issue 7 Winter 2012/13 newsletter of the awareness proactive initiative www.aware-project.eu
awareness newsletter
News from the Awareness Co-ordination Action project
Awareness Summer School Lucca, Italy FP7 FET 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
Also supporting: SYMBRION Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms (funded by PerAda) CoCoRo Collective Cognitive Robots (funded by FP7 ICT) Organic Computing Initiative (funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) Awareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7
editorial As we move into the final phase of AWARENESS, no doubt everyone involved in the funded projects are as busy as the Coordination Team here. This edition of the newsletter highlights some of our recent activities while drawing your attention to many things that will be happening over the next few months. Don’t forget to book a place for yourself or your students at the 2nd AWASS summer school which will be held in the beautiful city of Lucca in May. Just before that in April the University of Augsburg hosts the first Spring School on Trustworthy Self-Organising Systems. The Awareness team has been busy developing teaching material on Self-Aware Autonomic Systems – see inside the newsletter for information on how to access the material online. There are a few more months left in which you can benefit from AWARENESS funding to support research exchanges or multi-lateral workshops: read about some of the ones that have already happened and if you are inspired, get your applications in quickly! Wishing all project teams a productive final period – please feel free to contact the AWARENESS team if we can help support your final dissemination or public engagement efforts in any way
Research visit to Universität Augsburg Lehrstuhl für Organic Computing Supported by the Awareness project Andrea Guazzini, Department of Psychology, University of Florence recently completed a research visit to Universität Augsburg Lehrstuhl für Organic Computing. Andrea’s report, titled: A cognitive architecture of SelfAware Systems for Organic Computing applications, is available to download from the Awareness website: www. aware-project.eu/2012/andrea-guazzini-research-visit/
Acclaim for Franco Zambonelli 2
Awareness supports Research Exchanges We can “match-fund” travel and accommodation costs for researchers engaged in research related to self-awareness 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.
www.aware-project.eu/funding/
Franco Zambonelli of the ASCENS project has been recognised as an ACM Distinguished Scientist 2012. The Distinguished Member Grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field. Franco is based at the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Science Cafe @SASO 2012 Sixth IEEE International Conference on SelfAdaptive and Self Organizing Systems Lyon, France; 10-14 September 2012
The Computer After Me Around 50 attendees from the SASO workshops participated in the Awareness Science Cafe – a one hour informal and open discussion from 6 – 7pm with food and wine provided. Jeremy Pitt, of Imperial College, London, led a lively and illuminating discussion on the topic of ‘The Computer After Me’ – a complex future where ‘smart’ devices perhaps understand better what they are and what we want from them. Jeremy was interested in investigating 3 main themes:
Computer Consciousness Computer 2020 Computer-phobia To see a video of the event visit: http://www.awareproject.eu/2012/science-cafe-saso-2012-the-computerafter-me/
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The 2nd Awareness Summer School Lucca, Italy 24th – 30th June 2013
Aimed at graduate/PhD students, and researchers from different disciplines, this summer school will cover theoretical, practical, and technological issues related to autonomic self-awareness and its various facets. 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. The summer school activities will include:
As well as:
Lectures by well-known researchers:
4 case studies PhD Doctoral Forum PhD poster session Plenty of opportunity for mentoring activities Team presentations and feedback
Martin Wirsing, ASCENS project Title: Towards Systematically Engineering Ensemble
Peter Lewis, EPiCS project Title: Types of Computational Self-awareness and How We Might Implement Them
Registration
Title: Capturing the Immune System: From the wet-lab to the robot, building better quality immune-inspired engineering solutions
The registration fee includes: access to all summer school lectures and tutorials all presentation slides lunch and coffee breaks social events
RenĂŠ Doursat
PhD Forum
Title: Morphogenetic Engineering: Reconciling Architecture and Self-Organization Through Programmable Complex Systems
PhD students working in Awareness-related disciplines are invited to participate in a Doctoral Forum as part of the AWASS 2013, where they can present and discuss their work in a supportive environment, with other PhD students and experts from the field. This is a great opportunity to present your research with helpful feedback from the audience!
Mark Read, CoCoRo project
Alan Winfield (title to be announced)
For more details on the summer school and how to apply visit: http://www.aware-project.eu/2012/awass-2013-lucca-italy/
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First International Spring School on
Trustworthy Self-Organizing Systems University of Augsburg, Germany, April 8 – 12, 2013
About TSOS-SS The nature of self-organising systems demands that issues of trust and its different facets become a primary concern. Many interacting adaptive entities, emergent behavior, and a highly dynamic and open environment prompt the designer of such a system to consider trust in every aspect of the engineering process. Not only will a thorough consideration of trust yield a more robust and more secure system, but the incorporation of trust can also lead to gains with regard to performance and ease of use. In domains in which systems have to be certified, the formal treatment of trust and its facets in self-organising systems is a necessity. Furthermore, the role of humans as the users of self-organising and self-adaptive systems and the usability of such systems have to be a primary concern. The Spring School will give participants the chance to engage directly with renowned instructors from the field and learn about the state of the art in the design and analysis of trustworthy self-organising systems in focused lectures as well as gain hands-on experience during the workshops and assignments. The event brings together researchers from a number of fields, including privacy and trust, Organic Computing, and security and safety.
