IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation

TO APPEAR VOL. 6, NO. 2, JUNE 2002

This special issue will be devoted to exploring different immunological mechanisms and their relation to information processing and problem solving. The natural immune system is an adaptive learning system which is highly distributive in nature. It employs several alternative and complementary mechanisms for defense against foreign pathogens.

The natural immune system is a subject of great research interest because of its powerful information processing capabilities. The main purpose of the immune system is to recognize all cells (or molecules) within the body and categorize those cells as self or non-self. The non-self cells are further categorized in order to induce an appropriate type of defensive mechanism. The immune system learns through evolution to distinguish between foreign antigens (e.g., bacteria, viruses) and the body's own cells or molecules.

From an information-processing perspective, the immune system is a remarkable parallel and distributed adaptive system. It uses learning, memory, and associative retrieval to solve recognition and classification tasks. In particular, it learns to recognize relevant patterns, remember patterns that have been seen previously, and use combinatorics to construct pattern detectors efficiently. Also, the overall behavior of the system is an emergent property of many local interactions. These remarkable information-processing abilities of the immune system provide several important aspects in the field of computation. Artificial Immune Systems are used in pattern recognition, fault detection, computer security, and a variety of other applications researchers are exploring in the field of science and engineering.

The main objective of this special issue is to assemble a collection of high-quality contributions that reflect the latest advances in this emerging field -- the artificial immune systems. Original contributions are encouraged in, but are not limited to, the following areas:

§ Computational algorithms based on immunological principles

§ Immunogenetic approaches

§ Immunity-based optimization and learning

§ Autonomous Decentralized/Self-Organizing Systems

§ Immunity-based Design and Scheduling

§ Immunological approaches to computer & network security

§ Artificial Immune systems and their applications

The deadline for submitting a full paper has passed. Electronic submission is preferred. Send all submissions to the guest editor either through email or by post. Information on this special issue is available at the webpage http://www.msci.memphis.edu/~dasgupta/IEEE-TEC-AIS.html

Guest Editor:

Dipankar Dasgupta

Division of Computer Science

The University of Memphis

Memphis, TN 38138, USA

Email: ddasgupt@memphis.edu