Book excerpt: Neural computation arises from the capacity of nervous tissue to process information and accumulate knowledge in an intelligent manner. Conventional computational machines have encountered enormous difficulties in duplicatingsuch functionalities. This has given rise to the development of Artificial Neural Networks where computation is distributed over a great number of local processing elements with a high degree of connectivityand in which external programming is replaced with supervised and unsupervised learning. The papers presented in this volume are carefully reviewed versions of the talks delivered at the International Workshop on Artificial Neural Networks (IWANN '93) organized by the Universities of Catalonia and the Spanish Open University at Madrid and held at Barcelona, Spain, in June 1993. The 111 papers are organized in seven sections: biological perspectives, mathematical models, learning, self-organizing networks, neural software, hardware implementation, and applications (in five subsections: signal processing and pattern recognition, communications, artificial vision, control and robotics, and other applications).