Spring School topics Topics of the Spring School include: Self-organisation in mission-critical systems, especially power management systems Social constructs in self-organising systems Trust as a measure of uncertainty Trust and reputation management in self-organising environments TSOS Spring School activities The TSOS Spring School provides an interactive and friendly environment for hands-on learning for master and Ph.D. students as well as early career researchers. A key part of the concept is the possibility to exchange ideas and engage in discussions with the instructors. Team assignments will give participants the opportunity to apply their knowledge and improve their practical skills.
Important Dates Early application deadline: March 1, 2013 Final application date: April 1, 2013 Presentations by renowned experts from the field Team assignments on different important topics in trustworthy self-organising systems Plenty of opportunities to engage the instructors Team presentations and feedback Instructors at the TSOS Spring School
Cristiano Castelfranchi Instititute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR)
Hartmut Schmeck Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Audun Jøsang University of Oslo and Queensland University of Technology
Wolfgang Reif Institute for Software & Systems Engineering, Augsburg University
Christian Müller-Schloer Institute for Systems Engineering, Leibniz Universität Hannover Participating in the TSOS Spring School Participation is free of charge! Participants only pay for travel and accomodation. Participation is limited to at most 40 students. More details: https://swt.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/ tsos/tsos-ss-2013/index.html
Sponsors
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Awareness Slides Factory 2012 Barcelona: September 24-26, 2012 One of the objectives of the Awareness CA is the production of training/teaching materials to be widely accessible to all related projects and the autonomic computing community. This meeting produced a collection of slides covering a wide range of subjects relevant to awareness in autonomic systems. Awareness is a nascent area with no consolidated body of knowledge. The Slides Factory event was the first attempt to build one.
Attendees: Giacomo Cabri, Rene Doursat, Gusz Eiben, Jose Luiz Fernandez Marquez, Jose Halloy, Mark Hoogendoorn, Peter Lewis, Jeremy Pitt, Mark Read, Alan Winfield, Martin Wirsing
The factory produced slides for three audiences:
1. Layman Seminar Download from: http://www.aware-project.eu/ awareness-training/awareness-slides-factory-2012/
Topics: Autonomic systems Self-* properties Bio- & socially-inspired systems
Outline: Autonomic computing definitions Self-* properties of autonomic systems (selfawareness, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-protection, self-healing) Applications Scientific and engineering challenges
2. Industry Training Event Training Event Programme: Self-awareness in autonomic systems: basic concepts, properties and examples Videos / demos
Topics: Autonomic systems Self-* properties Bio- & socially-inspired systems Existing technology (architectures, models, algorithms, tools) and their limitations Future developments Industry partners
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3. Academic Course Course Outline (per lecture): Introduction: principles, overview, characteristics and challenges of autonomic computing Complexity in autonomic computing Architecture, open standards, implementation considerations, enabling technology and development tools Machine learning and multiagent systems in the development of autonomic computing Biologically inspired computing (evolutionary algorithms, cellular automata, DNA computation, amorphous computing, etc) Algorithms and optimization (graph algorithms, combinatorial scientific computing, Monte-Carlo simulations, linear, nonlinear and discrete optimization, and others), and their use in autonomic computing Algorithms for cooperation and interaction among distributed and independent components Cloud computing fundamentals, technologies and applications Grid computing technologies in cloud computing Supervision approaches Security and trustworthiness in autonomic computing State-of-the-art of present technology in autonomic computing Ongoing projects – strengths and limitations
AWARENESS recently supported:
Multilateral Workshop on Computational Awareness and Active Participation in Autonomic Power Grids The Awareness project provided financial support to participants via its international collaboration programme to enable them to travel. The Workshop on Computational Awareness and Active Participation in Autonomic Power Grids brought together ten researchers from Imperial College London, University of Barcelona and the University of Strathclyde. The aim was to address fundamental issues in the application of computational awareness to the visualisation of complex domain data, according to the roles occupied by the user and subject to principles of common resource management. The target application was autonomic power grids, with the specific aim of leveraging demand-side management to increase consumer participation and enhance user engagement to promote sustainability. As well as offering some innovative insight into the application of computational awareness to active participation in SmartGrids, the workshop has consolidated and clarified research plans for several PhD students, and identified several pairwise opportunities for joint research, as well as a strategic vision which unifies the work of all three workshop partners.
