The immune system's first steps

First Steps in Formalising Qualitative Systems Dynamics

System dynamics techniques, such as influence diagrams, are used to model poorly understood systems. Qualitative analysis of these models is often extremely vague. More rigorous analysis requires quantitative simulation and can only occur after an additional conversion to a ‘stock and flow’ model. In this paper we present some augmentations to influence diagrams that allow analysis and simulati...

The First Steps in Seeing

CRISPR-Cas: the effective immune systems in the prokaryotes

Approximately all sequenced archaeal and half of eubacterial genomes have some sort of adaptive immune system, which enables them to target and cleave invading foreign genetic elements by an RNAi-like pathway. CRISPR–Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats–CRISPR-associated proteins) systems consist of the CRISPR loci with multiple copies of a short repeat sequence separa...

First Steps in Symplectic and Spectral Theory of Integrable Systems

The paper intends to lay out the first steps towards constructing a unified framework to understand the symplectic and spectral theory of finite dimensional integrable Hamiltonian systems. While it is difficult to know what the best approach to such a large classification task would be, it is possible to single out some promising directions and preliminary problems. This paper discusses them an...

On-Line, Reflexive Constraint Satisfaction for Hybrid Systems: First Steps

We can achieve guaranteed constraint satisfaction of a hybrid dynamical system (which takes into account the underlying continuous dynamics) in a simple, hierarchical control algorithm. Two layers of functionality, (1) piece-wise viable servo controllers and (2) a “reflex controller,” are required for guaranteed constraint satisfaction. The resulting control structure allows higher-levels of “i...