This two volume set LNCS 5163 and LNCS 5164 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2008, held in Prague Czech Republic, in September 2008.

The 200 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 300 submissions. The second volume is devoted to pattern recognition and data analysis, hardware and embedded systems, computational neuroscience, connectionistic cognitive science, neuroinformatics and neural dynamics. it also contains papers from two special sessions coupling, synchronies, and firing patterns: from cognition to disease, and constructive neural networks and two workshops new trends in self-organization and optimization of artificial neural networks, and adaptive mechanisms of the perception-action cycle.