The germinal centre artificial immune system

This thesis deals with the development and evaluation of the Germinal centre artificial immune system (GC-AIS) which is a novel artificial immune system based on advancements in the understanding of the germinal centre reaction of the immune system. The key research questions addressed in this thesis are: can an artificial immune system (AIS) be designed by taking inspiration from recent developments in immunology to tackle multi-objective optimisation problems? How can we incorporate desirable features of the immune system like diversity, parallelism and memory into this proposed AIS? How does the proposed AIS compare with other state of the art techniques in the field of multi-objective optimisation problems? How can we incorporate the learning component of the immune system into the algorithm and investigate the usefulness of memory in dynamic scenarios? The main contributions of the thesis are: • Understanding the behaviour and performance of the proposed GC-AIS on multiobjective optimisation problems and explaining its benefits and drawbacks, by comparing it with simple baseline and state of the art algorithms. • Improving the performance of GC-AIS by incorporating a popular technique from multi-objective optimisation. By overcoming its weaknesses the capability of the improved variant to compete with the state of the art algorithms is evaluated. • Answering key questions on the usefulness of incorporating memory in GC-AIS in a dynamic scenario

Machine learning for human cancer research

Eiben, A.E. [Promotor]Vaart, A.W. van der [Promotor]Marchiori, E. [Copromotor

Algorithms and Methods for Designing and Scheduling Smart Manufacturing Systems

This book, as a Special Issue, is a collection of some of the latest advancements in designing and scheduling smart manufacturing systems. The smart manufacturing concept is undoubtedly considered a paradigm shift in manufacturing technology. This conception is part of the Industry 4.0 strategy, or equivalent national policies, and brings new challenges and opportunities for the companies that are facing tough global competition. Industry 4.0 should not only be perceived as one of many possible strategies for manufacturing companies, but also as an important practice within organizations. The main focus of Industry 4.0 implementation is to combine production, information technology, and the internet. The presented Special Issue consists of ten research papers presenting the latest works in the field. The papers include various topics, which can be divided into three categories—(i) designing and scheduling manufacturing systems (seven articles), (ii) machining process optimization (two articles), (iii) digital insurance platforms (one article). Most of the mentioned research problems are solved in these articles by using genetic algorithms, the harmony search algorithm, the hybrid bat algorithm, the combined whale optimization algorithm, and other optimization and decision-making methods. The above-mentioned groups of articles are briefly described in this order in this book

Special oils for halal and safe cosmetics

Three types of non conventional oils were extracted, analyzed and tested for toxicity. Date palm kernel oil (DPKO), mango kernel oil (MKO) and Ramputan seed oil (RSO). Oil content for tow cultivars of dates Deglect Noor and Moshkan was 9.67% and 7.30%, respectively. The three varieties of mango were found to contain about 10% oil in average. The red yellow types of Ramputan were found to have 11 and 14% oil, respectively. The phenolic compounds in DPKO, MKO and RSO were 0.98, 0.88 and 0.78 mg/ml Gallic acid equivalent, respectively. Oils were analyzed for their fatty acid composition and they are rich in oleic acid C18:1 and showed the presence of (dodecanoic acid) lauric acid C12:0, which reported to appear some antimicrobial activities. All extracted oils, DPKO, MKO and RSO showed no toxic effect using prime shrimp bioassay. Since these oils are stable, melt at skin temperature, have good lubricity and are great source of essential fatty acids; they could be used as highly moisturizing, cleansing and nourishing oils because of high oleic acid content. They are ideal for use in such halal cosmetics such as Science, Engineering and Technology 75 skin care and massage, hair-care, soap and shampoo products

Version 14.1 Magic Strategies: the basic biology of multilevel, multiscale, health intervention

Abstract A survey of the cultural psychology and related literatures suggests that Western biomedicine's fascination with atomistic, individual-oriented, interventions is a cultural artifact that may have little consonance with complex, subtle, multiscale, multilevel, social, ecological, or biological realities. Other cultural traditions may, in fact, view atomistic strategies as inherently unreal. A contrary perspective suggests that the most effective medical or public health interventions must be analogously patterned across scale and level of organization: 'magic strategies' will almost always be synergistically -and often emergently -more effective than 'magic bullets'. The result can be formally derived in a relatively straightforward manner using an adaptation of the Black-Scholes econometric model, applied here to the metabolic cost of bioregulation under uncertainty. Multifactorial interventions focused at the human 'keystone' ecosystem level of mesoscale social and geographic groupings may be particularly effective