Thisyear'svolumeofAdvancesinWebMiningandWebUsageAnalysiscontains thepostworkshopproceedingsofajointevent,the9thInternationalWorkshopon Knowledge Discovery from the Web (WEBKDD 2007) and the First SNA-KDD Workshop on Social Network Analysis (SNA-KDD 2007). The joint workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis took place at the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). It attracted 23 submissions, of which 14 were accepted for presentation at the workshop. Eight of them have been extended for inclusion in this volume. WEBKDD is one of the most traditional workshops of the ACM SIGKDD internationalconference, under the auspices of which it has been organizedsince 1999. The strong interest for knowledge discovery in the Web, fostered not least by WEBKDD itself, has led to solutions for many problems in the Web's p- mature era. In the meanwhile, the Web has stepped into a new era, where it is experienced as a social medium, fostering interaction among people, enabling and promoting the sharing of knowledge, experiences and applications, char- terized by group activities, community formation, and evolution. The design of Web 2. 0 re?ects the socialcharacterof the Web, bringing new potential and new challenges. The 9th WEBKDD was devoted to the challenges and opportunities of mining for the social Web and promptly gave rise to the joint event with the First Workshop on Social Network Analysis (SNA-KDD). Social network research has advanced signi?cantly in the last few years, strongly motivated by the prevalence of online social websites and a variety of large-scale o?ine social network systems.

Sequential behavior is essential to intelligence in general and a fundamental part of human activities, ranging from reasoning to language, and from everyday skills to complex problem solving. Sequence learning is an important component of learning in many tasks and application fields: planning, reasoning, robotics natural language processing, speech recognition, adaptive control, time series prediction, financial engineering, DNA sequencing, and so on. This book presents coherently integrated chapters by leading authorities and assesses the state of the art in sequence learning by introducing essential models and algorithms and by examining a variety of applications. The book offers topical sections on sequence clustering and learning with Markov models, sequence prediction and recognition with neural networks, sequence discovery with symbolic methods, sequential decision making, biologically inspired sequence learning models.

This book is devoted to adaptive processing of structured information similar to flexible and intelligent information processing by humans - in contrast to merely sequential processing of predominantly symbolic information within a deterministic framework. Adaptive information processing allows for a mixture of sequential and parallel processing of symbolic as well as subsymbolic information within deterministic and probabilistic frameworks.
The book originates from a summer school held in September 1997 and thus is ideally suited for advanced courses on adaptive information processing and advanced learning techniques or for self-instruction. Research and design professionals active in the area of neural information processing will find it a valuable state-of-the-art survey.