Artificial Immune Systems: 4th International Conference, ICARIS 2005, Banff, Alberta, Canada, August 14-17, 2005, Proceedings

Your immune system is unique. It is in many waysas complex as your brain, but itisnotcentredinonelocation, likethebrain.Itisnotasingleorgan-itconsists ofmanydi'erentcelltypes, diversemethods ofintercellularcommunication, and many di'erent organs. Its functionality is blurred throughout you-we can't extract the immune system, or point to where it begins and ends. The immune system is not separablefrom the system it protects. It has integrallinks to every organ of our bodies. Thishasradicalimplicationsforthe'eldofArti'cialImmuneSystems(AIS), that we are only now beginning to comprehend. One of the ?rst insights is that modelling the immune system, or developing any kind of immune algorithm, is di'cult. The immune system is one aspect of biology that we ?nd di'cult to apply simple reductionist explanations to. We can very successfully extract s- processes of the whole and create immune algorithms based on those processes. But we are always aware that we are missing the whole story. This is leading to more holistic views of immune algorithm development: theoretical analyses of how the sub-components contribute to the whole, and identi'cation of missing elements. Arti'cial immune systems are now beginning to incorporate ideas of innate as well as adaptive immunity, more complex intercellular communication mechanisms, endocrine and neural interfaces, concepts of tissue and broader ideas of organism and environment. SoperhapsthemostexcitingimplicationforthefutureofAISisthatthese- searchersareontheforefrontofunconventionalcomputing-mergingthe bou- aries between biology and traditional computation to achieve new emergent, embodied and distributed processing capabilities.