Guest editorial: special issue on the emerging applications of neural networks

It has been over 60 years since the first neural network model was developed by McCulloch and Pitts [1], and has been just over 50 years since the Mark I Peceptron model was developed by Rosenblatt and Wightman [2]. The downfall of Neural Network research was due to the limited capabilities of perceptron which was rigorously proved in the book ‘‘Perceptrons’’ by Minsky and Papert [3]. Neural network research has then gone through a period of quiet years from the mid sixties to the mid eighties. The take off of neural computing research was probably due to the announcement that Japan had resumed the research of neural networks. The US feared that they would be overtaken by the Japanese. This resulted in Ira Skurnick, a program funding manager in the US defense Science Office, decided to fund neural computing research again. To all neural computing researchers, the late eighties are well remembered because we saw how neural computing had been reinstated and repositioned. In 1986, we saw the first annual Neural Networks for Computing Conference, and we saw Rumelhart reported back his famous backpropagation learning algorithm. To date, we have seen the flourish of neural computing with its application stretched from rigorous mathematical proof to different engineering, physical science, and even business finance applications. This special issue on ‘‘The Emerging Applications of Neural Networks’’ is aimed at disseminating the latest applications of neural networks in the areas of engineering or computer science, business and management, geology and library science. It is exciting to see different researchers from different countries, and cultures come up with new thinking and applications. In the twenty-first century, We may have come to a stage that science theories and basic research are more than sufficient to our daily lives. This special issue delineates how the versatile neural networks are affecting us everyday. The papers solicited are selected from papers presented in the ICONIP 2009. Eventually, twelve papers from experts with innovation on new neural applications are invited and included in this issue. We include the paper: