The three volume set LNCS 3610, LNCS 3611, and LNCS 3612 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Computation, ICNC 2005, held in Changsha, China, in August 2005 as a joint event with the Second International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery FSKD 2005 (LNAI volumes 3613 and 3614). The program committee selected 313 carefully revised full papers and 189 short papers for presentation in three volumes from 1887 submissions. The first volume includes all the contributions related to learning algorithms and architectures in neural networks, neurodynamics, statistical neural network models and support vector machines, and other topics in neural network models; cognitive science, neuroscience informatics, bioinformatics, and bio-medical engineering, and neural network applications such as communications and computer networks, expert system and informatics, and financial engineering. The second volume concentrates on neural network applications as pattern recognition and diagnostics, robotics and intelligent control, signal processing and multi-media, and other neural network applications; evolutionary learning, artificial immune systems, evolutionary theory, membrane, molecular, DNA computing, and ant colony systems. The third volume deals with evolutionary methodology, quantum computing, swarm intelligence and intelligent agents; natural computation applications as bioinformatics and bio-medical engineering, robotics and intelligent control, and other applications of natural computation; hardware implementations of natural computation, and fuzzy neural systems as well as soft computing.