Welcome to the proceedings of the annual meeting of the Italian Neural Network Society (SIREN). As usual, here you will find fresh scientific news from the Italian community plus contributions by some foreign friends who joined us in Vietri sul Mare (Italy).

After more than 20 years, what motivates us to gather in this annual workshop is a genuine willingness to exchange our latest thoughts on neural networks and related fields. This publication provides an opportunity to read the proceedings, a process which may perhaps have additional value, after reading similar documents from conferences worldwide on the same topics.

All the papers have been peer reviewed and all the authors contributed with original results. Accordingly, the work of the reviewers has been mainly to suggest improvements to the authors and to remedy some possible misprints. We do not claim low acceptance rates as an indication of quality; rather, we constantly promote quality in our community, with the result that our acceptance rate is consistently high.

As for the content, we have a number of works on methodological and implementation topics, which have been discussed in the regular sessions of the conference and which we have grouped into the chapters: Models, Signal Processing and other Applications. Then, we have two chapters referring to special sessions devoted to current focuses in the field. This year they concern “The dynamics of biological networks” and “Nonlinear systems for multimodal human-machine interaction”. This latter session consists of a special activity of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST). The Editors would like to take this opportunity to thank the invited speakers, the contributors and the referees as well as the organizers of both regular and special sessions for their contribution to the realization of this volume. Above all, we hope to meet them all again next year.

Bruno Apolloni

Simone Bassis

Anna Esposito

Francesco Carlo Morabito