These three volumes are a collection of the contributions presented to the joint th conferencesofKES2007,the11 InternationalConferenceonKnowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, and the WIRN 2007, the th 17 Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, in September 2007. TheformulabywhichKESconferencesgatherover500peopleeachyearfrom the four corners of the globe to discuss the topic of knowledge-based and int- ligent information and engineering systems is: an open mind with rigor. Within the vastuniverseofthe conferencescenteredaroundthekeywords"information" and "computational intelligence," we encourage in our meetings the o?ering of newideas andtechniques to givesolutions to the never-endingseriesof problems and challenges that our own intelligence poses. As a precious attribute of the human brain, we will never be disturbed by the novelty, and possibly the provocation, of new mental paradigms and h- ardous conjectures, especially if they are raised by fresh research teams. At the same time, we have riddled eachcontribution using the sieve of scienti?c quality, checking the rigor with which the ideas are illustrated, their understandability and the support of the theory or of the experimental evidence.
The structure of the conference re?ects this philosophy. In addition to re- lartracksonthemain?eldsofthediscipline,weinvitedscientiststoproposes- sions focused on topics of high interest. Their response was generous and based onallsources,wereceivedsome1203submissions.Fromthisnumberwecollected 11 general track sessions and 47 invited sessions to make a total of 409 papers after a severe referee screening, an acceptance rate of 34%. Thus the reader may havefromthesevolumesanalmostexhaustiveoverviewofresearcher'sandprac- tioner'scurrentworkinthe?eldofinformationextractionandintelligentsystems.