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Prof Jon Timmis
Department of Computer Science and Department of Electronics
University of York
Heslington, York. YO10 5DD
Tel +44 (0) 1904 322318/325361
Email: jtimmis (at) cs (dot) york (dot) ac (dot) uk OR jt517 (at) ohm (dot) york (dot) ac (dot) uk |
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I am Professor of Natural Computation and hold a joint appointment between the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electronics . I am a member of the Non Standard Computation group, the Intelligent Systems group and the York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis (YCCSA).
Research
My work cuts across many areas, but most of my work revolves around immunology, either developing computational models of immune function (computational immunology), or fault-tolerance achieved via bio-inspired engineering with a focus on the immune system (immuno-engineering). In terms of applications, I focus mainly on swarm robotic systems as a platform for testing our ideas realting to fault tolerence and anomaly detection. My wider interests are in modelling and simulation of complex systems.
I currently hold a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award where my work is focussed on computational immunology and self-healing swarm robotic systems.
I work on a variety of robotic platforms, we made a video for some fun, of our flying robots (make sure the volume is turned up).
I am Visiting Professor at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
A few years ago, Nature did a piece on AIS, take a read
If you want to know more about AIS, I have written a few papers that you might find interesting all with pre-final version PDFs provided for you (you can find the full reference for citation purposes on my publication page):
I have recently helped to guest edit a number of special issues on AIS:
Jobs and Studentships
No vacancies at present.
Conferences in 2011
Research Activities
Current Research Council Projects
Current Industrial Funding
I hold two current research grants from a major manufacture of electro-mechanical devices where we develop ideas for dynamic data fusion.
I hold a grant from DSTL on chemical agent detection deployed on robotic platforms.
I hold a grant from Syngenta to develop a decision support tool for farmers to optimise bird life diversity on their land.
Activities
Books
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In Silico Immunology
Darren R. Flower, Jon Timmis, editors, in silico Immunology
Overview: Immunology is an all important science, addressing as it does, the most pressing medical needs of our time: infectious disease and transplantation medicine. It has given us vaccines on the one hand and therapeutic antibodies on the other. After a century of emperical research, it is now poised to finally reinvent itself as a quantitative, genome-based science.
Theoretical immunology is the application of mathematical modeling to diverse aspects of immunology ranging from T cell selection in the Thymus to the epidemiology of vaccination. Immunoinformatics, the application of computational informatics to the study of immunological macromolecules, address important questions in immunobiology and vaccinology. Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) is an area of computer science which uses ideas and concepts from immunology to guide and inspire the development of new algorithms and architectures.
These three different disciplines-theoretical immunology, immunoinformatics and AIS are now poised to engineer a paradigm shift from hypothesis- to data-driven research, with new understanding emerging from the analysis of complex datasets. in silico immunology will summarize these emergent disciplines and, while focusing on cutting edge developments, will address the issue of synergy as it shows how these three are set to transform immunological science and the future of health care.
See it on-line using the doi link 10.1007/978-0-387-39241-7
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Overview: Over the past few decades there has been a growing interest in the use of biology as a source of inspiration for solving computational problems. This area of research is often referred to as Biologically Inspired Computing. The motivation of this field is primarily to extract useful metaphors from natural biological systems, in order to create effective computational solutions to complex problems in a wide range of domain areas. The more notable developments have been the neural networks inspired by the working of the brain, and the evolutionary algorithms inspired by neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.
More recently however, there has been a growing interest in the use of the biological immune system as a source of inspiration to the development of these computational systems. The immune system contains many useful information-processing abilities, including pattern recognition, learning, memory and inherent distributed parallel processing. For these and other reasons, the immune system has received a significant amount of interest to use as a metaphor within computing. This emerging field of research is known as Artificial Immune Systems (AIS).
Essentially, AIS are the use of immune system components and processes as inspiration to construct computational systems. AIS is very much an emerging area of biologically inspired computation and has received a significant amount of interest from researchers and industrial sponsors in recent years. Applications of AIS include such areas as machine learning, fault diagnosis, computer security, scheduling, virus detection, and optimisation. The field of AIS is showing great promise of being a powerful computing paradigm and therefore the writing of this book is very timely.
The book will present a general introduction to the field of immunology, stressing the key areas that are currently used within the field of AIS. A framework for engineering AIS is then introduced to the reader, followed by an up to-date review of the state of the art in AIS, in then light of that framework. It is hoped that through these initial chapters the reader will become aware of the powerful metaphor of the immune system and be left with a concrete set of ideas of how to create their own AIS. The book then goes onto describing the natural immune system in context with other biological systems and explores interaction between those systems. This will allow the reader to develop an understanding and appreciation for the richness of biology and its possible inspiration. This is then followed by a discussion of the field of AIS in relation to other computational intelligence paradigms. It is hoped that this chapter will allow the reader to become familiar with other techniques and understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each and where the use of each (including AIS) would be appropriate.
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Current Research
My work cuts across many areas, but most of my work revolves around immunology, either developing computational models of immune function (computational immunology), or fault-tolerance achieved via bio-inspired engineering with a focus on the immune system (immuno-engineering) In terms of applications, I focus mainly on swarm robotic systems as a platform for testing our ideas. My wider interests are in modelling and simulation of complex systems.
Below is a current list of people, that in one way or another, work with me.
Computational Immunology
Complex Systems
Bio-Inspired Engineering
PhD students writing up
Submitted
- The general area of Artificial Immune Systems: applications and theory;
- Integration of natural and artificial immune, neural and endocrine systems;
- Immunological modelling;
- Immune inspired fault tolerance;
- Long-term autonomy in robotic systems;
- Pervasive adaptive systems
- Other natural computation areas such as particle swarms, artificial life and evolutionary systems.
- If you are not sure if you are ready for a PhD quite yet, think about a taught MSc in Natural Computation. See the website for more information.
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Publications
For my full list of published papers (most with PDF's) see here.
Papers Recently Submitted
Journal Papers
Conference Papers
Papers in Preperation
Journal Papers
Book Chapters
Conference Papers
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Teaching
In Computer Science I currently teach on the following courses:
In Electronics
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Admin
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Misc.