AWARE 2011 - AWARE Workshop: Challenges in achieving self-awareness in autonomous systems (AWARE)

As technology continues to rapidly advance, the management of systems becomes increasingly more difficult: systems are likely to be composed of heterogeneous devices, the topology of the system can dynamically change to device mobility; components of the system are probably programmed with different models, and emergent behaviours can occur, not previously pre-programmed into the system. On top of this, users of systems expect 24/7 reliability, high levels of security, and privacy of their data. The scale of the challenge imposed by the necessity to manage these systems is such that control can no longer be devolved to a human. Systems must be able to manage themselves - this implies that they must therefore be self-aware. Achieving truly self-aware systems is of interest to almost everyone in society as it will have technical, social and economic impacts. Enabling self-awareness however in a system is considerable challenge for the engineer and computer scientist. The goal of the workshop is to identify key challenges involved in creating self-aware systems which are capable of autonomous management, and consider methods by which these challenges can be addressed. The workshop specifically targets an interdisciplinary community (for example biology, autonomic systems, global computing, social science, software engineering) in the hope that collective expertise from a range of domains can be leveraged to drive forward research in the area.