Artificial Immune System - History

History

AIS began in the mid 1980s with Farmer, Packard and Perelson's (1986) and Bersini and Varela's papers on immune networks (1990). However, it was only in the mid 90s that AIS became a subject area in its own right. Forrest et al. (on negative selection) and Kephart et al. published their first papers on AIS in 1994, and Dasgupta conducted extensive studies on Negative Selection Algorithms. Hunt and Cooke started the works on Immune Network models in 1995; Timmis and Neal continued this work and made some improvements. De Castro & Von Zuben's and Nicosia & Cutello's work (on clonal selection) became notable in 2002. The first book on Artificial Immune Systems was edited by Dasgupta in 1999.

New ideas, such as danger theory and algorithms inspired by the innate immune system, are also now being explored. Although some doubt that they are yet offering anything over and above existing AIS algorithms, this is hotly debated, and the debate is providing one the main driving forces for AIS development at the moment. Other recent developments involve the exploration of degeneracy in AIS models, which is motivated by its hypothesized role in open ended learning and evolution.

Originally AIS set out to find efficient abstractions of processes found in the immune system but, more recently, it is becoming interested in modelling the biological processes and in applying immune algorithms to bioinformatics problems.

In 2008, Dasgupta and Nino published a textbook on Immunological Computation which presents a compendium of up-to-date work related to immunity-based techniques and describes a wide variety of applications.