TSOS 2011 - 2nd Workshop on Trustworthy Self-Organizing Systems

Full-day Workshop at the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO 2011) in Ann Arbor, MI, USA

The issues of trust and reputation in multi-agent systems have received a lot of attention. Also, formal methods to guarantee functional correctness, safety, and security as well as techniques to ensure reliability in distributed, self-organizing systems have been investigated by diverse research groups from different communities. Furthermore, the role of humans as the users of self-organizing and self-adaptive systems and the usability of such systems has been subject of research. These different facets of the same problem have so far been considered only separately and many have regarded security, safety, etc. as complementary to trust.

However, the overall trustworthiness of a self-organizing system is connected to all the aforementioned properties and should be regarded holistically. The facets of trust qualify the relationships between the components of the system and between the user and the system. Functional correctness, security, safety, and reliability are facets that have to be ensured for the system's components as well as for the system as a whole. The classical notions of trust and reputation in MAS also apply to this relationship between system components. The relationship between the system and the user is influenced by the transparency and consistency of the system towards the user and most importantly by its usability, i.e., the way the user is informed about self-organising processes and allowed to interact with the system.

The nature of self-organising systems demands that issues of trust and its different facets become a primary concern. Many interacting adaptive entities, emergent behavior, and a highly dynamic environment prompt the designer of such a system to consider trust in every aspect of the engineering process. Not only will a thorough consideration of trust yield a more robust and more secure system, but the incorporation of trust can also lead to gains with regard to performance and ease of use. In domains in which systems have to be certified, the formal treatment of trust and its facets in self-organizing systems is a necessity.

The workshop will provide an open stage for discussions about the different facets of trust in self-organizing systems, how every single one of them can be fostered, and how they relate. Further examples for topics of interest are:
* Metrics of trust and specialized metrics for single trust facets
* Policies and their influence on trustworthiness
* Trust management systems for self-organizing systems
* Formal methods to analyze, prove, or measure aspects of trust
* Trust and reputation in multi-agent systems and systems of systems
* Adaptive user interfaces
* Visualization, transparency and controllability of self-organization processes
* Measuring and evaluating user trust in self-organizing systems
* Engineering of trustworthy self-organizing systems
* Evaluations of the effects of trust in self-organizing systems
* Using trust to deal with uncertainty
* Trust and game theory

AIM OF THE WORKSHOP
The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers of different communities like Multi-Agent Systems, Autonomic Computing, Organic Computing, Trust Management, Security, and Distributed Systems to discuss ? based on high quality research papers and position papers ? the different aspects of trust in self-adaptive and self-organizing systems and to create a sense of the overarching concepts and problems that are associated with a holistic view on trustworthy self-organizing systems. The workshop is an opportunity to promote this view and to engage in discussions about the interconnectedness of the different facets and their interplay in self-organizing systems.

AUDIENCE
The workshop is aimed at researchers that have been investigating one of the trust aspects (functional correctness, safety, security, reliability, credibility, usability) in self-organizing systems or that have been looking into trust and its different shapes. We explicitly encourage participation of researchers from different communities within computer science. The workshop will be set in an informal and cooperative atmosphere with ample time allotted to discussions.

http://tsos.isse.de