ANNIE 2007 will be held on November 11-14, 2007, at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, USA. This will be the seventeenth international gathering of researchers interested in Intelligent Systems Design using neural networks, fuzzy logic, evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, and complex systems. The previous conferences each drew approximately 150 papers from twenty-two countries. The proceedings of all conferences were published by ASME Press as hardbound books in sixteen volumes. The last volume, edited by Dagli, et. al., was titled "Smart Engineering Systems Design: Infra-Structure Systems Engineering, Bio-Informatics and Computational Biology, and Evolutionary Computation".

ANNIE 2007 will cover the theory of Computational Intelligence and Systems Engineering techniques, namely; neural networks, fuzzy logic, evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, and complex systems. Presentations dealing with applications of these technologies are encouraged in the areas of: critical infrastructure, cyber security, systems engineering, data mining, pattern recognition, informatics, financial engineering, and smart engineering systems.

ANNIE 2007 brings three special sessions to the conference. Prof. Halil Ceylan is leading a session on Infrastructure Systems Engineering. It is our intention to publish an additional book in this area. Prof. Cihan Dagli will lead a session on System of Systems and Netcentric Operations. Prof. Okan Ersoy is leading a session on Bio-informatics and Bioengineering.

Mr. Steven Corns invites all conference participants to join the "Binary Time Series Prediction" Contest for ANNIE 2007. For details, please contact Mr. Corns at scorns@iastate.edu or visit the ANNIE Conference website.

We will be inviting plenary speakers to bring the latest research findings to the ANNIE 2007 audience. All suggestions for speakers should be directed to the conference chair.

Like the previous conferences, all papers will be reviewed by senior researchers in the field to assure a high-quality submission. These reviews will be based on the full papers and a six page condensed version of the accepted paper will be published as part of the conference proceedings in a hardbound book.