Artificial Neural Networks - ICANN 2008

This volume is the ?rst part of the two-volume proceedings of the 18th Inter- tional Conference on Arti?cial Neural Networks (ICANN 2008) held September 3-6, 2008 in Prague, Czech Republic. The ICANN conferences are annual me- ings supervised by the European Neural Network Society, in cooperation with the International Neural Network Society and the Japanese Neural Network - ciety. This series of conferences has been held since 1991 in various European countries and covers the ?eld of neurocomputing and related areas. In 2008, the ICANN conference was organized by the Institute of Computer Science, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic together with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. Over 300 papers were submitted to the regular sessions, two special sessions and two workshops. The Program Committee selected about200 papersafter a thoroughpeer-reviewprocess;they arepublishedinthetwovolumesoftheseproceedings. Thelargenumber,variety of topics and high quality of submitted papers re?ect the vitality of the ?eld of arti?cial neural networks. The ?rst volume contains papers on the mathematical theory of neuroc- puting, learning algorithms, kernel methods, statistical learning and ensemble techniques, support vector machines, reinforcement learning, evolutionary c- puting, hybrid systems, self-organization, control and robotics, signal and time series processing and image processing. The secondvolumeis devotedto patternrecognitionanddata analysis,ha- wareand embedded systems, computationalneuroscience,connectionistic cog- tive science, neuroinformatics and neural dynamics.