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Activating Artificial Immune Systems

October 27, 2005

  • Date: Thursday, October 27, 2005 
  • Time: 11:00-12:15pm. 
  • Place: Woodward 149

Prof. Stephanie Forrest Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

Natural immune systems are sophisticated information processors. They learn to recognize relevant patterns, they remember patterns that have been seen previously, they use combinatorics to construct pattern detectors efficiently, and they use diversity to promote robustness. Further, the individual cells and molecules that comprise the immune system are distributed throughout our bodies, encoding and controlling the system in parallel with no central control mechanism. The talk will describe recent progress on several related projects that are investigating the effector side of the immune system—how it chooses its response, how it controls the magnitude of response, and how it knows when to terminate a response.