“What a di?erence a year makes – 52 little weeks” This variation of the ?rst line from Dinah Washington’s famous song, which originally reads, “What a di?erence a day makes - 24 little hours,” brings it to the point: Accordingtoallexperts,thepress,andmostpeople’simpressionwearetoday in a serious economic recession. Less than one year ago, we practically lived on the “island of the blessed” (namely, at Networking 2008 that was held on the island of Singapore), or in the famous country where “milk and honey ?ow” (or “where wine and liquor ?ow”). This convenient situation has changed abruptly within less than 52 weeks. It looks like the same kind of problems has emerged in all areas – and the “Networking” area has, of course, been a?ected, too. Looking into the 2009 proceedings, however, you will immediately notice that the manuscripts are largely una?ected by any aspect of the economic c- sis (which should be a bit of a consolation). Apparently, research directions are dictated by a process that is all too sluggish in order to be quickly and radically changed by a “tsunami.” Likewise, the conference itself was prepared in spite of such a crisis.

The Second Future Internet Symposium washeld during September 1-3, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. FIS 2009 provided a forum for leading researchers and pr- titioners to meet and discuss the wide-ranging scienti?c and technical issues related to the design of a new Internet. This second edition of the symposium con?rmed the sentiment shared during the First Future Internet Symposium, held in Vienna in 2008: designing the Future Internet is a very exciting and challenging task, and a new research community needs to be built around it. With overa billionusers,today’s Internet is arguablythe most successful- man artifact ever created. The Internet’s physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyoneon the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its ?fth decade, the Int- net has shown remarkable resilience and ?exibility in the face of ever-increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meeting the needs of our knowledge society. Yet, Internet access moves increasingly from ?xed to mobile, the trend towards mobile usage is - deniable and predictions are that by 2014 about 2 billion users will access the Internet via mobile broadband services. This adds a new layer of complexity to the already immense challenges. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scienti?c research, physical infrastructure inve- ment, better education, and better utilization of the Internet. Japan, the USA andEuropeareinvestingheavilyin this area.

Internet-based information systems, the second covering the large-scale in- gration of heterogeneous computing systems and data resources with the aim of providing a global computing space. Eachofthesefourconferencesencouragesresearcherstotreattheirrespective topics within a framework that incorporates jointly (a) theory, (b) conceptual design and development, and (c) applications, in particular case studies and industrial solutions. Following and expanding the model created in 2003, we again solicited and selected quality workshop proposals to complement the more “archival” nature of the main conferences with research results in a number of selected and more “avant-garde” areas related to the general topic of Web-based distributed c- puting. For instance, the so-called Semantic Web has given rise to several novel research areas combining linguistics, information systems technology, and ar- ?cial intelligence, such as the modeling of (legal) regulatory systems and the ubiquitous nature of their usage. We were glad to see that ten of our earlier s- cessful workshops (ADI, CAMS, EI2N, SWWS, ORM, OnToContent, MONET, SEMELS, COMBEK, IWSSA) re-appeared in 2008 with a second, third or even ?fth edition, sometimes by alliance with other newly emerging workshops, and that no fewer than three brand-new independent workshops could be selected from proposals and hosted: ISDE, ODIS and Beyond SAWSDL. Workshop - diences productively mingled with each other and with those of the main c- ferences, and there was considerable overlap in authors.

The three volume set LNCS 5551/5552/5553 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks, ISNN 2009, held in Wuhan, China in May 2009. The 409 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 1.235 submissions. The papers are organized in 20 topical sections on theoretical analysis, stability, time-delay neural networks, machine learning, neural modeling, decision making systems, fuzzy systems and fuzzy neural networks, support vector machines and kernel methods, genetic algorithms, clustering and classification, pattern recognition, intelligent control, optimization, robotics, image processing, signal processing, biomedical applications, fault diagnosis, telecommunication, sensor network and transportation systems, as well as applications.

This volume is part of the two-volume proceedings of the 19th International Conf- ence on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2009), which was held in Cyprus during September 14–17, 2009. The ICANN conference is an annual meeting sp- sored by the European Neural Network Society (ENNS), in cooperation with the - ternational Neural Network Society (INNS) and the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS). ICANN 2009 was technically sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intel- gence Society. This series of conferences has been held annually since 1991 in various European countries and covers the field of neurocomputing, learning systems and related areas. Artificial neural networks provide an information-processing structure inspired by biological nervous systems. They consist of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements, with the capability of learning by example. The field of artificial neural networks has evolved significantly in the last two decades, with active partici- tion from diverse fields, such as engineering, computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, system theory, biology, operations research, and neuroscience. Artificial neural networks have been widely applied for pattern recognition, control, optimization, image processing, classification, signal processing, etc.