Research in the field of pattern recognition both in theo retical terms and in the area of appl ication continues to flourish. Pattern recognition is a fairly diverse field involving researchers whose primary disciplines spread over at least a half dozen fields. Possibly because of the great diversity of backgrounds but a common interest in certain broad areas of application, the field has grown so rapidly and yet seems to promise at least a similar growth rate for the future. This book is a collection containing some of the papers that were presented at the N. A. T. O. Advanced Study Institute held in Bandol, France, September 1975. The main purpose of the institute was to present material which would provide a basic background in the field. Thus, survey papers covering syntactic methods, picture processing, classification theory, and speech recognition were presented. This should have provided the listener (and we hope now, the reader) with an acquaintance with the basic tools, a look at some of the appl ications and an appraisal of how each of the particular topics will evolve. A more recent addition to the pattern recognition "family" is the work in the areas of economics and group choice. Since the process of recognizing and inter preting patterns is so fundamental, it probably is no surprise when a particular discipline is discovered to be amenable to the already developed techniques.
