KES Doctoral School on Artificial Immune Systems

September 17th-19th, 2007, Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy
following the KES2007 conference.

Introduction

Over the last few years, artificial immune systems have come to the forefront of computer science research. Besides being a hot research topic for advanced modeling and simulation, immunology has provided a set of powerful analogies and metaphors to a number of IT-related research areas.

The First KES Doctoral School on Artificial Immune Systems will give a restricted group of talented Ph.D. students the opportunity to interact with leading researchers on various aspects of artificial immune systems, as well as the chance of working in cooperation with them, and with other faculty members on open research problems.

The course will focus on sophisticated immunological mechanisms emerging in biological systems as well as in IT-related artificial contexts. It will consist of three days, each devoted to a specific aspect of artificial immune systems. Supervised group projects will be run as an integral part of the course.

The Presenters

We are fortunate to have secured the following talented and distinguished lecturers to deliver the School:-

Prof. J. Timmis: What are Artificial Immune Systems?

This topic provides an introduction to the essential concepts of complex systems and to related mathematical methods, highlighting representation techniques such as statistical methods, cellular automata, agent-based systems, and their applications to modeling physical, biological and social systems. Concepts to be discussed include emergence, complexity, selforganization and complex pattern formation and detection.

Prof. M. Gerla: Urban Sensing from vehicle Platforms: epidemic index dissemination and bio-inspired harvesting

Topics: There has been growing interest in urban surveillance using vehicles that monitor the environment, classify the events, e.g., license plate readings, and exchange metadata with neighbors in a peer-to-peer fashion. In this talk MobEyes, a Peer to Peer middleware solution will be described, that diffuses data summaries via epidemic dissemination to create a distributed index of the massive sensor data base. This database is then "harvested" using bio-inspired techniques. The challenges of designing and maintain such a system, from information dissemination to harvesting, routing and security will also be presented.

Prof. S. Forrest: Self-healing Systems and Autonomic Network Security

Topics: The immune system relies a number of sophisticated mechanisms for protecting living beings, including support for the identification and destruction of foreign pathogens such as viruses and bacteria. Immunology has provided a powerful metaphor about how to achieve computer security. Indeed, immunological mechanisms provide a number of powerful metaphors for understanding, designing and implementing IT security systems. To name but a few, friend vs. foe detection is aimed at distinguishing potentially dangerous intruders from innocuous ones, as well as from legitimate components belonging to the environment under protection. Cooperative search-and-destroy strategies (e.g., triggered by unexpected environmental changes) aim to bring back the environment under protection to a controlled state and keeping it that way. Finally, maintaining internal diversity ensures that a security system remains capable of evolving to face new types of intruders. Mimicking the natural immune system behavior requires more sophisticated notions of identity and protection than those provided by current operating systems, and it would provide a general-purpose protection system to augment current computer security systems.

Doctoral School Web Site

The Doctoral School Web Site is available .. here ..

Contact

For queries about the Doctoral School please contact
ais-school@dti.unimi