The 18th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2011) will be held in Shanghai, China. It is an annual event, organized since 1994 by the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). ICONIP 2011 aims to provide a high-level international forum for scientists, engineers, educators, and students to address new
challenges, share solutions, and discuss future research directions in neural information processing and real-world applications.

[Call for Papers, Special Sessions and Workshop Proposals]

Prospective authors are invited to contribute high-quality papers in the topic areas listed below and proposals for special sessions
and workshops.
Special sessions, to be organized by internationally recognized experts, aim to bring together researchers in special focused topics.
Each special session should include at least 6 contributing papers. A special session proposal should include the session title, a
brief description of the scope and motivation, names, contact information and brief biographical information on the organizers.
Papers submitted for special sessions are to be peer-reviewed with the same criteria used for the regular papers.
Workshops will consist of a panel of invited experts. No individual papers will be submitted and no papers will appear in the proceedings.
A proposal for workshop should include a summary statement (2-3 pages) describing the topic and motivation of the workshop
and a list of the workshop panelists. All of the post-conference workshops will be held at Hangzhou, November 18, 2011.

[Topic Areas]

The scope of the conference includes, but is not limited to, the following areas:
- Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Science:Spiking neurons, visual and auditory cortex, neural
encoding and decoding, plasticity and adaptation, brain imaging, learning and memory, inference and reasoning, perception,
emotion and development, attractor and associative memory.
- Models, Methods and Inference: Stability and convergence analysis, neural network models, supervised learning,
unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, embeddings and manifold learning, active learning, statistical and informationtheoretic
methods, kernel methods and support vector machines, mixture models, graphical and causal models, Bayesian
networks, topic models, evolutionary algorithms, Gaussian processes, model selection, matrix/tensor analysis.
- Vision and Auditory Modelling: Visual perception and modelling, visual selective attention, visual coding and representation,
object recognition, motion and tracking, natural scene analysis, image processing, auditory perception and modelling, source
separation, speech recognition and speech synthesis, speaker identification, audio and speech retrieval.
- Control, Robotics and Hardware: Neuromorphic hardware and implementation embedded neural networks, fuzzy neural
networks, cognitive robotics, developmental robotics, multi-agent systems and game theory, planning and decision making, action
and motor control.
- Novel approaches and Applications: Brain-like systems, adaptive intelligent systems, brain-computer interfaces,
granular computing, hybrid intelligent systems, neuroinformatics and neuroengineering, bioinformatics, information retrieval, data
mining and knowledge discovery, natural language processing.

[Paper Submission]

Authors are invited to submit full-length papers (10 pages maximum) by the submission deadline through the online submission system. The submission of a paper implies that the paper is original and has not been submitted under review or copyrightprotected
elsewhere and will be presented by an author if accepted. All submitted papers will be refereed by experts in the field based on the criteria of originality, significance, quality, and clarity. The authors of accepted papers will have an opportunity to revise
their papers and take consideration of the referees' comments and suggestions. The proceedings of ICONIP 2011 will be published by Springer in its series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Selected good papers will be included in a special issue of
Neurocomputing.