New Directions in Neural Networks

The book is a collection of selected papers from the 18th WIRN workshop, the annual meeting of the Italian Neural Networks Society (SIREN). As the number 18 marks the year young people come of age in Italy, the society invited two generations of researchers to participate in a discussion on neural networks: those new to the field and those with extensive familiarity with the neural paradigm. The challenge laid in understanding what remains of the revolutionary ideas from which neural networks stemmed in the eighties, how these networks have evolved and influenced other research fields, and ultimately, what the new conceptual/methodological frontiers are that need to be trespassed for a better exploitation of the information carried by data. This book presents the outcome of this discussion. New Directions in Neural Networks is divided in two general subjects, models and applications and two specific ones, economy and complexity and remote sensing image processing. The editors of this book have set out to publish a scientific contribution to the discovery of new forms of cooperative work that are necessary today for the invention of efficient computational systems and new social paradigms.