Author Description

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 11th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2004) to be held in Calcutta. ICONIP 2004 is organized jointly by the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and Jadavpur University (JU). We are con?dent that ICONIP 2004, like the previous conf- ences in this series,will providea forum for fruitful interactionandthe exchange of ideas between the participants coming from all parts of the globe. ICONIP 2004 covers all major facets of computational intelligence, but, of course, with a primary emphasis on neural networks. We are sure that this meeting will be enjoyable academically and otherwise. We are thankful to the track chairs and the reviewers for extending their support in various forms to make a sound technical program. Except for a few cases, where we could get only two review reports, each submitted paper was reviewed by at least three referees, and in some cases the revised versions were againcheckedbythereferees. Wehad470submissionsanditwasnotaneasytask for us to select papers for a four-day conference. Because of the limited duration of the conference, based on the review reports we selected only about 40% of the contributed papers. Consequently, it is possible that some good papers are left out. We again express our sincere thanks to all referees for accomplishing a great job. In addition to 186 contributed papers, the proceedings includes two plenary presentations, four invited talks and 18 papers in four special sessions. The proceedings is organized into 26 coherent topical groups.