Stephanie Forrest presented on complexity, privacy and the pandemic to the Applied Complexity Network, a collaboration group of firms, governments and nonprofit organizations facilitated by the Santa Fe Institute.
In this July talk, Forrest, who is the director of the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society, discussed how biological mechanisms can inspire and inform computer algorithms that help us address privacy concerns, such as those that arise in a pandemic.
Specifically, Forrest described an algorithm inspired by negative selection in the adaptive immune system, which supports large-scale data collection while preserving individual privacy.