The NEUREL symposia have been organized as biennial events to allow scientists, experts and engineers working in diverse areas to report their recent research in the fields of neural networks (NNs) and fuzzy systems, and to contribute to their applications, mainly, but not only, in Electrical Engineering. Much attention has also been paid to biomedical aspects of NNs.
   The first NEUREL Seminar started eighteen years ago, in December 1990, as a result of enthusiastic work of several professors, particularly of our late professor Rajko Tomovic (1919-2001), who recognized the power of neural networks in solving different complex problems without the need for special purpose algorithms. Just after this event, the Civil War in former Yugoslavia stopped many intellectual, cultural and scientific activities. Surprisingly, despite the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, NEUREL events survived: the second NEUREL was held in winter 1992/93 under an enormous inflation in Yugoslavia, as a series of lectures offered from Saturday-to-Saturday, and organized by our late professor Mirko Milic (1932-1993). The third NEUREL was held in September 1995, following the main intentions of the first Seminar. The following NEURELs (in 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006) were organized by the IEEE Yugoslavia Section (now Serbia and Montenegro) and its CAS-SP Chapter, and technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and/or the IEEE CAS Society and the IEEE Artificial Intelligence Society (now renamed to Computational Intelligence Society), as well as of the IEEE Region 8.
   The 9th NEUREL 2008 is technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and the IEEE Region 8. The Symposium topics cover many relevant aspects of the area of computational intelligence. After reviewing the submitted manuscripts, 33 papers, authored by more than 100 authors/co-authors from 14 countries, have been accepted for presentation at the Symposium and scheduled in six regular sessions. Also, two Special Sessions with 12 papers are organized, covering two very actual fields: Application of AI Methods in Multimodal Analysis of Digital Media (a topic of the EU project COST Action 292) and Use of Neural Networks in External Control of Movement. Moreover, two Tutorial Lectures will be held: Swarming and Flocking: Cooperative Collective Behavior in self-organizing systems (ant colonies, bird flocking) and Principal Component Analysis and Artificial Neural Networks in Prediction of Genomic Signals. All the accepted papers are printed in the Symposium Proceedings and recorded on the Symposium CD-ROM, published through the IEEE Conference Publications Program. Selected papers are expected to be published in the Journal of Automatic Control (ISSN 0354-124X, http://control.etf.bg.ac.yu/JAC/main.htm)
   We would like to express our thanks to all the contributors who submitted their papers to NEUREL-2008 for review. Certainly, we could not have had such a high quality technical program without their contributions. Also, our sincere thanks go to the reviewers, for their dedicated efforts in reviewing the submitted papers. Technical and Organizing Committees made exceptional efforts in organizing the Symposium and in preparing the Symposium Proceedings and we are grateful to them.
   Also, we would like to express our gratitude to our friends and sponsors. Without their help and support, the Symposium definitely would not be held.
   The next, 10th NEUREL is scheduled for 2010. We do hope that we will meet again in NEUREL-2010, sharing our experiences.

Belgrade, September 2008