Participants
The Awareness project welcomes proposals for running:
supported multi-lateral workshops for the Awareness Community For further information please contact: Emma Hart e.hart@napier.ac.uk
The workshop was attended by Ivana Kockar, Makis Karamanlis and Han Xu from the University of Strathclyde; Maite Lopez-Sanchez, Inma Rodriguez Santiago and Pablo Almajano from University of Barcelona; and Didac Busquets, Katerina Bourazeri, Patricio Petruzzi and Jeremy Pitt from Imperial College. Five PhD students and five ‘senior’ researchers were represented. The workshop was organised around five main discussion sessions, with each of the PhD students making a short presentation on their research and presenting a set of ‘concerns’ to act as the focal point for a “round table” discussion on the issues. These were particularly successful in clarifying the problems, generating potential innovative solutions, and facilitating knowledge exchange. This latter is crucial to inter-disciplinary research as the different group expertise (in power systems, multi-agent systems, and visualisation) was converged with synergistic effect. Each of the students prepared a summary presentation of the main discussion point, findings, and future plans. As well as offering some innovative insight into the application of computational awareness to active participation in SmartGrids, the workshop has consolidated and clarified research plans for each of the PhD students, and identified several pairwise opportunities for joint research, as well as a strategic vision which unifies the work of all three workshop partners.
More info: http://www.aware-project.eu/2012/active-participation-inautonomic-power-grids/
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Awareness online magazine the www.awareness-mag.eu More new articles have been added to Awareness online magazine. These short articles, covering recent advances and research news, are informal and aimed at a general audience. They can be viewed online or downloaded in pdf format. Included here are the introductory paragraphs of the most recent articles. If you would like to write for the Awareness magazine, contact: Jeremy Pitt: j.pitt@imperial.ac.uk
Magazine Themes: Artificial Intelligence : Computer Organisation : Interactive Robotics : Networks & Infrastructure : Situational Awareness : Swarm Robotics
A cognitively inspired model for self-aware agents Andrea Guazzini A computational model that simulates human heuristics, based on the theoretical building blocks of high-level cognitive functions, can help meet the challenges of Organic Computing. The human brain arose as a result of natural and sexual selection operating in the typical human framework of social systems. One of the main tasks humans have had to tackle for evolutionary survival is that of self-awareness, essentially answering questions such as: “Who am I?” “Where am I?” “What context am I in?” and “What are other people doing, and why?”
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Map built online.
Situation awareness with semantic region-landmarks Rupert Reiger, Anjan Sarkar, and Palash Goyal A semantic map-based localization and navigation method for unmanned aerial vehicles delivers encouraging results in simulations. For autonomous systems, localization is a major precondition for situation-awareness—the observe, orient, decide, act (OODA) decision chain1, 2—and for navigation. The system has to first know where it is to build a picture of its environment and to gauge its placement relative to other surrounding objects. Then, the system can determine whether it is alone or in proximity with friendly or unfriendly others.
Myriads of data, myriads of devices: self-awareness of the Ad-hoc Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Othon Michail, Georgios Mylonas, and Paul Spirakis Designing highly distributed dependable systems offers a means of dealing with open data. Recent advances in pervasive computing and the novel Internet technologies coming out of research labs provide a glimpse of the future, including smart cities, streets, schools and much more. By using the Internet to connect real-world sensors and control mechanisms to cloud-based services that pull streams
from other data sources, we create an opportunity for new wide-impact services and products. Future systems will orchestrate myriads of units/nodes, Web services, business processes, people, companies and institutions. These will be continuously integrated and connected, while preserving their individual properties, objectives and action.
Self-expression in adaptive architectural patterns Mariachiara Puviani The self-expression mechanism enhances self-adaptation by enabling runtime selection of appropriate adaptive architectural patterns in response to environmental changes. Engineering an autonomic system to be selfadaptive—that is, able to change its behaviour according to operating conditions encountered at runtime—helps simplify its design, and self-adaptive, self-aware components have been proposed to handle open-ended, highly parallel and massively distributed systems.1 However, as complexity increases, self-adaptive systems become more difficult to develop, deploy and manage. Worse, what if the scenario changes at runtime to such an extent that the adaptive pattern that was most appropriate to the initial systems configuration is no longer relevant?
Triad transition probabilities characterize complex networks Katarzyna Musial, Krzysztof Juszczyszyn, and Marcin Budka A data-driven approach to analysing and characterizing complex networks outperforms simulations based on traditional network models. Complex networked systems are present in every aspect of our lives. Life itself is made possible by the intricate biological interactions within gene regulatory networks and food webs. Technological networks such as the Internet have changed the way the world seeks information and does business. And technology-enabled social networks have drastically altered how people meet and communicate. In general, complex networks feature large numbers of highly interconnected units exhibiting timedependent behaviour. A relatively simple interactivity between neighbouring units may often compound into emergent collective behaviour of surprising sophistication. The need to analyse complex systems
and to predict changes in them is crucial: from assessing the potential effects of human activity on food webs, to defining telecommunications service offerings according to expected user behaviour. Yet the scale, complexity and dynamics of today’s technology-based complex networks have proven resistant to traditional network analysis methods. Predicting structural changes in such networks remains a challenge.
