After a vibrant and successful event in Burgos, Spain, last year, this year's international conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning—IDEAL 2007 (http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/ideal07/)—was held in the second largest city of the UK, Birmingham. The IDEAL conference has become a unique multidisciplinary forum for researchers in both theoretical and practical aspects of learning and information processing, data mining, retrieval and management, bioinformatics and bio-inspired models, agents and hybrid systems, and financial engineering. A special feature of the IDEAL conferences is the cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas in emerging techniques and applications in these areas. Data engineering and associated learning paradigms are playing increasingly important roles in an increasing number of disciplines and fields. The multidisciplinary nature of contemporary research and modern technology is pushing boundaries and one of the principal aims of the IDEAL conference is to promote interactions and collaborations across disciplines.