Artificial Neural Nets and Genetic Algorithms: Proceedings of the International Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, 2001 - Softcover

The first ICANNGA conference, devoted to biologically inspired computational paradigms, Neural Net­ works and Genetic Algorithms, was held in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1993. The meeting attracted researchers from all over Europe and further afield, who decided that this particular blend of topics should form a theme for a series of biennial conferences. The second meeting, held in Ales, France, in 1995, carried on the tradition set in Innsbruck of a relaxed and stimulating environment for the. exchange of ideas. The series has continued in Norwich, UK, in 1997, and Portoroz, Slovenia, in 1999. The Institute of Computer Science, Czech Academy of Sciences, is pleased to host the fifth conference in Prague. We have chosen the Liechtenstein palace under the Prague Castle as the conference site to enhance the traditionally good atmosphere of the meeting. There is an inspirational genius loci of the historical center of the city, where four hundred years ago a fruitful combination of theoretical and empirical method, through the collaboration of Johannes Kepler and Tycho de Brahe, led to the discovery of the laws of planetary orbits.

The papers in this volume present theoretical insights and reports on successful applications of articifical neural networks and genetic algorithms. A dual affinity with biology is shown as several papers deal with cognition, neurocontrol, and biologically inspired brain models and others describe successful applications of computational methods to biology and environmental science. Theoretical contributions cover a variety of topics including nonlinear approximation by feedforward networks, representation of spiking perceptrons by classical ones, recursive networks and associative memories, learning and generalization, population attractors, and proposal and analysis of new genetic operators or measures. These theoretical studies are augmented by a wide selection of application-oriented papers on topics ranging from signal processing, control, pattern recognition and times series prediction to routing tasks. To keep track of the rapid development of the field of computational intelligence, the scope of the conference has been extended to hybrid methods and tools for which neural networks and evolutionary algorithms are combined with methods of soft computing, fuzzy logic, probabilistic computing, and symbolic artificial intelligence, to computer-intensive methods in control and data processing, and to data mining in meteorology and air pollution.