Advances in Neural Information Processing Paradigms

This chapter provides an introduction and motivates the leading thread of the following ten chapters that were collected to present some of the most recent advances in neural processing models, concerning both the analysis of theoretical properties of novel neural architectures and the illustration of some real–world applications. Not pretending to be exhaustive, this chapter and the whole book delineate an evolving picture of connectionism, in which neural information systems are moving towards approaches that try to exploit the symbolic information available mostly as relations among the data and to specialize themselves, sometimes based on biological inspiration, to cope with difficult applications.