Artificial immune systems

ICARIS 2006 is the ? fth instance of a series of conferences dedicated to the comprehension and the exploitation of immunological principles through their translation into computational terms. All scienti? c disciplines carrying a name that begins with “arti? cial” (followed by “life,” “reality,” “intelligence” or “- munesystem”) aresimilarlysu? ering froma veryambiguousidentity. Their axis of research tries to stabilize an on-going identity somewhere in the crossroad of engineering (building useful artifacts), natural sciences (biologyor psychology— improving the comprehension and prediction of natural phenomena) and t- oretical computer sciences (developing and mastering the algorithmic world). Accordingly and depending on which of these perspectives receives more s- port, they attempt at attracting di? erent kinds of scientists and at stimul- ing di? erent kinds of scienti? c attitudes. For many years and in the previous ICARIS conferences, it was clearly the “engineering” perspective that was the most represented and prevailed through the publications. Indeed, since the o- gin of engineering and technology, nature has o? ered a reserve of inexhaustible inspirations which have stimulated the development of useful artifacts for man. Biology has led to the development of new computer tools, such as genetic - gorithms, Boolean and neural networks, robots learning by experience, cellular machines and others that create a new vision of IT for the engineer: parallel, ? exible andautonomous. Inthis type of informatics, complexproblemsareta- led with the aid of simple mechanisms, but in? nitely iterated in time and space.