPP). The conference was intended to stimulate the exchange of ideas on the topics of c- puter vision and computer graphics. We received a high number of paper submissions: 374 in total for both conferences. We had contributions from more than 50 countries in all continents. This confirms the success and global dimension of these jointly organized conferences. After a rigorous double-blind evaluation method, 78 submissions were accepted as full papers. From those, 20 were selected for this book. To ensure the sci- tific quality of the contributions, these were selected from the ones that were evaluated with the highest scores by the VISIGRAPP Program Committee Members and then they were extended and revised by the authors. Special thanks go to all contributors and re- rees, without whom this book would not have been possible. VISIGRAPP 2008 also featured the comments of keynote speakers, in alphabetical order, Adrian Hilton (University of Surrey, UK), Genevieve Lucet (Computer S- vices for Research at the UNAM, Mexico), Peter Sturm (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France) and Sharathchandra Pankanti (IBM - Exploratory Computer Vision Group, USA), who are internationally recognized researchers. The presentations represented an - portant contribution to the overall quality of the conference.

Following the very successful Motion in Games event in June 2008, we or- nized the Second International Workshop on Motion in Games (MIG) during November 21-24, 2009 in Zeist, The Netherlands. Games have become a very important medium for both education and - tertainment. Motion plays a crucial role in computer games. Characters move around, objects are manipulated or move due to physical constraints, entities are animated, and the camera moves through the scene. Even the motion of the player nowadays is used as input to games. Motion is currently studied in many di?erent areas of research, including graphics and animation, game technology, robotics, simulation, computer vision, and also physics, psychology, and urban studies. Cross-fertilizationbetween these communities can considerably advance the state of the art in this area. The goal of the workshop Motion in Games is to bring together researchers from this variety of ?elds to present the most recent results and to initiate collaboration. The workshop is organized by the Dutch research project GATE. In total, the workshop this year consisted of 27 high-quality presentations by a selection of internationally renownedspeakers in the ?eld of games and simulations. We were extremely pleased with the quality of the contributions to the MIG workshop and we look forward to organizing a follow-up MIG event.

The Second Annual Workshop on Privacy and Security, organized by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Information Privacy and Security of the School of C- munication and Information at Rutgers University, was held on May 12, 2008 at the Hyatt Regency, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. A few of the papers in this volume were produced through a multi-step process. First, we recorded the talk given by each author at the workshop in May 2008. Next, we transcribed the recording. The authors then produced a draft of their paper from these transcriptions, refining each draft until the final version. Although the papers are not verbatim transcriptions of the talks given, some do retain the informal and conv- sational quality of the presentations. In one instance we have included some material from the question-and-answer period after the talk, since the material covered proved to be relevant and interesting. The majority of authors, however, preferred to include a more formal paper based on the material presented at the workshop.

The 2009 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computational Int- ligence (AICI 2009) was held during November 7-8, 2009 in Shanghai, China. The technical program of the conference reflects the tremendous growth in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence with contributions from a large number of participants around the world. AICI 2009 received 1,203 submissions from 20 countries and regions. After rig- ous reviews, 79 high-quality papers were selected for this volume, representing an acceptance rate of 6.6%. These selected papers cover many new developments and their applications in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence. Their publications reflect a sustainable interest from the wide academic community worldwide in tirelessly pursuing new solutions through effective utilizations of arti- cial intelligence and computational intelligence to real-world problems. We would like to specially thank all the committee members and reviewers, without whose timely help it would have been impossible to review all the submitted papers to assemble this program. We also would like take this opportunity to express our heartfelt appreciation for all those who worked together in organizing this conference, establi- ing the technical programs and running the conference meetings. We greatly appreciate the authors, speakers, invited session organizers, session Chairs, and others who made this conference possible. Lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to the Shanghai University of Electric Power for the sponsorship and support of the conference.

