Proceedings are ready

August 1, 2009: The prcoeedings have been delivered now. All registered participants of ICONIP08 conference, NNN08, or related workshops and special sessions should receive a copy of the proceedings CD-ROM shipped by Springer LNCS very soon.The proceedings
are also available on-line for registered customers of Springer-Online service, or can be purchased from there independently:

LNCS 5506
Information: http://www.springeronline.com/978-3-642-02489-4
On-line Content: http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-642-02489-4/

LNCS 5507
Information: http://www.springeronline.com/978-3-642-03039-0
On-line Content: http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-642-03039-0/

Welcome to ICONIP 2008 – the 15th International Conference on Neuro- Information Processing of the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly, 25-28.11.2008

We are delighted to host for a second time in New Zealand the annual ICONIP conference of the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (http://www.apnna.net)

The first time the conference took place at the University of Otago, Dunedin, in 1997. Now it takes place in the largest and the most dynamic city of New Zealand - Auckland.

ICONIP 2008 attracted appr. 400 submissions, with appr. 260 presentations accepted, many of them - invited. ICONIP 2008 covers a large scope of topics in the areas of: methods and techniques of artificial neural networks, neurocomputers, brain modeling, neuroscience, bioinformatics, pattern recognition, intelligent information systems, quantum computation, and their numerous applications in almost all areas of science, engineering, medicine, environment, business. Publications will appear in the SPRINGER Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science and in 10 special issues of international journals.

We are proud to have as plenary and invited speakers 20 internationally established scientists presenting their recent work. Among them are Professors Shun-ichi Amari,RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Shiro Usui,RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan , Andrzej Cichocki ,RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Takeshi Yamakawa, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kenji Doya,Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Youki Kadobayashi, National Iinstitute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan, Sung-Bae Cho,Yonsei University, Korea, Alessandro Villa, University of Grenoble, France, Danilo Mandic,Imperial College, United Kingdom, Richard Duro, Universidade da Coruna, Spain, Andreas Koenig, Technische Universitaet Kaiserslautern, Germany, Yaochu Jin, Honda Research Institute Europe, Germany, Bogdan Gabrys, University of Bournemouth, UK, Jun Wang, Chinese University of Hong Kong , Mike Paulin, Otago University, New Zealand , Mika Hirvensalo, University of Turku, Finland, Lei Xu, Chinese University of Hong Kong and Beijing University, China, Wlodzislaw Duch, Nicholaus Copernicus University, Poland, Gary Marcus, New York University, USA.

ICONIP 2008 is preceded by the First Symposium of the International Neural Network Society (INNS, http://www.inns.org) on New Directions in Neural Networks (NNN’08), 24-25.11.2008. This Symposium is on the topic “Modeling the brain and neurvous systems”, with two streams – Development and Learning and Computational Neurogenetic Modeling. It complements the conference with these important topics. Among the invited speakers are: A.Villa, J.Weng, G.Marcus, C.Abraham, H.Kojima, M.Tsukada, Y.Jin, L.Benuskova.

ICONIP ’08 is technically sponsored by APNNA, INNS, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, JNNS, ENNS, KEDRI, AUT. Our sincere thanks to the sponsors!

ICONIP’08 was organized by a large team comprising the organising and the program committees. I would like to thank especially the program chair Mario Koeppen and the program co-chairs George Coghill and Masumi Ishikawa.

The ICONIP’08 event is hosted by the Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI, http://www.kedri.info), which is part of the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) – one of the most dynamic universities in New Zealand. I would like to thank the staff of KEDRI and especially the Local Organizing Chair Joyce D’Mello, the Web manager Peter Hwang, and the publication team – Stefan Shliebs, Raphael Hu and Kshitij Doble, for putting their efforts to make this conference an exciting event.

I hope you all will enjoy the ICONIP ’08 and will take some ideas home for a future research. By attending ICONIP you became a member of APNNA for the next two years. Congratulations and welcome!

Professor Nikola Kasabov
General Chair of ICONIP 2008 (http://iconip08.kedri.info)
President of APNNA (http://www.apnna.net)

November 2008
Auckland, New Zealand