Research by Dr. Fernando Esponda, director of ITAM’s master’s program in computer science, was recently publicized in Stanford University’s on-line news service. He collaborated with Stanford biology researcher Dr. Deborah Gordon on a study, “Distributed Nestmate Recognition in Ants,” which appeared in the journal The Royal Society Proceedings B. The work suggests that the human immune system and the defense system of ants to combat intruders both employ a similar strategy. In addition, they suggest that such a strategy could be used to create better filters in e-mail systems to detect spam.

The Stanford News article can be accessed here: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/april/immune-system-ants-040115.html