The 13 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions for inclusion in the book. The workshop served to present the current state of the art in the new transdiscipline of cognitive systems, which is emerging from computer science, the neurosciences, computational linguistics, neurological networks and the new philosophy of mind. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimodal human-computer interfaces, neuropsychology and neurocomputing, Chinese-German natural language processing and psycholinguistics, as well as information processing and retrieval from the semantic Web for intelligent applications.

This special issue collects a subset of the papers presented at the Joint Chinese-German Workshop on Cognitive Systems, held March 7-11, 2005, at Fudan University, in Shanghai, the city that never sleeps and changes daily. Just as it is not easy to keep track of Shanghai’s growth and modernisation, it is hard to keep up with research on the new transdiscipline of cognitive systems, which is emerging from computer science, the neurosciences, computational linguistics, neurological networks and the new philosophy of mind. The workshop served to present the current state of the art in these fields and brought together researchers from Fudan University and Jiao Tong University, both in Shanghai, China, and from Saarland University, Germany.

The Workshop on Cognitive Systems was the last in a series of events to mark the longstanding collaboration between the three universities, which includes numerous joint projects, exchange of researchers and research visits, as well as formal joint cooperation agreements, treatises and joint Ph.D. and student exchange programmes in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence and in computational linguistics.