This volume collects a selection of contributions which has been presented at the 22nd Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, the yearly meeting of the Italian Society for Neural Networks (SIREN). The conference was held in Italy, Vietri sul Mare (Salerno), during May 17-19, 2012. The annual meeting of SIREN is sponsored by International Neural Network Society (INNS), European Neural Network Society (ENNS) and IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS). The book - as well as the workshop- is organized in three main components, two special sessions and a group of regular sessions featuring different aspects and point of views of artificial neural networks and natural intelligence, also including applications of present compelling interest.

The book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2013, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in September 2013. The 78 papers included in the proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 128 submissions. The focus of the papers is on following topics: neurofinance graphical network models, brain machine interfaces, evolutionary neural networks, neurodynamics, complex systems, neuroinformatics, neuroengineering, hybrid systems, computational biology, neural hardware, bioinspired embedded systems, and collective intelligence.

This volume collects a selection of contributions which has been presented at the 22nd Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, the yearly meeting of the Italian Society for Neural Networks (SIREN). The conference was held in Italy, Vietri sul Mare (Salerno), during May 17-19, 2012. The annual meeting of SIREN is sponsored by International Neural Network Society (INNS), European Neural Network Society (ENNS) and IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS). The book - as well as the workshop- is organized in three main components, two special sessions and a group of regular sessions featuring different aspects and point of views of artificial neural networks and natural intelligence, also including applications of present compelling interest.

One high-level ability of the human brain is to understand what it has learned. This seems to be the crucial advantage in comparison to the brain activity of other primates. At present we are technologically almost ready to artificially reproduce human brain tissue, but we still do not fully understand the information processing and the related biological mechanisms underlying this ability. Thus an electronic clone of the human brain is still far from being realizable. At the same time, around twenty years after the revival of the connectionist paradigm, we are not yet satisfied with the typical subsymbolic attitude of devices like neural networks: we can make them learn to solve even difficult problems, but without a clear explanation of why a solution works. Indeed, to widely use these devices in a reliable and non elementary way we need formal and understandable expressions of the learnt functions. of being tested, manipulated and composed with These must be susceptible other similar expressions to build more structured functions as a solution of complex problems via the usual deductive methods of the Artificial Intelligence. Many effort have been steered in this directions in the last years, constructing artificial hybrid systems where a cooperation between the sub symbolic processing of the neural networks merges in various modes with symbolic algorithms. In parallel, neurobiology research keeps on supplying more and more detailed explanations of the low-level phenomena responsible for mental processes.

Rem tene, verba sequentur (Gaius J. Victor, Rome VI century b.c.)

The ultimate goal of this book is to bring the fundamental issues of information granularity, inference tools and problem solving procedures into a coherent, unified, and fully operational framework. The objective is to offer the reader a comprehensive, self-contained, and uniform exposure to the subject.The strategy is to isolate some fundamental bricks of Computational Intelligence in terms of key problems and methods, and discuss their implementation and underlying rationale within a well structured and rigorous conceptual framework as well as carefully related to various application facets. The main assumption is that a deep understanding of the key problems will allow the reader to compose into a meaningful mosaic the puzzle pieces represented by the immense varieties of approaches present in the literature and in the computational practice. All in all, the main approach advocated in the monograph consists of a sequence of steps offering solid conceptual fundamentals, presenting a carefully selected collection of design methodologies, discussing a wealth of development guidelines, and exemplifying them with a pertinent, accurately selected illustrative material.

This volume reports the proceedings of the 15th Italian Workshop on Neural Nets WIRN04. The workshop, held in Perugia from September 14th to 17th 2004 has been jointly organized by the International Institute for Advanced Scienti?c Studies "Eduardo R. Caianiello" (IIASS) and the Societ' a Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN). This year the Conference has constituted a joint event of three associations: Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Arti?ciale (AIIA), Gruppo Italiano di Ricercatori in Pattern Recognition (GIRPR), Societ' a Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN) within the conference CISI-04 (Conferenza Italiana sui Sistemi Int- ligenti - 2004) combining the three associations' annual meetings. The aim was to examine Intelligent Systems as a joint topic, pointing out synergies and d- ferences between the various approaches. The volume covers this matter from the Neural Networks and related ?elds perspective. It contains invited review papers and selected original contri- tions presented in either oral or poster sessions by both Italian and foreign - searchers. The contributions have been assembled, for reading convenience, into ?ve sections. The ?rst two collect papers from pre-WIRN workshops focused on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, and Computational Intelligence on Hardware, respectively. The remaining sections concern Architectures and Algorithms, Models, and Applications. The Editors would like to thank the invited speakers and all the contributors whosehighlyquali?edpapershelpedthesuccessoftheWorkshop.Finally,special thanks go to the referees for their accurate work.

