Recently, the telecommunications industry has been exposed to many changes in technology. AT&T is currently experiencing its second divestiture. The internet has grown explosively with enormous numbers of people subscribing to providers such as America On Line. Microsoft, Netscape, and other computer-oriented companies are competing furiously for customers in the on-line world. Customers are having service problems because the network and providers cannot keep up with the ever-growing demand for service. Selling on the internet is ubiquitous with every company and with many individuals having a home page. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that almost nobody is making a profit from the growth of the internet.

The papers in this collection reflect these changes. They were presented at a meeting of the International Workshop on the Application of Neural Networks to Communications (IWANNT*97). Discussing a wide variety of intelligent system applications, the major theme of the articles is networking, especially the use of ATM technology and the modeling of the resulting traffic. Recurring themes in this conference are routing and resource allocation in all types of communications networks. The collection also contains papers on fault detection, diagnosis, correction, coding and equalization, customer profiling, and pattern recognition.