This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, IWANN'97, held in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain, in June 1997. The volume presents 142 revised full papers selected from an overwhelming wealth of submissions. The volume is divided into sections on biological foundations of neural computation, formal tools and computational models of neurons and neural nets architectures, plasticity phenomena, complex systems dynamics, cognitive science and AI, neural nets simulation, emulation and implementation, methodology for data analysis, task selection and net design, neural networks for perception, and neural networks for communications, control and robotics.