Design Principles for the Immune System and Other Distributed Autonomous Systems (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings)

Rating:
Summary: Agent-based modeling in medicine
Review: Design Principles was written by a collection of authors specializing in diverse fields from computer scientists, theoretical biologist, pathologist, chemists and neurologists. The book began as a workshop held at the Sante Fe Institute in 1999 by the same name. While it is not a collection of abstracts and papers from this workshop, it did serve as the motivating factor to write the book. Design Principles starts with a description of the immune system that serves as a basic introduction both to the topic and to the biases of the multiple authors. Steven Hofmeyr offers a "gentle introduction to the immune system for researchers who do not have much background in immunology." (p.3) The chapter is titled "Introduction to the Immune System". Right off the biases of the book are exposed as Hofmeyr has a Ph.D. in computer sciences with a focus on information detection and distribution. Hofmeyr does an excellent job describing very complex biology without assuming that the reader has a background in either immunology or systems. While the author is gentle in his presentation the chapter is very dense with information which one hopes will be reiterated as one needs the information further in the book. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in pursuing agent based modeling of biological systems. This book would be particularly interesting to those pursing interests in modeling the process of immunity. My final criticism would be that the title is a bit misleading as I would suggest that the book only gives limited mention and thought to other types of autonomous systems with the exception of Bonabeau's description of control mechanisms learned from social insects and Gordon's chapter titled, "Task Allocation in Ant Colonies."

Rating:
Summary: Agent-based modeling in medicine
Review: Design Principles was written by a collection of authors specializing in diverse fields from computer scientists, theoretical biologist, pathologist, chemists and neurologists. The book began as a workshop held at the Sante Fe Institute in 1999 by the same name. While it is not a collection of abstracts and papers from this workshop, it did serve as the motivating factor to write the book. Design Principles starts with a description of the immune system that serves as a basic introduction both to the topic and to the biases of the multiple authors. Steven Hofmeyr offers a "gentle introduction to the immune system for researchers who do not have much background in immunology." (p.3) The chapter is titled "Introduction to the Immune System". Right off the biases of the book are exposed as Hofmeyr has a Ph.D. in computer sciences with a focus on information detection and distribution. Hofmeyr does an excellent job describing very complex biology without assuming that the reader has a background in either immunology or systems. While the author is gentle in his presentation the chapter is very dense with information which one hopes will be reiterated as one needs the information further in the book. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in pursuing agent based modeling of biological systems. This book would be particularly interesting to those pursing interests in modeling the process of immunity. My final criticism would be that the title is a bit misleading as I would suggest that the book only gives limited mention and thought to other types of autonomous systems with the exception of Bonabeau's description of control mechanisms learned from social insects and Gordon's chapter titled, "Task Allocation in Ant Colonies."