issue 2 Autumn 2011 newsletter of the awareness proactive initiative www.aware-project.eu
awareness newsletter
Contents: Calls for magazine articles and Research Agenda contributions SASO workshop, USA Research Exchange Funding Virtual Lecture Series
Awareness Projects: ASCENS Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles EPICS Engineering Proprioception in Computing Systems RECOGNITION Relevance and cognition for self-awareness in a content-centric Internet SAPERE Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems and also supporting:
CoCoRo Collective Cognitive Robots SYMBRION Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms
Awareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7 Future and Emerging Technologies
Editorial This newsletter marks the end of the first year of the Awareness proactive initiative, keeping you informed of the many activities and events that the Coordination Action team have been planning over the past 12 months. The newsletter highlights some of the things that are already in place to support your research in the area of self-aware autonomic systems, as well as looking forward to some upcoming events happening over the coming months. The Awareness website is fully functional, with a wealth of resources now available, from video interviews with leading researchers, comments on relevant papers, to information on how you can obtain funding to help with your research. The newsletter gives some insight into some exciting events we have planned over the next few months. In October, we are pleased to be hosting a workshop at SASO in Ann Arbor, with seven accepted papers, and an invited speaker, Dr Niranjan Suri from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Download our mobile app, see page 6 for more details! October also sees the start of our online lecture series: eight leading researchers will be delivering online lectures over a period of eight weeks, and making themselves available for online chat and discussion immediately following their lecture. Don’t forget to tune in on Fridays at 3pm CET, starting on October 14th. More details of all the events that Awareness are running can be found on our website – don’t forget to check regularly for the latest information. You can also contribute to Awareness! Enjoy writing for a public audience – have you considered contributing to the Awareness Magazine? Leave a comment on any of the articles on the website, or tweet your news or relevant information using the hashtag #euawareness. Please don’t hesitate to contact any of the Awareness team if you would like our support in either organising or promoting an event or in any other aspect that might help in your research. Suggestions always welcome!
Awareness PhD Forum to be held at Bionetics 2011
Doing a PhD related to bio-inspired methods of creating self-aware systems? A PhD doctoral forum will be held at Bionetics 2011, where students working in fields related to understanding the fundamental principles and design strategies in biological systems, and leveraging that understanding to build bio-inspired systems can discuss their work in a supportive forum. Students’ papers will be published in the conference proceedings by Springer (Lecture Notes of ICST). The forum will include a panel session where students can question experienced researchers on doing a PhD in this area, and an invited talk by Prof. Dr. A.E. Eiben from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
See the Awareness website or www.bionetics.org for further details.
www.aware-project.eu
Awareness 101
101 Challenges for Self-Aware Autonomic Systems The big grand challenges in science research can often be broken down into many smaller challenges. The Awareness project is trying to identify 101 key challenges that can contribute to the long-term advancement of research in the field of self-aware autonomic systems.
Awareness supports researchers that share an interest in creating autonomic systems which are self-aware, creating systems which benefit from lower management costs due to the ability to adapt to changing environments and patterns of use, and are more efficient in terms of resource usage.
We need your help!
We welcome researchers from a broad range of disciplines that can contribute to this research. You can follow our work by signing up to the mailing list on our website which will keep you to date with funding opportunities, calls for participation, Awareness news, etc, all from a single source.
We are inviting researchers to tell us what they see as key issues, and identify critical areas for future research, in both the short and long term. Do you have a radically new vision for the area? Can you identify new challenges that will drive this important research discipline forward? Visit our website and post your challenge or tweet your challenge using the hashtag #awareness101
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www.aware-project.eu
Awareness Inter-Project meeting Topic: “How can we have confidence that systems which are self-aware and adapt according to their beliefs actually do what expect them to?” 23rd / 24th January 2012 Universitá di Bologna, Italy
Who is this meeting for? We welcome as many people from each of the Awareness supported projects as possible – in particular, we encourage project coordinators to send research staff/students who are employed on the projects developing and implementing ideas in addition to project and workpackage coordinators. The more people that attend, the more we expect each project to get out of the day.
Format Each project should present a short talk (or set of talks) which cover: Brief reminder to all of the goals of the project Particular challenges in their project with respect to the topic question above Proposal/suggestions for measuring confidence within their own project Particular topics on which they may like to receive advice/expertise from the other projects
Call for magazine articles The EC FP7 FET Proactive Initiative on Self-awareness in Autonomic Systems (AWARENESS) addresses the challenge of designing, developing and deploying computing and communication systems which are able to adapt and optimise their overall performance according to multiple contextual factors, including changing environmental conditions and user performance and preferences. As part of the Awareness Coordination Action for this Initiative, we are publishing an online magazine that gives a broader perspective on Awareness-related research. The magazine publishes short (800-1000 word) articles on high-level, informative descriptions of projects, research programmes, initiatives and latebreaking results, and in particular focusing on their impact on society, for example with respect to usability, sustainability, climate change, culture, and so on. (For
It is intended that the workshop will break out into a number of discussion groups following the presentation in which particular challenges that arise from the presentations will be addressed A wiki is now available for the inter-project meeting. Please visit the page for travel/accommodation information, and to begin contributing to the premeeting discussion. Upload your slides, and add a post with and proposals or suggestions you have for measuring confidence or post a list of topics you would like to see discussed at the meeting. http://awarenessinterproject.wikispaces.com
Rationale Although each project as its own goals and objectives, it is likely that each project faces some common challenges. The workshop aims to identify areas of common interest, and common challenges, and look at ways in which expertise can be shared to address these problems. If appropriate, Awareness can organise further ‘expert’ workshops on specific topics to enable projects to address their future needs.
