Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the application of biologically-inspired algorithms to business problems. Applications of neural networks and evolutionary algorithms have become common. However, as yet there have been few applications of artificial immune systems (AIS), algorithms that are inspired by the workings of the natural immune system. The natural immune system can be cons...

Probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs) provide a simple way to represent a particular class of distributions over sentences in a context-free language. Efficient parsing algorithms for answering particular queries about a PCFG (i.e., calculating the probability of a given sentence, or finding the most likely parse) have been developed, and applied to a variety of patternrecognition problem...

Face recognition is promising as an active research area spanning several disciplines such as computer vision, patternrecognition, neural network and image processing. It plays animportant role in many application areas such as authentication, human machine and surveillance. Human beings appear to recognize faces in cluttered scenes with relative ease having the ability to identify coarsely qua...

C-type lectin receptors (CLRs) fulfill multiple functions within the immune system by recognition of carbohydrate moieties on foreign or (altered) self-structures. CLRs on myeloid dendritic cells (DCs) have been well characterized as patternrecognition receptors (PRRs) combining ligand internalization with complex signaling events. Much less is known about CLR expression and function in human p...

In this paper we explore some implications of viewing graphs as geometric objects. This approach offers a new perspective on a number of graph-theoretic and algorithmic problems. There are several ways to model graphs geometrically and our main concern here is with geometric representations that respect the metric of the (possibly weighted) graph. Given a graph G we map its vertices to a normed...

The information tools in medicine have developed over a long time. There are certain reasons why they look the way they do. In a study of the use of the paper-based versions of these tools in daily practise, some interesting observations were made. Experienced physicians showed to have developed perceptual skills that enabled them to use patternrecognition as a complement to normal reading. The...

Can a machine think? The answer to this old chestnut is certainly "yes": Computers have been made to play chess and checkers, to prove theorems, to solve intricate problems of strategy. Yet the intelligence implied by such activities has an elusive, unnatural quality. It is not based on any orderly development of cognitive skills. In particular, the machines are not well equipped to select from...

host-pathogen interactions that occur in outbred populations. A fundamental point in the development of new and improved intervention strategies is the understanding of host differences in the innate immune response, which primes the subsequent adaptive immune response. Although the innate immune system has been largely conserved during evolution, marked variations and diversity exist between d...

Advanced telemetry systems are being developed to collect and archive hundreds of system performance, throughput, quality-of-service (QoS), and physical variables for the purpose of enhancing the reliability, availability, serviceability, scalability, and security of business-critical enterprise computing servers. SAS software was chosen for this project because of the language's powerful codin...