th These proceedings contain refereed papers presented at the 7 WSOM held at the Casa Monica Hotel, St. Augustine, Florida, June 8¿10, 2009. We designed the wo- shop to serve as a regular forum for researchers in academia and industry who are interested in the exciting field of self-organizing maps (SOM). The program includes excellent examples of the use of SOM in many areas of social sciences, economics, computational biology, engineering, time series analysis, data visualization and c- puter science as well a vibrant set of theoretical papers that keep pushing the envelope of the original SOM. Our deep appreciation is extended to Teuvo Kohonen and Ping Li for the plenary talks and Amaury Lendasse for the organization of the special sessions. Our sincere thanks go to the members of the Technical Committee and other reviewers for their excellent and timely reviews, and above all to the authors whose contributions made this workshop possible. Special thanks go to Julie Veal for her dedication and hard work in coordinating the many details necessary to put together the program and local arrangements. Jose C. Principe Risto Miikkulainen

Batch-Learning Self-Organizing Map for Predicting Functions of Poorly-Characterized Proteins Massively Accumulated.- Incremental Unsupervised Time Series Analysis Using Merge Growing Neural Gas.- Clustering Hierarchical Data Using Self-Organizing Map: A Graph-Theoretical Approach.- Time Series Clustering for Anomaly Detection Using Competitive Neural Networks.- Fault Prediction in Aircraft Engines Using Self-Organizing Maps.- Incremental Figure-Ground Segmentation Using Localized Adaptive Metrics in LVQ.- Application of Supervised Pareto Learning Self Organizing Maps and Its Incremental Learning.- Gamma SOM for Temporal Sequence Processing.- Fuzzy Variant of Affinity Propagation in Comparison to Median Fuzzy c-Means.- Clustering with Swarm Algorithms Compared to Emergent SOM.- Cartograms, Self-Organizing Maps, and Magnification Control.- Concept Mining with Self-Organizing Maps for the Semantic Web.- ViSOM for Dimensionality Reduction in Face Recognition.- Early Recognition of Gesture Patterns Using Sparse Code of Self-Organizing Map.- Bag-of-Features Codebook Generation by Self-Organisation.- On the Quantization Error in SOM vs. VQ: A Critical and Systematic Study.- Approaching the Time Dependent Cocktail Party Problem with Online Sparse Coding Neural Gas.- Career-Path Analysis Using Optimal Matching and Self-Organizing Maps.- Network-Structured Particle Swarm Optimizer with Various Topology and Its Behaviors.- Representing Semantic Graphs in a Self-Organizing Map.- Analytic Comparison of Self-Organising Maps.- Modeling the Bilingual Lexicon of an Individual Subject.- Self-Organizing Maps with Non-cooperative Strategies (SOM-NC).- Analysis of Parliamentary Election Results and Socio-Economic Situation Using Self-Organizing Map.- Line Image Classification by NG×SOM:Application to Handwritten Character Recognition.- Self-Organization of Tactile Receptive Fields: Exploring Their Textural Origin and Their Representational Properties.- Visualization by Linear Projections as Information Retrieval.- Analyzing Domestic Violence with Topographic Maps: A Comparative Study.- On the Finding Process of Volcano-Domain Ontology Components Using Self-Organizing Maps.- Elimination of Useless Neurons in Incremental Learnable Self-Organizing Map.- Hierarchical PCA Using Tree-SOM for the Identification of Bacteria.- Optimal Combination of SOM Search in Best-Matching Units and Map Neighborhood.- Sparse Linear Combination of SOMs for Data Imputation: Application to Financial Database.- Towards Semi-supervised Manifold Learning: UKR with Structural Hints.- Construction of a General Physical Condition Judgment System Using Acceleration Plethysmogram Pulse-Wave Analysis.- Top-Down Control of Learning in Biological Self-Organizing Maps.- Functional Principal Component Learning Using Oja's Method and Sobolev Norms.- A Computational Framework for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction and Clustering.- The Exploration Machine - A Novel Method for Data Visualization.- Generalized Self-Organizing Mixture Autoregressive Model.- An SOM-Hybrid Supervised Model for the Prediction of Underlying Physical Parameters from Near-Infrared Planetary Spectra.