The ICANNGA series of conferences has been organized since 1993 and has a long history of promoting the principles and understanding of computational intelligence paradigms within the scienti?c community. Originally ICANNGA stood for "International Conference on Arti?cial Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms," but in 2005 the conference was renamed to "International C- ference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms," while keeping the acronymICANNGA.The?rstICANNGAconferencewasheldinInnsbruckA- tria (1993), then Al' es in France (1995), Norwich in the UK (1997), Portoroz in Slovenia (1999),Prague in the Czech Republic (2001), Roanne in France (2003), CoimbrainPortugal(2005)andWarsawinPoland(2007).ContinuingthisEu- peantradition,the9thICANNGA washeldinKuopio,Finland(2009).Thevast majority of ICANNGA conferences is organized by and based at a university. Drawing on the experience of previous events and following the same g- eral model, ICANNGA 2009 combined plenary lectures and technical sessions. Apart from being a widely recognized conference, it enhanced the possibility to exchange opinions through lectures and discussions, provided a great oppor- nity to meet new colleagues, as well as to renew old friendships and to facilitate the possibilities for international collaborations. As previously, the conference proceedings are published in the Springer LNCS series.

The two volume set LNCS 4431 and LNCS 4432 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms, ICANNGA 2007, held in Warsaw, Poland, in April 2007.

The 178 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 474 submissions. The 94 papers of the first volume are organized in topical sections on evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, learning, optimization and games, fuzzy and rough systems, just as classification and clustering. The second volume contains 84 contributions related to neural networks, support vector machines, biomedical signal and image processing, biometrics, computer vision, as well as to control and robotics.

The two volume set LNCS 4431 and LNCS 4432 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms, ICANNGA 2007, held in Warsaw, Poland, in April 2007.

The 178 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 474 submissions. The 94 papers of the first volume are organized in topical sections on evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, learning, optimization and games, fuzzy and rough systems, just as classification and clustering. The second volume contains 84 contributions related to neural networks, support vector machines, biomedical signal and image processing, biometrics, computer vision, as well as to control and robotics.