Preface: A Forum at the Dawn of the Era of Biologically Inspired Intelligent Machines

The emergence of biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA) challenges researchers across many disciplines with a new frontier: computational replication of the human mind, taken in all its essential aspects, as a functional unit of a team or a society. The mission of the international conference series on BICA is to facilitate interaction and collaboration among researchers who devoted themselves to solution of this BICA Challenge, by bridging cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural barriers. BICA annual conference series are now seven years old. Initially organized under the auspices of AAAI, the conference grew up into a world-wide forum coordinated and organized by the BICA Society, a nonprofit US corporation. In recent years, the BICA conference traveled around the globe: from Washington, D.C. to Palermo, Kiev, and Boston. Today BICA is a mainstream interdisciplinary field, promising solutions to urgent problems that resisted traditional approaches for decades. Over all its years, the BICA conference was a huge success in growing progression