The European Concerted Action \COMPARES" (Concerted Action on COnnectionist Methods for Preprocessing and Analysis of REmote Sensing Data) was funded within the Environment and Climate Programme of the European Commission. The \COMPARES" project was aimed at focussing and coordinating future research at European level on the general theme of connectionist computation in the eld of Earth Observation (EO). Connectionist computation can be interpreted as the use of arti cial neural networks and parallel distributed processing systems.
Jim Austin, Giorgio Giacinto, I. Kanellopoulos, Ke