Book excerpt: The book reports the proceedings of the 15th Italian workshop on neural networks issued by the Italian Society on Neural Networks SIREN. The longevity recipe of this conference stands in three main points that normally renders the reading of these proceedings so interesting as appealing. 1. The topics of the neural networks is considered an attraction pole for a set of researches centered on the inherent paradigm of the neural networks, rather than on a specific tool exclusively. Thus, the subsymbolic management of the data information content constitutes the key feature of papers in various fields such as Pattern Recognition, Stochastic Optimization, Learning, Granular Computing, and so on, with a special bias toward bioinformatics operational applications. An excerpt of all these matters may be found in the book. 2. Though managed at domestic level, the conference attracts contributions from foreign researchers as well, so that in the book the reader may capture the flavor of the state of the art in the international community. 3. The conference is a meeting of friends as well. Thus the papers generally reflect a relaxed atmosphere where researchers meet to generously exchange their thought and explain their actual results in view of a common cultural growing of the community.