The 14th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP 2009, C- gresoIberoAmericanodeReconocimientodePatrones)formedthelatestofanow longseriesofsuccessfulmeetingsarrangedbytherapidlygrowingIberoamerican pattern recognition community. The conference was held in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and organized by the Mexican Association for Computer Vision, Neural Computing and Robotics (MACVNR). It was sponsodred by MACVNR and ?ve other Iberoamerican PR societies. CIARP 2009 was like the previous conferences in the series supported by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). CIARP 2009 attracted participants from all over the world presenting sta- of-the-artresearchon mathematical methods and computing techniques for p- tern recognition, computer vision, image and signal analysis, robot vision, and speech recognition, as well as on a wide range of their applications. This time the conference attracted participants from 23 countries,9 in Ibe- america, and 14 from other parts of the world. The total number of submitted papers was 187, and after a serious review process 108 papers were accepted, all of them with a scienti?c quality above overall mean rating. Sixty-four were selected as oral presentations and 44 as posters. Since 2008 the conference is almost single track, and therefore there was no real grading in quality between oral and poster papers. As an acknowledgment that CIARP has established itself as a high-quality conference, its proceedings appear in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Moreover, its visibility is further enhanced by a selection of a set of papers that will be published in a special issue of the journal Pattern Recognition Letters.

The Mexican International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (MICAI), a yearly international conference organized by the Mexican Society for Arti?cial Intelligence (SMIA), is a major international AI forum and the main event in the academic life of the country's growing AI community. The proceedings of the previous MICAI events were published by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence (LNAI) series, vol. 1793,2313,2972,3787,4293,4827, and 5317. Since its foundation the conference has been growing in popularity and improving quality. This volume contains the papers presented at the oral sessions of the 8th Mexican International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence, MICAI 2009, held November 9-13, 2009, in Guanajuato, Mexico. The conference received for ev- uation 215 submissions by 646 authors from 21 countries. This volume contains revised versionsof 63 articles, which after thorough and careful revision were- lected by the international Program Committee. Thus the acceptance rate was 29.3% This book is structured into 18 sections, 17 of which correspond to a c- ference track and are representative of the main current areas of interest for the AI community; the remaining section comprises invited papers. The conference featured excellent keynote lectures by leading AI experts: Patricia Melin, Instituto Tecnologico de Tijuana, Mexico Dieter Hutter, DFKI GmbH, Germany Josef Kittler, Surrey University, UK Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, IIIA-CSIC, Spain Jose Luis Marroquin, CIMAT, Mexico In addition to the oral technical sessions and keynote lectures, the conf- ence program included tutorials, workshops, and a poster session, which were published in separate proceedings volumes."

The First Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2009) was held at Nanjing, China during November 2-4, 2009.This was the ?rst edition of a series of annual conferences which aim to provide a leading international forum for researchers in machine learning and related ?elds to share their new ideas and research ?ndings. This year we received 113 submissions from 18 countries and regions in Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America. The submissions went through a r- orous double-blind reviewing process. Most submissions received four reviews, a few submissions received ?ve reviews, while only several submissions received three reviews. Each submission was handled by an Area Chair who coordinated discussions among reviewers and made recommendation on the submission. The Program Committee Chairs examined the reviews and meta-reviews to further guarantee the reliability and integrity of the reviewing process. Twenty-nine - pers were selected after this process. To ensure that important revisions required by reviewers were incorporated into the ?nal accepted papers, and to allow submissions which would have - tential after a careful revision, this year we launched a "revision double-check" process. In short, the above-mentioned 29 papers were conditionally accepted, and the authors were requested to incorporate the "important-and-must"re- sionssummarizedbyareachairsbasedonreviewers'comments.Therevised?nal version and the revision list of each conditionally accepted paper was examined by the Area Chair and Program Committee Chairs. Papers that failed to pass the examination were ?nally rejected.