illustration, see the earlier PerAda magazine at www. perada-magazine.eu) The magazine editors are therefore commissioning articles describing embedded autonomic computer systems which are ‘aware’ of a socio-technical aspect and/or have a socio-technical impact: by takingmeasurements of both environment and the users (e.g. their physiological or emotional state); by representing, understanding and reasoning with social, legal, or organisational constructs; by collaborative decision-support which has an impact on human behaviour and attitudes; and/or by making any or all these conceptual features perceptually prominent through advanced visualisation techniques. We would kindly like to invite you to submit an article describing your ideas and research on awareness. Please contact Jeremy Pitt for more information: j.pitt@imperial.ac.uk
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Awareness Virtual Lecture Series
Roger Whitaker
Learn about Self-Awareness directly from the experts! This lecture series will take place online, on the Awareness project website. The series consists of of eight web lectures by expert scientists in the domain and will be broadcast on Fridays at 3pm CET (Central European Time) starting on October 14th 2011. Lecturers will be available for one hour during and after the 20-25 minute lecture for answering questions via a chat/comments facility. Aimed at graduate/PhD students, and researchers from different disciplines, this virtual lecture series will cover theoretical, practical, and technological issues related to autonomic self-awareness and its various facets. These include self-organising and self-adaptive systems, pervasive computing technologies as well as security and socio/economic aspects of autonomic computing. Managing systems is increasingly becoming more challenging. Different devices, heterogeneous platforms and different programming models can now be connected into a single system, and devices are increasing in technological complexity. These factors not only make systems unmanageable but lead to systems exhibiting unplanned behaviours. To counter this, systems must become self-aware, exhibiting context-awareness at an internal and external level. More information: www.aware-project. eu/2011/08/03/virtual-lecture-series
REGISTRATION
Jeremy Pitt
LECTURES Adaptation and Awareness in Robot Ensembles Matthias Hölzl (Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich) Languages and Models for Context Aware Programming Rocco Di Nicola | Rosario Pugliese (Università di Firenze) Marco Platzner (University of Paderborn) Relevance and cognition for self-awareness in a content-centric Internet Roger Whitaker (Cardiff University) Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems Franco Zambonelli (University of Modena and Reggio) Coordination Models From Parallel Computing To Self-Organising Systems Andrea Omicini (Alma Mater Studiorum-Università di Bologna) Self-Organising Institutions Jeremy Pitt (Imperial College London) Self-awareness at the Hardware/Software Interface Marco Platzner (University of Paderborn) Xin Yao (University of Birmingham)
All web lectures will be freely available on the Awareness Initiaitive website and you do not need to register in order to view these lectures. We do kindly ask you to register if you want to participate in commenting and chat. We need to know the number of participants for technical reasons, and we aim for allowing as many participants as possible. The lectures take place on Fridays at 3pm CET (Central European Time) starting on October 14th 2011. You can register on http://bit.ly/awass2011.
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An interview with:
Giacomo Cabri tasked with the creation of a Research Agenda for the Awareness project
Giacomo is from the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia where he is a member of the AgentGroup. His research interests lie in the area of software agents and distributed systems. As a partner in the Awareness team, his role is to identify a research agenda for the field of Self-Aware systems, working closely with the community to identify research problems, key knowledge gaps and strategic developmental areas for problems related to self-aware and autonomic system. In addition, he is investigating ways in which the existing community can be expanded through interdisciplinary research. Key to the success of this endeavour will be promoting consultation and exchange of ideas from key researchers active in FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) research, particularly in the area of Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems, and in identifying potential synergies and complementarities within the research groups across FET.
The role of a CA We asked Giacomo what he sees as the role of the coordination action within a proactive initiative. He told us, “a key role of the coordination action is to provide information which can be shared and exploited”. Giacomo went onto say, “two aspects of this are very important… the form of the information and the content of the information”. In relation to the first aspect, Giacomo identified the need to for information to be readily accessible, quick to find and easily searchable, and described the need for the CA to find novel and innovative ways of disseminating and sharing information between interested researchers. email: giacomo.cabri@unimore.it www.aware-project.eu/research-agenda
He goes onto to highlight a very important role for the CA in relation to information content: “there are many challenges and issues that arise in the study of self-aware systems that are common across all of the projects, and therefore it is critical for the CA to provide opportunities in which researchers can join together, and discuss common problems, for example through workshops and joint discussions”. In addition, the CA should provide information on future research initiative and topics of interest to the community. Videos and Keywords Giacomo has already made good progress in developing a collection of short videos which capture the opinions of experts from around the world on future research directions for the field. You can find these videos on our website, under Research Agenda. Join the discussion by commenting online on any video, or if you would like to offer your own opinion on camera, please contact Giacomo directly. We are also developing a keyword cloud - again, please submit any keywords you think are relevant via the comment boxes on the website. See also on page 2 of this newsletter, where we explain the concept of Awareness 101, a list of the top challenges facing researchers.
