connections between the processing elements and element parameters. Artificial neurons were first proposed in 1943 by Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist, and Walter Pitts, a logician, who first collaborated at the University of Chicago. One classical type of artificial neural network is the recurrent Hopfield network. The concept of a neural network appears to have first been proposed by Alan Turing in his 1948 paper Intelligent Machinery in which he called them "B-type unorganised machines". The utility of artificial neural network models lies in the fact that they can be used to infer a function from observations and also to use it. Unsupervised neural networks can also be used to learn representations of the input that capture the salient characteristics of the input distribution, e.g., see the Boltzmann machine (1983), and more recently, deep learning algorithms, which can implicitly learn the distribution function of the observed data. Learning in neural networks is particularly useful in applications where the complexity of the data or task makes the design of such functions by hand impractical. Applications Neural networks can be used in different fields. The tasks to which artificial neural networks are applied tend to fall within the following broad categories: Function approximation, or regression analysis, including time series prediction and modeling. Classification, including pattern and sequence recognition, novelty detection and sequential decision making. Data processing, including filtering, clustering, blind signal separation and compression. Application areas of ANNs include nonlinear system identification and control (vehicle control, process control), game-playing and decision making (backgammon, chess, racing), pattern recognition (radar systems, face identification, object recognition), sequence recognition (gesture, speech, handwritten text recognition), medical diagnosis, financial applications, data mining (or knowledge discovery in databases, "KDD"), visualization and e-mail spam filtering. For example, it is possible to create a semantic profile of user's interests emerging from pictures trained for object recognition. Neuroscience Theoretical and computational neuroscience is the field concerned with the analysis and computational modeling of biological neural systems. Since neural systems are intimately related to cognitive processes and behaviour, the field is closely related to cognitive and behavioural modeling. The aim of the field is to create models of biological neural systems in order to understand how biological systems work. To gain this understanding, neuroscientists strive to make a link between observed biological processes (data), biologically plausible mechanisms for neural processing and learning (biological neural network models) and theory (statistical learning theory and information theory).