ANTIFRAGILE 2015 - 2nd International Workshop on Computational Antifragility and Antifragile Engineering

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”. Recent studies of Professor N. Taleb introduced the concept of antifragility. Antifragility goes one step further. Antifragile systems are those resilient systems that are open to their own system-environment fit; that are able to exercise auto-predictive behaviors; and thus develop wisdom as a result of matches between available strategies and obtained results. 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.
Building atop the very positive response of last year, this second edition of ANTIFRAGILE aims to further enhance the awareness of the above challenges and to continue the initiated discussionon how computer and software engineering may address them. As a design aspect cross-cutting through all system and communication layers, antifragile engineering calls for 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 computational 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;
Verification and validation of resilience and antifragility;
Antifragile and resilient services.
ANTIFRAGILE is co-located with the 6th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, June 2 - 5, 2015, London, UK (http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-15/). ANTIFRAGILE is likely to take place on June 3 (though this has not been confirmed yet.)
All ANT-2015 accepted papers (thus including the ANTIFRAGILE 2015 papers) will be published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science series on-line. Procedia Computer Sciences is hosted on www.Elsevier.com and on Elsevier content platform ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com), and will be freely available worldwide. All papers in Procedia will be indexed by Scopus (www.scopus.com) and by Thomson Reuters' Conference Proceeding Citation Index http://thomsonreuters.com/conference-proceedings-c.... The papers will contain linked references, XML versions and citable DOI numbers. You will be able to provide a hyperlink to all delegates and direct your conference website visitors to your proceedings. All accepted papers will also be indexed in DBLP (http://dblp.uni-trier.de/). Selected papers will be invited for publication in special issues of international journals.