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saso
1st Awareness Workshop @ SASO 2011, Ann Arbor, USA Challenges in achieving self-awareness in autonomous systems www.saso-conference.org Fifth IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: 7th October 2011 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 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. However, enabling self- awareness in a system raises many challenges, which will require a multidisciplinary approach to overcome them. This workshop brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to articulate the main challenges and propose methods of addressing them.
SASO Workshop Twoppy App View the Awareness Twoppy App that includes; the SASO programme (including abstracts), invited speaker biographies, google maps of the conference venue and information about the conference: http://m.twoppy.com/AWAREatSASO
You can also access the SASO App via the QR Tag.
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Awareness Workshop Programme October 7th 2011 Invited Speaker: Dr Niranjan Suri, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognitition. Title: An Agile Computing Approach to Engineering Adaptive and Resilient Computing Systems Peter Lewis, Arjun Chandra, Shaun Parsons, Edward Robinson, Kyrre Glette, Rami Bahsoon, Jim Torresen and Xin Yao Title: A Survey of Self-Awareness and Its Application in Computing Systems Franco Zambonelli, Nicola Bicocchi, Giacomo Cabri, Letizia Leonardi and Mariachiara Puviani Title: On Self-Adaptation, Self-Expression, and Self-awareness in Autonomic Service Component Ensembles Mirko Viroli, Elena Nardini, Gabriella Castelli, Marco Mamei and Franco Zambonelli Title: A Coordination Approach to Adaptive Pervasive Service Ecosystems Thomas Schmickl, Ronald Thenius, Christoph Möslinger, Jon Timmis, Andy Tyrrell, Mark Read, James Hilder, Jose Halloy, Alexandre Campo, Cesare Stefanini, Luigi Manfredi, Tobias Dipper, Donny Sutantyo and Serge Kernbach Title: CoCoRo – The Self-aware Underwater Swarm Julia Schaumeier and Jeremy Pitt Title: From Self-Organising Institutions to Self-Aware Institutions: Preliminary Results and Prospective Challenges Emil Vassev and Mike Hinchey Title: Self-Awareness in Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm Missions David Musliner, Jeffrey Rye, Dan Thomsen, David Mcdonald, Mark Burstein and Paul Robertson Title: Fuzzbuster: Towards Adaptive Immunity from Cyber Threats
Organising Committee Emma Hart, Edinburgh Napier University, UK Martijn Schut, Vrieje Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College London, UK Giacomo Cabri, University di Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
The Awareness Coordination Action project provides a collaborative environment for research into self-awareness in autonomic systems, supporting the network of researchers and engaging with a wider scientific and technological audience. Awareness reaches out to a diverse, multidisciplinary scientific community that researches self-aware autonomic systems. As technology continues to rapidly advance, the management of systems becomes more difficult, and they must increasingly be able to manage themselves implying that they must 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. The FET funded projects that we support are:
ASCENS: Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles
CoCoRo:
Collective Cognitive Robots
EPICS:
Engineering Proprioception in Computing Systems
RECOGNITION:
Relevance and cognition for self-awareness in a content-centric Internet
SAPERE:
Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems
SYMBRION:
Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms (funded by PerAda)
What the Awareness project does: Organises summer schools and virtual lectures to train the researchers of the future and for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Arranges workshops relevant to the self-awareness community of researchers. Presents public showcase events. Creates widely accessible publications, and training materials for use in teaching and outreach work. Provides funding for research exchanges. Disseminates the research output of our supported FET funded projects. Shapes the Reseach Agenda of the future: this will gather opinion relating to the Awareness Initiative from expert researchers and scientists.
www.aware-project.eu Awareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7 2010-2013
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Funding for Awareness Research Exchanges
Deadlines: 30th September/December/March/June 2011‐2013
Working in the field of Self-Aware Autonomic Systems? •
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Are you a researcher looking to collaborate with another researcher from another institution? Do you want to kick-start a collaboration with someone from a different discipline? Have you some experience to share with companies or SMEs? Would you like to invite an expert from another institution to work with you, or explain their ideas to your own research group? Would your Awareness project benefit by sharing ideas with other FET-funded projects?
Awareness is the European Commission’s FET Proactive Initiative on Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems. The coordination action funds research exchanges to encourage interaction between institutions, organisations, industry and SMEs. We can “match-fund” travel and accommodation costs for researchers engaged in research related to selfawareness in autonomic systems, especially if they aim to learn from different disciplines or transfer knowledge between academia and industry. This means we can pay up to 50% of the costs as long as the host organisation or the individual visiting researcher pays the balance of costs. Full details including an FAQ and application form are available on the Awareness website www.aware-project.eu
Awareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7