CogMan 2015 - 1st Workshop on Cognitive Network & Service Management (CogMan)

The First IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Cognitive Network and Service Management will be held in conjunction with IFIP/IEEE IM 2015 in Ottawa, Canada, from May 11-15, 2015. The scope of the CogMan workshop is to bring together experts in network and service management, on the one hand, with scientist in cognitive control and artificial intelligence, on the other hand. CogMan is a follow up of the DamNet Workshop on Data Mining in Networks, which has been run for four years at IEEE ICDM (the IEEE flagship conference on Data Mining). However, while DamNet aimed at bringing the broader network science (beyond computer networks) into the data mining community, CogMan aims at bringing experts in computational intelligence into the particular area of Integrated Networks and Services.
Modern communication networks have reached a level of scale, dynamics and complexity that demands for a dynamic management that is able to (i) adapt in the case of unforeseen scenarios and (ii) proactively undertake management decisions when certain trends can be witnessed. Cognitive approaches such as artificial intelligence and machine learning have long been seen as an ideal candidate for reaching this dynamic management. Network management paradigms such as autonomic network management, bio-inspired network management, etc. all rely to some extent on techniques. Within network management, cognition and computational intelligence have a large application domain.
While of vital importance and receiving a great attention, cognitive techniques are not yet widely spread in todays network management solutions. This is because their deployment introduces major challenges for network and service management. First, there is an issue in guaranteeing robustness within the network and/or managed system. Cognitive techniques often operate as a black box and/or require a learning phase that may consist of exploring random actions. As this has a direct impact on the network’s and/or system’s performance, there is a need of developing robust cognitive management techniques. Second, there is a vast spectrum of cognitive techniques that can be applied. Many network and service management solutions only apply basic versions of well-known cognitive technologies, while ignoring the state-of-the-art in cognitive control. Third, applying cognitive control to multi-agent settings (which is often necessary in a network or distributed system) is still a major challenge.
CogMan 2015 aims at providing an international forum for researchers addressing the above challenges. It will focus on applying cognitive methods and technologies to network and service management, with particular attention to the following topical issues:
Using cognition for achieving self-* properties in network and service management
State-of-the-art applications of cognition for network and service management
Specific contributions to the field of cognition for improving network and service management techniques
Achieving robustness while using cognitive technologies for network and service management
Multi-agent cognitive technologies
Achieving cognitive network service management in competitive environments