As you probably well know, intelligent recognition systems go far beyond your ID badge at the cube farm. Character recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, medical imaging, visualization and the media are all applications in which these systems are common or essential. In these 24 articles describing cutting-edge research, contributors describe their work in offline Arabic-character recognition, a license plate recognition system, algorithms for extracting textual characters in color video, recognizing handwriting, logo detection in complex backgrounds, signature and fingerprint verification, palm print recognition, iris recognition using neural networks, face recognition using subspace techniques and humanoid robots, age classification, medical pattern understanding and cognitive analysis, speech recognition, data analysis, topological recognition and cryptographic communication.