For 'Recent Progress in Brain and Cognitive Engineering' Brain and Cognitive Engineering is a converging study field to derive a better understanding of cognitive information processing in the human brain, to develop "human-like" and neuromorphic artificial intelligent systems and to help predict and analyze brain-related diseases. The key concept of Brain and Cognitive Engineering is to understand the Brain, to interface the Brain, and to engineer the Brain. It could help us to understand the structure and the key principles of high-order information processing on how the brain works, to develop interface technologies between a brain and external devices and to develop artificial systems that can ultimately mimic human brain functions. The convergence of behavioral, neuroscience and engineering research could lead us to advance health informatics and personal learning, to enhance virtual reality and healthcare systems, and to "reverse engineer" some brain functions and build cognitive robots. In this book, four different recent research directions are presented: Non-invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces, Cognitive- and Neural-rehabilitation Engineering, Big Data Neurocomputing, Early Diagnosis and Prediction of Neural Diseases. We cover numerous topics ranging from smart vehicles and online EEG analysis, neuroimaging for Brain-Computer Interfaces, memory implantation and rehabilitation, big data computing in cultural aspects and cybernetics to brain disorder detection. Hopefully this will provide a valuable reference for researchers in medicine, biomedical engineering, in industry and academia for their further investigations and be inspiring to those who seek the foundations to improve techniques and understanding of the Brain and Cognitive Engineering research field.

We are delighted to present the proceedings of DAGM 2004, and wish to - press our gratitude to the many people whose e?orts made the success of the conference possible. We received 146 contributions of which we were able to - cept 22 as oral presentations and 48 as posters. Each paper received 3 reviews, upon which decisions were based. We are grateful for the dedicated work of the 38 members of the program committee and the numerous referees. The careful review process led to the exciting program which we are able to present in this volume. Among the highlights of the meeting were the talks of our four invited spe- ers, renowned experts in areas spanning learning in theory, in vision and in robotics: - William T. Freeman, Arti?cial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT: Sharing F- tures for Multi-class Object Detection - PietroPerona,Caltech:TowardsUnsupervisedLearningofObjectCategories - StefanSchaal,DepartmentofComputerScience,UniversityofSouthernC- ifornia: Real-Time Statistical Learning for Humanoid Robotics - Vladimir Vapnik, NEC Research Institute: Empirical Inference WearegratefulforeconomicsupportfromHondaResearchInstituteEurope, ABW GmbH, Transtec AG, DaimlerChrysler, and Stemmer Imaging GmbH, which enabled us to ? nance best paper prizes and a limited number of travel grants. Many thanks to our local support Sabrina Nielebock and Dagmar Maier, who dealt with the unimaginably diverse range of practical tasks involved in planning a DAGM symposium. Thanks to Richard van de Stadt for providing excellent software and support for handling the reviewing process. A special thanks goes to Jeremy Hill, who wrote and maintained the conference website.

It is our great pleasure and honor to organize the First IEEE Computer Society International Workshop on Biologically Motivated Computer Vision (BMCV 2000). The workshop BMCV 2000 aims to facilitate debates on biologically motivated vision systems and to provide an opportunity for researchers in the area of vision to see and share the latest developments in state-of-the-art technology. The rapid progress being made in the field of computer vision has had a tremendous impact on the modeling and implementation of biologically motivated computer vision. A multitude of new advances and findings in the domain of computer vision will be presented at this workshop. By December 1999 a total of 90 full papers had been submitted from 28 countries. To ensure the high quality of workshop and proceedings, the program committee selected and accepted 56 of them after a thorough review process. Of these papers 25 will be presented in 5 oral sessions and 31 in a poster session. The papers span a variety of topics in computer vision from computational theories to their implementation. In addition to these excellent presentations, there will be eight invited lectures by distinguished scientists on "hot" topics. We must add that the program committee and the reviewers did an excellent job within a tight schedule.

The "functional" in the title of this book not only reflects my personal bias about neuroanatomy in brain research, it is also the gist of many chapters which describe sophisticated ways to resolve structures and interpret them as dynamic entities. Examples are: the visualization of functionally identified brain areas or neurons by activity staining or intracellular dye-iontophoresis; the resolution of synaptic connections between physiologically identified nerve cells; and the biochemical identification of specific neurons (their peptides and transmitters) by histo- and immunocytochemistry. I personally view the nervous system as an organ whose parts, continuously exchanging messages, arrive at their decisions by the cooperative phenome non of consensus and debate. This view is, admittedly, based on my own ex perience of looking at myriads of nerve cells and their connections rather than studying animal behaviour or theorizing. Numerous structural studies have demonstrated that interneurons in the brain must receive hundreds of thousands of synapses. Many neurons receive inputs from several different sensory areas: each input conveys a message about the external world and possibly also about past events which are stored within the central nervous system. Whether an interneuron responds to a certain combination of inputs may be, literally, a matter of debate whose outcome is decided at the post synaptic membrane. A nerve cell responding to an overriding command is possibly a rare event.

The contributors bring a wide range of methodologies to bear on the common problem of image-based object recognition. These interconnected essays on three-dimensional visual object recognition present cutting-edge research by some of the most creative neuroscientific, cognitive, and computational scientists in the field. Cassandra Moore and Patrick Cavanagh take a classic demonstration, the perception of "two-tone" images, and turn it into a method for understanding the nature of object representations in terms of surfaces and the interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes. Michael J. Tarr and Isabel Gauthier use computer graphics to study whether viewpoint-dependent recognition mechanisms can generalize between exemplars of perceptually defined classes. Melvyn A. Goodale and G. Keith Humphrey use innovative psychophysical techniques to investigate dissociable aspects of visual and spatial processing in brain-injured subjects. D.I. Perrett, M.W. Oram, and E. Ashbridge combine neurophysiological single-cell data from monkeys with computational analyses for a new way of thinking about the mechanisms that mediate viewpoint-dependent object recognition and mental rotation. Shimon Ullman also addresses possible mechanisms to account for viewpoint-dependent behavior, but from the perspective of machine vision. Finally, Philippe G. Schyns synthesizes work from many areas, to provide a coherent account of how stimulus class and recognition task interact. The contributors bring a wide range of methodologies to bear on the common problem of image-based object recognition.