Theoriginalmotivationsfordevelopingopticalcharacterrecognitiontechnologies weremodesttoconvertprintedtexton?atphysicalmediatodigitalform,prod- ingmachine-readabledigitalcontent. Bydoingthis,wordsthathadbeeninertand bound to physical material would be brought into the digital realm and thus gain newandpowerfulfunctionalitiesandanalyticalpossibilities. First-generation digital OCR researchers in the 1970s quickly realized that by limiting their ambitions primarily to contemporary documents printed in st- dard font type from the modern Roman alphabet (and of these, mostly English language materials), they were constraining the possibilities for future research andtechnologiesconsiderably. Domainresearchersalsosawthatthetrajectoryof OCR technologies if left unchanged would exclude a large portion of the human record. Digitalconversionofdocumentsandmanuscriptsinotheralphabets,scripts, and cursive styles was of critical importance. Embedded in non-Roman alp- bet source documents, including ancient manuscripts, papyri scrolls, clay tablets, and other inscribed artifacts was not only a wealth of scholarly information but alsonewopportunitiesandchallengesforadvancingOCR,imagingsciences,and othercomputationalresearchareas. Thelimitingcircumstancesatthetimeincluded the rudimentary capability (and high cost) of computational resources and lack of network-accessible digital content. Since then computational technology has advancedataveryrapidpaceandnetworkinginfrastructurehasproliferated. Over time, thisexponential decrease inthecost of computation, memory, and com- nicationsbandwidthcombinedwiththeexponentialincreaseinInternet-accessible digitalcontenthastransformededucation,scholarship,andresearch. Largenumbers ofresearchers,scholars,andstudentsuseanddependuponInternet-basedcontent andcomputationalresources. Thechaptersinthisbookdescribeacriticallyimportantareaofinvestigation- addressingconversionofIndicscriptintomachine-readableform. Roughestimates haveitthatcurrentlymorethanabillionpeopleuseIndicscripts. Collectively,Indic historic and cultural documents contain a vast richness of human knowledge and experience. The state-of-the-art research described in this book demonstrates the multiple values associated with these activities. Technically, the problems associated with Indicscriptrecognitionareverydif?cultandwillcontributetoandinformrelated v vi Foreword scriptrecognitionefforts. Theworkalsohasenormousconsequenceforenriching andenablingthestudyofIndicculturalheritagematerialsandthehistoricrecord of its people. This in turn broadens the intellectual context for domain scholars focusingonothersocieties,ancientandmodern. Digital character recognition has brought about another milestone in coll- tivecommunicationbybringinginert,?xed-in-place,textintoaninteractivedi- talrealm. Indoingso,theinformationhasgainedadditionalfunctionalitieswhich expandourabilitiestoconnect,combine,contextualize,share,andcollaboratively pursue knowledge making. High-quality Internet content continues to grow in an explosivefashion. Inthenewglobalcyberenvironment,thefunctionalitiesandapp- cationsofdigitalinformationcontinuetotransformknowledgeintonewundersta- ingsofhumanexperienceandtheworldinwhichwelive. Thepossibilitiesforthe futurearelimitedonlybyavailableresearchresourcesandcapabilitiesandtheim- inationandcreativityofthosewhousethem. Arlington,Virginia StephenM.

The concept of CAST as Computer Aided Systems Theory was introduced by F. Pichler in the late 1980s to refer to computer theoretical and practical developments as tools for solving problems in system science. It was thought of as the third component (the other two being CAD and CAM) required to complete the path from computer and systems sciences to practical developments in science and engineering. Franz Pichler, of the University of Linz, organized the first CAST workshop in April 1988, which demonstrated the acceptance of the concepts by the scientific and technical community. Next, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria joined the University of Linz to organize the first international meeting on CAST (Las Palmas, February 1989) under the name EUROCAST'89. This proved to be a very successful gathering of systems theorists, computer scientists and engineers from most European countries, North America and Japan. It was agreed that EUROCAST international conferences would be organized every two years, alternating between Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and a continental European location. From 2001 the conference has been held exclusively in Las Palmas. Thus, successive EUROCAST meetings took place in Krems (1991), Las Palmas (1993), In- bruck (1995), Las Palmas (1997), Vienna (1999), Las Palmas (2001), Las Palmas (2003) Las Palmas (2005) and Las Palmas (2007), in addition to an extra-European CAST c- ference in Ottawa in 1994.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems, ICVS 2009, held in Liege, Belgium, October 13-15, 2009.

