This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN'97, held in Lausanne, Switzerland,in October 1997. The 201 revised papers presented were selected from a large number of submissions and give a unique documentation of the state of the art in the area. The papers are organized in parts on coding and learning in biology; cortical maps and receptive fields; learning: theory and applications; signal processing: blind source separation, vector quantization, and self-organization; robotics, autonomous agents, and control; speech, vision and pattern recognition; prediction, forecasting and monitoring; and implementations.