A cursory glance at the table of contents of EANN 2009 reveals the am- ing range of neural network and related applications. A random but revealing sample includes: reducing urban concentration, entropy topography in epil- tic electroencephalography, phytoplanktonic species recognition, revealing the structure of childhood abdominal pain data, robot control, discriminating angry and happy facial expressions, ?ood forecasting, and assessing credit worthiness. The diverse nature of applications demonstrates the vitality of neural comp- ing and related soft computing approaches, and their...