This volume contains the Proceedings of the 9th Italian Workshop on Neural Nets WIRN VIETRI-97, organised by the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies ((Eduardo R. Caianiello" (IIASS), the Societa Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN) and the IEEE NNC Italian RIG. As in the previous editions some invited and reviewed talks on updated subjects are presented in addition to the original contributions selected by the Refereeing Committee. Also included is Professor C.M. Bishop's Invited paper on: Latent Variables, Topographic Mappings and Data Visualization; and two review talks that deal with updated topics: Fuzzy Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition; A Unifying View of Gradient Calculations and Learning for Locally Recurrent Neural Networks; For publication the original contributions have been assembled into 4 sections: Applications, Architectures and Algorithms, Mathematical Models, Pattern Recognition and Robotics. The Editors thank the invited speaker and all the participants for having contributed to the success of the Workshop by submitting high quality manuscripts, and also express gratitude to the Refereeing Committee for the high quality of the selection process. Maria Marinaro Roberto Tagliaferri VI Organizing -Scientific Committee: B. Apolloni (Univ. Milano), A. Bertoni (Univ. Milano), D.O. Caviglia (Univ. Genova), P. Campadelli (Univ. Milano), A. Colla (ELSAG BAILEY -Genova), M. Frixione (1IASS), C. Furlanello (IRST -Trento), A. Esposito (1IASS), G.M. Guazzo (1IASS), M. Gori (Univ. Firenze), F. Lauria (Univ. Napoli), M. Marinaro (Univ. Salerno - IIASS), F.

Inhalt
Section 1 - Invited Paper.- Latent Variables, Topographic Mappings and Data Visualization.- Section 2 - Review Papers.- Fuzzy Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition.- A Unifying View of Gradient Calculations and Learning for Locally Recurrent Neural Networks.- Section 3 - Eduardo R. Caianiello Lecture.- Employment of a Progressive Learning Neural Network for Identification and Control.- Section 4 - Mathematical Models.- What Size Needs Testing?.- Entropy Based Comparison of Neural Networks for Classification.- A Hebbian Model for Space Representation.- Sequences of Discrete Hopfield's Networks for the Maximum Clique Problem.- Rates of Approximation of Multivariable Functions by One-Hidden-Layer Neural Networks.- Energy Functional and Fixed Points of a Neural Network.- A Distribution-Free VC-Dimension-Based Performance Bound.- Attractor Neural Networks as Models of Semantic Memory.- Section 5 - Pattern Recognition and Robotics.- Image Reconstruction Using a Hierarchical RBF Network Architecture.- Word Recognition by MLP-Based Character Spotting and Dynamic Programming.- Video Data Compression Using Multilayer Perceptrons.- Speeding Up Neural Network Execution: An Application to Speech Recognition.- Periodicity Analysis of Unevenly Spaced Data by Means of Neural Networks.- Computational Maps for Articulatory Speech Synthesis.- A Neural Solution for a Mobile Robot Navigation into Unknown Indoor Environments Using Visual Landmarks.- Section 6 - Applications.- An Application of the Bootstrap 632+ Rule to Ecological Data.- Are Hybrid Fuzzy-Neural Systems Actually Useful in Plasma Engineering?.- MAIA Neural Network: An Application to the Railway Anti-Skating System.- On the Cognitive Behaviour of a Multi-Layer Perceptron in Forecasting Meteorological Visibility.-Classifying Magnetic Resonance Spectra of Brain Neoplasms Using Fuzzy and Robust Gold Standard Adjustments.- Self-Organization with a Large Medical Databases Using GTM for Prediction and Clustering.- Icarus Platform: Software Integration of Several Intelligent Systems.- Section 7 - Architectures and Algorithms.- Plastic Tabu Search for Training Multilayer Perceptrons.- Training Analog VLSI Multi Layer Perceptron Networks with Continuous Time Back Propagation.- EM Algorithm: A Neural Network View.- HW/SW Co-Design of a Complete Pre-Processing/Recognition System Based on Sgs-Thomson OCR Analog Chip.- Interval Arithmetic Perceptron with Pruning Capability.- Hidden Recursive Models.- Geometrical Constructive Algorithms of Binary Neural Networks.- On the Adaptable Boolean Neural Net Paradigm.- Cluster Connections: A Visualization Technique to Reveal Cluster Boundaries in Self-Organizing Maps.- Discriminative Least Squares Learning for Fast Adaptive Neural Equalization.- Author Index.