Attention has represented a core scienti?c topic in the design of AI-enabled systems in the last few decades. Today, in the ongoing debate, design, and c- putationalmodelingofarti?cialcognitivesystems, attentionhasgainedacentral position as a focus of research. For instance, attentional methods are considered in investigating the interfacing of sensory and cognitive information processing, for the organization of behaviors, and for the understanding of individual and social cognition in infant development. Whilevisualcognitionplaysacentralroleinhumanperception, ?ndingsfrom neuroscience and experimental psychology have provided strong evidence about the perception-action nature of cognition. The embodied nature of senso- motor intelligence requires a continuous and focused interplay between the c- trolofmotoractivitiesandtheinterpretationoffeedbackfromperceptualmod- ities. Decision making about the selection of information from the incoming sensory stream - in tune with contextual processing on a current task and an agent's global objectives - becomes a further challenging issue in attentional control. Attention must operate at interfaces between a bottom-up-driven world interpretationandtop-down-driveninformationselection, thusactingatthecore of arti?cial cognitive systems. These insights have already induced changes in AI-related disciplines, such as the design of behavior-based robot control and the computational modeling of animats. Today, the development of enabling technologiessuch as autonomous robotic systems, miniaturizedmobile-evenwearable-sensors, andambientintelligence systems involves the real-time analysis of enormous quantities of data. These data have to be processed in an intelligent way to provide "on time delivery" of the required relevant information. Knowledge has to be applied about what needs to be attended to, and when, and what to do in a meaningful sequence, in correspondence with visual feedback.

In the past few years, with the advances in microelectronics and digital te- nology, cameras became a widespread media. This, along with the enduring increase in computing power boosted the development of computer vision s- tems. The International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS) covers the advances in this area. This is to say that ICVS is not and should not be yet another computer vision conference. The ?eld of computer vision is fully covered by many well-established and famous conferences and ICVS di?ers from these by covering the systems point of view. ICVS 2008 was the 6th International Conference dedicated to advanced research on computer vision systems. The conference, continuing a series of successful events in Las Palmas, Vancouver, Graz, New York and Bielefeld, in 2008 was held on Santorini. In all, 128 papers entered the review process and each was reviewed by three independent reviewers using the double-blind review method. Of these, 53 - pers were accepted (23 as oral and 30 as poster presentation). There were also two invited talks by P. Anandan and by Heinrich H. Bultho ] ?. The presented papers cover all aspects of computer vision systems, namely: cognitive vision, monitor and surveillance, computer vision architectures, calibration and reg- tration, object recognition and tracking, learning, human-machine interaction and cross-modal systems."

Inrecentresearchoncomputervisionsystems, attentionhasbeenplayingacrucialrolein mediatingbottom-upandtop-downpathsofinformationprocessing. Inappliedresearch, the development of enabling technologies such as miniaturized mobile sensors, video surveillance systems, and ambient intelligence systems involves the real-time analysis of enormous quantities of data. Knowledge has to be applied about what needs to be attendedto, andwhen, andwhattodoinameaningfulsequence, incorrespondencewith visual feedback. Methods on attention and control are mandatory to render computer vision systems more robust. The 2nd International Workshop on Attention and Performance in Computational Vision (WAPCV 2004) was held in the Czech Technical University of Prague, Czech Republic, as an associated workshop of the 8th European Conference on Computer - sion (ECCV 2004). The goal of this workshop was to provide an interdisciplinary forum tocommunicatecomputationalmodelsofvisualattentionfromvariousviewpoints, such as from computer vision, psychology, robotics and neuroscience. The motivation for - terdisciplinarity was communication and inspiration beyond the individual community, to focus discussion on computational modelling, to outline relevant objectives for p- formance comparison, to explore promising application domains, and to discuss these with reference to all related aspects of cognitive vision. The workshop was held as a single-day, single-track event, consisting of high-quality podium and poster presen- tions. Invited talks were given by John K. Tsotsos about attention and feature binding in biologically motivated computer vision and by Gustavo Deco about the context of attention, memory and reward from the perspective of computational neuroscience. The interdisciplinary program committee was composed of 21 internationally r- ognized researc

A key property of neural processing in higher mammals is the ability to focus resources by selectively directing attention to relevant perceptions, thoughts or actions. Research into attention has grown rapidly over the past two decades, as new techniques have become available to study higher brain function in humans, non-human primates, and other mammals. Neurobiology of Attention is the first encyclopedic volume to summarize the latest developments in attention research.
An authoritative collection of over 100 chapters organized into thematic sections provides both broad coverage and access to focused, up-to-date research findings. This book presents a state-of-the-art multidisciplinary perspective on psychological, physiological and computational approaches to understanding the neurobiology of attention. Ideal for students, as a reference handbook or for rapid browsing, the book has a wide appeal to anybody intereseted in attention research.
* Contains numerous quick-reference articles covering the breadth of investigation into the subject of attention
* Provides extensive introductory commentary to orient and guide the reader
* Includes the most recent research results in this field of study