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The vertebrate adaptive immune system provides a flexible and diverse set of molecules to neutralize pathogens. Yet, viruses such as HIV can cause chronic infections by evolving as quickly as the adaptive immune system, forming an…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
Artificial immune system can be used to generate schedules in changing environments and it has been proven to be more robust than schedules developed using a genetic algorithm. Good schedules can be produced especially when the number of…
The contact structure of the population shapes the progression of epidemics. Nonetheless, the joint evolution of individual behavioral adaptations and disease dynamics on networks remains poorly understood. We use a…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
Though deep neural networks have achieved significant progress on various tasks, often enhanced by model ensemble, existing high-performance models can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Many efforts have been devoted to enhancing the…
The susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model describes the evolution of three species of individuals which are subject to an infection and recovery mechanism. A susceptible $S$ can become infectious with an infection rate $\beta$ by an…
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…
Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that protect the host by binding to specific antigens, and their binding is mainly determined by the Complementary Determining Regions (CDRs) in the antibody. Despite the great progress made in CDR design,…
Character rigging is universally needed in computer graphics but notoriously laborious. We present a new method, HeterSkinNet, aiming to fully automate such processes and significantly boost productivity. Given a character mesh and skeleton…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
The immune response to a pathogen has two basic features. The first is the expansion of a few pathogen-specific cells to form a population large enough to control the pathogen. The second is the process of differentiation of cells from an…
Disgust is a basic emotion that serves to avoid contaminants, and is central to the behavioural immune system. While disgust-motivated avoidance occurs in bonobos and chimpanzees, humans show uniquely high levels of contamination…
Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity. Molecular recognition sites are short genome segments or…
We present a novel model that describes the within-host evolutionary dynamics of parasites undergoing antigenic variation. The approach uses a multi-type branching process with two types of entities defined according to their relationship…
The human adaptive immune response is known to weaken in advanced age, resulting in increased severity of pathogen-born illness, poor vaccine efficacy, and a higher prevalence of cancer in the elderly. Age-related erosion of the T-cell…
In spite of their many facets, the phenomena of autoimmunity and immunodeficiency seem to be related to each other through the subtle links connecting retroviral mutation and action to immune response and adaptation. In a previous work, we…
The human immune system has numerous properties that make it ripe for exploitation in the computational domain, such as robustness and fault tolerance, and many different algorithms, collectively termed Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), have…
Antibodies are versatile proteins that bind to pathogens like viruses and stimulate the adaptive immune system. The specificity of antibody binding is determined by complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) at the tips of these Y-shaped…
The process of identifying and characterizing B-cell epitopes, which are the portions of antigens recognized by antibodies, is important for our understanding of the immune system, and for many applications including vaccine development,…