The 21 papers for oral presentation presented together with 24 poster presentations and 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on human-machine-interaction, sensors, features and representations, stereo, 3D and optical flow, calibration and registration, mobile and autonomous systems, evaluation, studies and applications, learning, recognition and adaption.

Thebookpresentsa cross-sectionofstate-of-the-artresearchonmultimodalc- pora, a highly interdisciplinary area that is a prerequisite for various specialized disciplines. A number of the papers included are revised and expanded versions ofpapersacceptedtotheInternationalWorkshoponMultimodal Corpora: From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications, held in conjunction th with the 6 International Conference for Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) on May 27, 2008, in Marrakech, Morocco. This international workshop series started in 2000 and has since then grown into a regular satellite event of the bi-annual LREC conference, attracting researchers from ?elds as diverse as psychology, arti?cial intelligence, robotics, signal processing, computational linguisticsandhuman-computerinteraction. Tocomplement theselected papers from the 2008 workshop, we invited well-known researchers from corpus coll- tioninitiativestocontributetothisvolume. Wewereabletoobtainseveninvited research articles, including contributions from major international multimodal corpus projects like AMI and SmartWeb, which complement the six selected workshop contributions. All papers underwent a special review process for this volume, resulting in signi?cant revisions and extensions based on the experts' advice. While we were pleased that the 2006 edition of the workshop resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation, published in 2007, we felt that this was the time for another major publication, given not onlytherapidprogressandincreasedinterestin this researchareabut especially in order to acknowledge the di?culty of disseminating results across discipline borders. The Springer LNAI series is the perfect platform for doing so. We also created the website www. multimodal-corpora.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems, ACIVS 2009, held in Bordeaux, France in September/October 2009.

The 43 revised full papers and 25 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on technovision, fundamental mathematical techniques, image processing, coding and filtering, image and video analysis, computer vision, tracking, color, multispectral and special-purpose imaging, medical imaging, and biometrics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IAPR International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery, DGCI 2009, held in Montreal, Canada, in September/October 2009.

The 42 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on discrete shape, representation, recognition and analysis; discrete and combinatorial tools for image segmentation and analysis; discrete and combinatorial Topology; models for discrete geometry; geometric transforms; and discrete tomography.

On behalf of the Program Committee, it is our pleasure to present the p- ceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection systems (RAID 2009),which took place in Saint-Malo,France, during September 23-25. As in the past, the symposium brought together leading - searchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to discuss intrusion detection research and practice. There were six main sessions prese- ingfullresearchpapersonanomalyandspeci?cation-basedapproaches,malware detection and prevention, network and host intrusion detection and prevention, intrusion detection for mobile devices, and high-performance intrusion det- tion. Furthermore, there was a poster session on emerging research areas and case studies. The RAID 2009ProgramCommittee received59 full paper submissionsfrom all over the world. All submissions were carefully reviewed by independent - viewers on the basis of space, topic, technical assessment, and overall balance. The ?nal selection took place at the Program Committee meeting on May 21 in Oakland, California. In all, 17 papers were selected for presentation and p- lication in the conference proceedings. As a continued feature, the symposium accepted submissions for poster presentations which have been published as - tended abstracts, reporting early-stage research, demonstration of applications, or case studies. Thirty posters were submitted for a numerical review by an independent, three-person sub-committee of the Program Committee based on novelty, description, and evaluation. The sub-committee recommended the - ceptance of 16 of these posters for presentation and publication. The success of RAID 2009 depended on the joint e?ort of many people.