Rem tene, verba sequentur (Gaius J. Victor, Rome VI century b.c.)

The ultimate goal of this book is to bring the fundamental issues of information granularity, inference tools and problem solving procedures into a coherent, unified, and fully operational framework. The objective is to offer the reader a comprehensive, self-contained, and uniform exposure to the subject.The strategy is to isolate some fundamental bricks of Computational Intelligence in terms of key problems and methods, and discuss their implementation and underlying rationale within a well structured and rigorous conceptual framework as well as carefully related to various application facets. The main assumption is that a deep understanding of the key problems will allow the reader to compose into a meaningful mosaic the puzzle pieces represented by the immense varieties of approaches present in the literature and in the computational practice. All in all, the main approach advocated in the monograph consists of a sequence of steps offering solid conceptual fundamentals, presenting a carefully selected collection of design methodologies, discussing a wealth of development guidelines, and exemplifying them with a pertinent, accurately selected illustrative material.

The three volume set LNAI 4692, LNAI 4693, and LNAI 4694, constitute the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2007, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, September 12-14, 2007.

The 409 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 1203 submissions. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing in the broadest sense; topics covered in the first volume are artificial neural networks and connectionists systems, fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, machine learning and classical AI, agent systems, knowledge based and expert systems, hybrid intelligent systems, miscellaneous intelligent algorithms, intelligent vision and image processing, knowledge management and ontologies, Web intelligence, multimedia, e-learning and teaching, intelligent signal processing, control and robotics, other intelligent systems applications, papers of the experience management and engineering workshop, industrial applications of intelligent systems, as well as information engineering and applications in ubiquotous computing environments.

These three volumes are a collection of the contributions presented to the joint th conferencesofKES2007,the11 InternationalConferenceonKnowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, and the WIRN 2007, the th 17 Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, in September 2007. TheformulabywhichKESconferencesgatherover500peopleeachyearfrom the four corners of the globe to discuss the topic of knowledge-based and int- ligent information and engineering systems is: an open mind with rigor. Within the vastuniverseofthe conferencescenteredaroundthekeywords"information" and "computational intelligence," we encourage in our meetings the o?ering of newideas andtechniques to givesolutions to the never-endingseriesof problems and challenges that our own intelligence poses. As a precious attribute of the human brain, we will never be disturbed by the novelty, and possibly the provocation, of new mental paradigms and h- ardous conjectures, especially if they are raised by fresh research teams. At the same time, we have riddled eachcontribution using the sieve of scienti?c quality, checking the rigor with which the ideas are illustrated, their understandability and the support of the theory or of the experimental evidence. The structure of the conference re?ects this philosophy. In addition to re- lartracksonthemain?eldsofthediscipline,weinvitedscientiststoproposes- sions focused on topics of high interest. Their response was generous and based onallsources,wereceivedsome1203submissions.Fromthisnumberwecollected 11 general track sessions and 47 invited sessions to make a total of 409 papers after a severe referee screening, an acceptance rate of 34%. Thus the reader may havefromthesevolumesanalmostexhaustiveoverviewofresearcher'sandprac- tioner'scurrentworkinthe?eldofinformationextractionandintelligentsystems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 16th Italian Workshop on Neural Nets, WIRN 2005, as well as the satellite International Workshop on Natural and Artificial Immune Systems, NAIS 2005, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy in June 2005. The 41 revised papers presented together with a lecture by the winner of the Premio Caianiello award were carefully reviewed and improved during two rounds of selection and refereeing.

This volume reports the proceedings of the 15th Italian Workshop on Neural Nets WIRN04. The workshop, held in Perugia from September 14th to 17th 2004 has been jointly organized by the International Institute for Advanced Scienti?c Studies "Eduardo R. Caianiello" (IIASS) and the Societ' a Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN). This year the Conference has constituted a joint event of three associations: Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Arti?ciale (AIIA), Gruppo Italiano di Ricercatori in Pattern Recognition (GIRPR), Societ' a Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN) within the conference CISI-04 (Conferenza Italiana sui Sistemi Int- ligenti - 2004) combining the three associations' annual meetings. The aim was to examine Intelligent Systems as a joint topic, pointing out synergies and d- ferences between the various approaches. The volume covers this matter from the Neural Networks and related ?elds perspective. It contains invited review papers and selected original contri- tions presented in either oral or poster sessions by both Italian and foreign - searchers. The contributions have been assembled, for reading convenience, into ?ve sections. The ?rst two collect papers from pre-WIRN workshops focused on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, and Computational Intelligence on Hardware, respectively. The remaining sections concern Architectures and Algorithms, Models, and Applications. The Editors would like to thank the invited speakers and all the contributors whosehighlyquali?edpapershelpedthesuccessoftheWorkshop.Finally,special thanks go to the referees for their accurate work.

