ICARIS 2006 is the fifth instance of a series of conferences dedicated to the comprehension and the exploitation of immunological principles through their translation into computational terms. All scientific disciplines carrying a name that begins with “artificial” (followed by “life,” “reality,” “intelligence” or “- munesystem”) aresimilarlysuffering 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 different kinds of scientists and at stimul- ing different kinds of scientific 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 offered 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 inflnitely iterated in time and space.