The cochlear implant is the first neural prosthesis to achieve the technical success necessary for widespread clinical application. It provides the only effective therapy for restoring a sensation of sound to the profoundly deaf. In the past 15 years dramatic advances in the performance of such devices have been achieved. Current devices afford a significant fraction of users the ability to understand some speech without the aid of lipreading. These advances have derived substantially from the collective efforts of researchers in a broad array of scientific disciplines. The close collaboration and cooperation among experts from many fields which has yielded this progress has been fostered in large part through a series of biennial research conferences, originating with the 1983 Gordon Research Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses. The 1993 Conference will continue a long standing tradition of providing a forum for the focussed discussion and serious scientific exchange which is crucial to continued progress in the field. This application seeks partial support for that conference.