This book presents some of the most recent research results in the area of machine learning and robot perception. The chapters represent new ways of solving real-world problems. The book covers topics such as intelligent object detection, foveated vision systems, online learning paradigms, reinforcement learning for a mobile robot, object tracking and motion estimation, 3D model construction, computer vision system and user modelling using dialogue strategies. This book will appeal to researchers, senior undergraduate/postgraduate students, application engineers and scientists.

The proceedings of the 14th Italian Workshop on Neural Nets WIRN VIETRI 2003 are collected in this volume. The workshop, held in Vietri sul Mare (SA) June 4-7, 2003 was jointly organized by the International Institute for Advanced Scienti?c Studies "Eduardo R. Caianiello" (IIASS) and the Societ' a Italiana Reti Neuroniche(SIREN). Thevolumecoversup-to-datetopicsonneuralnetsand- lated ?elds. It contains invited review papers and selected original contributions presented in either oral or poster sessions by both Italian and non-Italian - searchers. The contributions have been assembled, for reading convenience, into four sections: Models, Architectures and Algorithms, Image and Signal Proce- ing, and Applications, plus two special sessions. The latter gives a fresh persp- tive in the ?elds of "Bioinformatics and Statistics" and "Formats Knowledge: Words, Images, Narratives", sharing the technical languages of the involved d- ciplines. The editors would like to thank the invited speakers and all the c- tributors whose highly quali?ed papers contributed towards the success of the workshop. Finally, special thanks go to the referees for their accurate work. June 2003 Bruno Apolloni Maria Marinaro Roberto Tagliaferri Organizing Scienti?c Committee B. Apolloni (Univ. Milano), A. Bertoni (Univ. Milano), N. A. Borghese (Univ. Milano),D. D. Caviglia(Univ. Genova),P. Campadelli(Univ. Milano),A. Chella (Univ. Palermo),A. Colla(ELSAGGenova),A. Esposito(I. I. A. S. S. ),F. M. Fr- tale Mascioli (Univ. Roma), C. Furlanello (ITC-IRST Trento), S. Giove (Univ. Venezia), M. Gori (Univ. Siena), M. Marinaro (Univ. Salerno), F. Masulli (Univ. Pisa), C. Morabito (Univ. Reggio Calabria), P. Morasso (Univ. Genova), G.

One high-level ability of the human brain is to understand what it has learned. This seems to be the crucial advantage in comparison to the brain activity of other primates. At present we are technologically almost ready to artificially reproduce human brain tissue, but we still do not fully understand the information processing and the related biological mechanisms underlying this ability. Thus an electronic clone of the human brain is still far from being realizable. At the same time, around twenty years after the revival of the connectionist paradigm, we are not yet satisfied with the typical subsymbolic attitude of devices like neural networks: we can make them learn to solve even difficult problems, but without a clear explanation of why a solution works. Indeed, to widely use these devices in a reliable and non elementary way we need formal and understandable expressions of the learnt functions. of being tested, manipulated and composed with These must be susceptible other similar expressions to build more structured functions as a solution of complex problems via the usual deductive methods of the Artificial Intelligence. Many effort have been steered in this directions in the last years, constructing artificial hybrid systems where a cooperation between the sub symbolic processing of the neural networks merges in various modes with symbolic algorithms. In parallel, neurobiology research keeps on supplying more and more detailed explanations of the low-level phenomena responsible for mental processes.

This book reconsiders key issues, such as description and explanation, which affect data analytics. For starters: the soul does not exist. Once released from this cumbersome roommate, we are left with complex biological systems: namely, ourselves, who must configure their environment in terms of worlds that are compatible with what they sense. Far from supplying yet another cosmogony, the book provides the cultivated reader with computational tools for describing and understanding data arising from his surroundings, such as climate parameters or stock market trends, even the win/defeat story of his son football team. Besides the superposition of the very many universes considered by quantum mechanics, we aim to manage families of worlds that may have generated those data through the key feature of their compatibility. Starting from a sharp engineering of ourselves in term of pairs consisting of genome plus a neuron ensemble, we toss this feature in different cognitive frameworks within a span of exploitations ranging from probability distributions to the latest implementations of machine learning. From the perspective of human society as an ensemble of the above pairs, the book also provides scientific tools for analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of the modern paradigm of the world as a service.