The report attempts to provide some background to the technique being developed as well as outline the work being carried out on the research project. The Proposed research Aims of the Project Objectives of the Project Expertise at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth References 1. There are a number of aspects which are unique to the immune system which make it of particular interest as the basis of a machine learning system. That it learns by experience. It is inherently distributed.
Theories are available about how it achieves the above, although some are controversial.
However, the immune system has not attracted the same kind of interest from the computing field as the neural operation of the brain or the evolutionary forces used in learning classifier systems. Thus removing the time consuming and tedious process of identifying or creating such negative examples and ensure that no positive examples are accidentally included. Some techniques such as neural networks and genetic algorithms are relatively simple but can take a great deal of time to optimise for a particular application. A self organising system would alleviate this problem. Case based reasoning has been one of the growth areas in AI over the last few years.