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.