ANTIFRAGILE 2014 - 1st International Workshop "From Dependable to Resilient, from Resilient to Antifragile Ambients and Systems"

1st International Workshop
“From Dependable to Resilient, from Resilient to Antifragile
Ambients and Systems”
As well-known, dependability refers to a system’s trustworthiness and measures several aspects of the quality of its services ? for instance how reliable, available, safe, or maintainable those services are. Resilience differs from dependability in that it focuses on the system itself rather that its services; it implies that the system when subjected to faults and changes 1) will continue distributing its services 2) without losing its peculiar traits, its identity: the system will “stay the same”. Antifragility goes one step further and suggests that certain systems could actually “get better”, namely improve their system-environment fit, when subjected (to some system-specific extent) to faults and changes. Recent studies of Professor N. Taleb introduced the concept of antifragility and provided a characterization of the behaviors enacted by antifragile systems. The engineering of antifragile computer-based systems is a challenge that, once met, would allow systems and ambients to self-evolve and self-improve by learning from accidents and mistakes in a way not dissimilar to that of human beings. Learning how to design and craft antifragile systems is an extraordinary challenge whose tackling is likely to reverberate on many a computer engineering field. New methods, programming languages, even custom platforms will have to be designed. The expected returns are extraordinary as well: antifragile computer engineering promises to enable realizing truly autonomic systems and ambients able to meta-adapt to changing circumstances; to self-adjust to dynamically changing environments and ambients; to self-organize so as to track dynamically and proactively optimal strategies to sustain scalability, high-performance, and energy efficiency; to personalize their aspects and behaviors after each and every user. And to learn how to get better while doing it.
The ambition and mission of ANTIFRAGILE is to enhance the awareness of the above challenges and to begin a discussion on how computer and software engineering may address them. As a design aspect cross-cutting through all system and communication layers, antifragile engineering will require multi-disciplinary visions and approaches able to bridge the gaps between “distant” research communities so as to
propose novel solutions to design and develop antifragile systems and ambients;
devise conceptual models and paradigms for antifragility;
provide analytical and simulation models and tools to measure systems ability to withstand faults, adjust to new environments, and enhance their resilience in the process;
foster the exchange of ideas and lively discussions able to drive future research and development efforts in the area.
The main topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:
Conceptual frameworks for antifragile systems, ambients, and behaviours;
Dependability, resilience, and antifragile requirements and open issues;
Design principles, models, and techniques for realizing antifragile systems and behaviours;
Frameworks and techniques enabling resilient and antifragile applications;
Antifragile human-machine interaction;
End-to-end approaches towards antifragile services;
Autonomic antifragile behaviours;
Middleware architectures and mechanisms for resilience and antifragility;
Theoretical foundation of resilient and antifragile behaviours;
Formal modeling of resilience and antifragility;
Programming language support for resilience and antifragility;
Machine learning as a foundation of resilient and antifragile architectures;
Antifragility and resiliency against malicious attacks;
Antifragility and the Cloud;
Service Level Agreements for Antifragility;
Antifragile and resilient services.
ANTIFRAGILE is co-located with the 5th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, June 2 - 5, 2014, Hasselt, Belgium (http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-14/).
For more information please contact Vincenzo De Florio (vincenzo.deflorio-AT-uantwerpen.be)