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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Pattern Recognition with Support Vector Machines, SVM 2002, held in Niagara Falls, Canada in August 2002.The 16 revised full papers and 14 poster papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 full paper submissions. The papers presented span the whole range of topics in pattern recognition with support vector machines from computational theories to implementations and applications.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in the research and development of techniques for components of complete document analysis systems. In recognition of this trend, a series of workshops on Document Analysis Systems commenced in 1994, under the leadership of Henry Baird. The first workshop, held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in October, 1994, was chaired by Andreas Dengel and Larry Spitz. The second workshop on Document Analysis Systems was held in Malvern, PA, USA, in October, 1996, chaired by Jonathan J. Hull and Suzanne Liebowitz Taylor. The DAS workshop has been one of the most prestigious technical meetings, bringing together a large number of scientists and engineers from all over the world to express their innovative ideas and report on their latest achievements in the area of document analysis systems. The papers in this special book edition were rigorously selected from the Third IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS'98), held in Nagano, Japan, on 4 - 6 November 1998. It is worth mentioning that the papers were chosen for their original and substantial contributions to the workshop theme and this special book edition. From among the 53 papers that were presented by authors from 11 countries at the DAS'98 after critical reviews by at least three experts, we carefully selected 29 papers for this special book edition. Most of the contributions in this edition have been expanded or extensively revised to include helpful discussions, suggestions, or comments made during the workshop.