The goal of this workshop is to foster our understanding of mechanisms and principles of information processing in self-organized hierarchical systems. Our knowledge of self-organized information processing in hierarchical systems is still very limited despite being a focus of research for many years. This workshop aims at assembling the latest results from various research branches in order to combine them into a broader and more comprehensive picture of the state of the art in hierarchical systems.

The workshop will concentrate on three complementary major topics:

1. Coding and representation of information in hierarchical systems
2. Adaptation, self-organisation and learning in hierarchical systems
3. Complex systems, networks and their dynamics

These three topics will consequently lead to the ultimate question of how information is processed in natural hierarchical systems.

A central aspect of the workshop is to elucidate principles of communication between different brain modules. We believe that this is important because large scale interactions in the brain are presumably self-organized. Since the visual and the motor system are the systems that we know best, the workshop will naturally focus on these two.