ICARIS 2006 is the ?fth instance of a series of conferences dedicated to the comprehension and the exploitation of immunological principles through their translation into computational terms. All scienti c disciplines carrying a name that begins with arti cial (followed by life, reality, intelligence or - munesystem) aresimilarlysu ering froma veryambiguousidentity.Their axis of research tries to stabilize an on-going identity somewhere in the crossroad of engineering (building useful artifacts), natural sciences (biologyor psychology improving the comprehension and prediction of natural phenomena) and t- oretical computer sciences (developing and mastering the algorithmic world). Accordingly and depending on which of these perspectives receives more s- port, they attempt at attracting di erent kinds of scientists and at stimul- ing di erent kinds of scienti c attitudes. For many years and in the previous ICARIS conferences, it was clearly the engineering perspective that was the most represented and prevailed through the publications. Indeed, since the o- gin of engineering and technology, nature has o ered a reserve of inexhaustible inspirations which have stimulated the development of useful artifacts for man. Biology has led to the development of new computer tools, such as genetic - gorithms, Boolean and neural networks, robots learning by experience, cellular machines and others that create a new vision of IT for the engineer: parallel, ?exible andautonomous.Inthis type of informatics,complexproblemsareta- led with the aid of simple mechanisms, but in nitely iterated in time and space.
