Dear colleagues:

It is our great pleasure to invite you to take part in a New Trends in
Self-organization and Optimization of Artificial Neural Networks
workshop taking place on the last day of the ICANN 2008
conference. The keynote invited talk of the workshop is

Abstracting Biological Development to Evolve Large-Scale Artificial
Neural Networks

presented by 

Kenneth O. Stanley.

In his talk Kenneth will focus on recent work in indirect encoding of
neural networks through an abstraction of biological development
called Hypercube-based NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies
(HyperNEAT). The primary conceptual focus will be on the critical role
of abstraction in biologically-inspired systems.

More can be found at:
http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/

Note that the program of the workshop will continue with plenary
lectures and poster session. You can submit your workshop
contribution through the conference system
(http://icann2008.org/submit). Contributions will be included in
conference proceedings published by Springer.

If you have already submitted your paper to ICANN 2008 and you want to
present your contribution at the workshop, indicate it in the the
"Comments to the Chair" field in the submission system or by email to
info@icann2008.org. Please note that the deadline for the submissions is 

April 7 2008.

Sincerely, 

Organizers of the New Trends in Self-organization and
Optimization of Artificial Neural Networks workshop,

http://icann2008.org/workshop.php