th TSD 2009was the 12 eventin the series of InternationalConferenceson Text, Speech andDialoguesupportedbytheInternationalSpeechCommunicationAssociation(ISCA) ? and Czech Society for Cybernetics and Informatics (CSKI). This year, TSD was held in Plzen ? (Pilsen), in the Primavera Conference Center, during September 13-17, 2009 and it was organized by the University of West Bohemia in Plzen ? in cooperation with Masaryk University of Brno, Czech Republic. Like its predecessors, TSD 2009 hi- lighted to both the academic and scienti?c world the importance of text and speech processing and its most recent breakthroughsin current applications. Both experienced researchers and professionals as well as newcomers to the text and speech processing ?eld, interested in designing or evaluating interactive software, developing new int- action technologies, or investigatingoverarchingtheories of text and speech processing found in the TSD conference a forum to communicate with people sharing similar - terests. The conference is an interdisciplinary forum, intertwining research in speech and language processing with its applications in everyday practice. We feel that the mixture of different approaches and applications offered a great opportunity to get - quaintedwith currentactivitiesin all aspects oflanguagecommunicationand to witness the amazing vitality of researchers from developing countries too. This year's conference was partially oriented toward semantic processing, which was chosen as the main topic of the conference. All invited speakers (Frederick Jelinek, Louise Guthrie, Roberto Pieraccini, Tilman Becker, and Elmar Not ] h) gave lectures on thenewestresultsintherelativelybroadandstillunexploredareaofsemanticprocessing."

Half a centuryago not manypeople had realizedthat a new epoch in the history of homo sapiens had just started. The term "Information Society Age" seems an appropriate name for this epoch. Communication was without a doubt a lever of the conquest of the human race over the rest of the animate world. There is little doubt that the human racebegan when our predecessorsstarted to communicate with each other using language.This highly abstractmeans of communicationwas probably one of the major factors contributing to the evolutionary success of the human race within the animal world. Physically weak and imperfect, humans started to dominate the rest of the world through the creation of communication-based societies where individuals communicated initially to satisfy immediate needs, and then to create, accumulate and process knowledge for future use. The crucial step in the history of humanity was the invention of writing. It is worth noting that writing is a human invention, not a phenomenon resulting from natural evolution. Humans invented writing as a technique for recording speech as well as for storing and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Humans continue to be born illiterate, and therefore teaching and conscious supervised learning is necessary to maintain this basic social skill.

This book constitutes the research papers presented at the Joint 2101 & 2102 International Conference on Biometric ID Management and Multimodal Communication.

BioID_MultiComm'09 is a joint International Conference organized cooperatively by COST Actions 2101 and 2102. COST 2101 Action is focused on "Biometrics for Identity Documents and Smart Cards (BIDS)," while COST 2102 Action is entitled "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Non-verbal Communication."

The aim of COST 2101 is to investigate novel technologies for unsupervised multimodal biometric authentication systems using a new generation of biometrics-enabled identity documents and smart cards.

COST 2102 is devoted to develop an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication signals originating in spontaneous face-to-face interaction, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of recognizing human emotional states.

This volume is part of the two-volume proceedings of the 19th International Conf- ence on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2009), which was held in Cyprus during September 14-17, 2009. The ICANN conference is an annual meeting sp- sored by the European Neural Network Society (ENNS), in cooperation with the - ternational Neural Network Society (INNS) and the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS). ICANN 2009 was technically sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intel- gence Society. This series of conferences has been held annually since 1991 in various European countries and covers the field of neurocomputing, learning systems and related areas. Artificial neural networks provide an information-processing structure inspired by biological nervous systems. They consist of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements, with the capability of learning by example. The field of artificial neural networks has evolved significantly in the last two decades, with active partici- tion from diverse fields, such as engineering, computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, system theory, biology, operations research, and neuroscience. Artificial neural networks have been widely applied for pattern recognition, control, optimization, image processing, classification, signal processing, etc.