ARTIFICIAL IMMUNE SYSTEMS

DR. MARINA YUSOFF

FACULTY OF COMPUTER AND

MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES
UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MARA

Outline

What are Artificial Immune Systems?

Background immunology
Why

use the immune system as a metaphor

Immune Metaphors employed

Review of AIS work
Applications
More

blue sky research

Artificial Immune Systems

Introduction of Artificial Immune System

(AIS)

Models natural immune systems ability to detect

cells foreign to the body
Powerful recognition especially to anomaly
detection
A Definition of AIS : Adaptive systems inspired by
theoretical immunology and observed immune
functions, principles and models, which are applied
to complex problem domains
[De Castro and Timmis,2002]
Artificial Immune Systems

History

Developed from the field of theoretical immunology

in the mid 1980s.
Suggested we might look at the IS
1990 Bersini first use of immune algorithms to
solve problems
Forrest et al Computer Security mid 1990s
Hunt et al, mid 1990s Machine learning

Artificial Immune Systems

What is the Immune System ?

a complex system of cellular and molecular components

having the primary function of distinguishing self from not
self and defense against foreign organisms or substances
(Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary)

The immune system is a cognitive system whose primary

role is to provide body maintenance
(Cohen)

Immune system was evolutionary selected as a consequence

of its first and primordial function to provide an ideal intercellular communication pathway
(Stewart)
Artificial Immune Systems

Artificial Immune Systems

Relatively new branch of computer science

Using natural immune system as a metaphor for

solving computational problems

Some history

Not modelling the immune system

Variety of applications so far

Fault diagnosis (Ishida)
Computer security (Forrest, Kim)
Novelty detection (Dasgupta)
Robot behaviour (Lee)
Machine learning (Hunt, Timmis, de Castro)

Artificial Immune Systems

Why the Immune System?

Recognition

Anomaly detection
Noise tolerance

Robustness
Feature extraction
Diversity
Reinforcement learning
Memory
Distributed
Multi-layered
Adaptive
Artificial Immune Systems

Role of the Immune System

Protect our bodies from infection

Primary immune response
Launch

a response to invading pathogens

Secondary immune response

Remember

past encounters
Faster response the second time around

Artificial Immune Systems

CEC 2001

Natural Immune System

Body has defense mechanism, skin covers body,

membrane covers organ and vessels.
Immune system reacts to body
to

specific body material (pathogenic material)

referred as antigen
Distinguish between normal (self) and foreign (non-self)
in the body

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Shape Space

Describe interactions between molecules

Degree of binding between molecules
Complement threshold
Each paratope matches a certain region of space
Complete repertoire

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Artificial Immune Systems : Affinity

Layer
Computationally, the degree of interaction of an antibodyantigen or antibody-antibody can be evaluated by a distance or
affinity measure
The choice of affinity measure is crucial:
It alters the shape-space topology
It will introduce an inductive bias into the algorithm
It needs to take into account the data-set used and the problem
you are trying to solve

Artificial Immune Systems

Representation and Affinities

Representation affects affinity measure

Binary
Integer

Affinity is related to distance

Euclidian
Hamming

Affinity threshold

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Applications

Artificial Immune Systems

Robotics

Behaviour Arbitration

Garbage

Ishiguro et al. (1996, 1997) :

Immune network theory to
evolve a behaviour among a
set of agents

Middle
Far
Near
Robot

Collective Behaviour

Emerging collective behaviour

through communicating robots
(Jun et al, 1999)
Immune network theory to
suppress or encourage robots
behaviour

Artificial Immune Systems

Battery charger

Garbage can

Paratope
Desirable
condition

Action

Idiotope
Interacting antibodies
and degree of interaction

Scheduling

Hart et al. (1998) and Hart & Ross (1999a)

Proposed an AIS to produce robust schedules

Investigated is an AIS could be evolved using a GA approach

for a dynamic job-shop scheduling problem in which jobs arrive

continually, and the environment is subject to changes.
then be used to produce sets of schedules which together cover a range
of contingencies, predictable and unpredictable.

Model included evolution through gene libraries, affinity

maturation of the immune response and the clonal selection
principle.

Artificial Immune Systems

Diagnosis

Ishida (1993)
Immune network model applied to the process diagnosis
problem
Later was elaborated as a sensor network that could diagnose
sensor faults by evaluating reliability of data from sensors,
and process faults by evaluating reliability of constraints
among data.
Main immune features employed:

Recognition is performed by distributed agents which dynamically

interact with each other;
Each agent reacts based solely on its own knowledge; and
Memory is realized as stable equilibrium points of the dynamical
network.

Artificial Immune Systems

Summary

Covered much, but there is much work not covered (so

apologies to anyone for missing theirs)
Immunology
Immune metaphors
Antibodies and their interactions
Immune learning and memory

Application of immune metaphors

Artificial Immune Systems

The Future

Rapidly growing field, very exciting

Wide possible application domains

Artificial Immune Systems

Reference
1. Dr. Jonathan Timmis
Computing Laboratory
University of Kent at Canterbury
England. UK.
J.Timmis@ukc.ac.uk
http:/www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/jt6
2. Andries Engelbreacht, Computational Intelligence, 2nd Edition.

Artificial Immune Systems