Moving towards autonomic, gateway-free cross networking Gianluigi Ferrari An approach based on Internet Protocol version 6 will provide seamless integration of networks for next-generation devices. The new fourth generation (4G) cellular standards that will bring higher Internet bandwidths to mobile devices are built to interoperate with other systems, such as wireless local area (Wi-Fi) networks.1 The forthcoming ‘Internet of things’ (IoT) will see billions of smart objects from traffic lights to energy meters sharing information on the Internet.2 In the face of these developments, it will be crucial to devise a general framework for communication between disparate systems. Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)—the next generation of the underlying technology that enables devices to connect to the Internet, currently in the process of being rolled out—is a prime candidate for a common ‘language’ that can be used to this end.3
Autonomous components in dynamic environments Tomáš Bureš, Ilias Gerostathopoulos, Petr Hnětynka, Jaroslav Keznikl, Michal Kit, and František Plášil A new component model provides abstractions for efficient development of autonomous, self-adaptive systems operating in distributed, open-ended dynamic environments. Distributed systems such as cloud computation, swarm robotics, and intelligent navigation of electric vehicles are gaining popularity. The common characteristic of most distributed systems is that they need a significant level of selfawareness and autonomy, meaning that they can dynamically adapt to changes in their operation environment and recover from potential failures.
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Events Self-IoT, Self-aware Internet of Things http://tinyurl.com/c66rvbe Special track in ICAC 2013
The 10th International Conference on Autonomic Computing http://icac2012.cs.fiu.edu/ June 26-28 2013, San Jose, California, USA Spectacular advances in technology have introduced increasingly complex and large scale computer and communication systems. Autonomic computing has been proposed as a grand challenge that will allow systems to self-manage this complexity, using high-level objectives and policies defined by humans. Internet of things (IoT) will exponentially increase the scale and the complexity of existing computing and communication systems; the autonomy is thus an imperative property for IoT systems. However, there is still a lack of research on new techniques adapted to the IoT context or on how to adapt and tailor existing research on autonomic computing to the specific characteristics of IoT such as high dynamicity and distribution, real-time nature, resources constraints, and lossy environments.
Awareness sponsor
MOSPAS 2013 July 1-5, 2013 4th International Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Peer-to-Peer and Autonomic Systems (MOSPAS 2013) CALL FOR PAPERS As part of The International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2013) Helsinki, Finland Submission Deadline: March 01, 2013 http://cisedu.us/rp/hpcs13/2-conference/workshops/ workshop-07-mospas
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Supported by Awareness Special track on Self-aware Internet of Things Following the successful first edition of the Self-IoT workshop held in conjunction with the ICAC ‘12, ICAC ‘13 will host this special track on Self-aware Internet of Things that aims at drawing the attention of both IoT and autonomic computing communities to the emerging needs and challenges for self-aware IoT. The main goal is to gather different scientific communities from academy and industry under one common objective: realizing plug-n-play, context-aware and autonomous Internet of things that will be selfconfigured, self-organized, self-optimized and selfhealed without (or with minimum) human intervention. Papers The Self-IoT track welcomes original research papers related to self-management in IoT. Besides theoretical aspects, Self-IoT is also interested in practical results of self-management in IoT applications. Paper registrations (title and abstract) due: February 25, 2013, 11:59 p.m. PST Paper submissions due: March 4, 2013, 11:59 p.m. PST The Self-IoT track is sponsored by three European projects on IoT: BUTLER (www.iot-butler.eu), iCore (www. iot-icore.eu) and IoT.est (www.ict-iotest.eu), which belong to the IERC-European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things (www.internet-of-things-research.eu).
Joint 15th IFIP International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-based Distributed Systems 31th IFIP International Conference on FORmal TEchniques for Networked and Distributed Systems (FMOODS-FORTE 2013), ASCENS project member Michele Boreale is Program Co-Chair 3 – 5 June 2013, Florence (Italy) http://forte13.sosy-lab.org/
Funding for Awareness Research Exchanges
Next Dead line 30th Marc h!
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
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:
FP7 FET Awareness projects: ASCENS Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles EPICS Engineering Proprioception in Computing Systems RECOGNITION Relevance and cognition for self-awareness in a contentcentric Internet SAPERE Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems
Also supporting: SYMBRION Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms (funded by PerAda) CoCoRo Collective Cognitive Robots (funded by FP7 ICT) Organic Computing Initiative (funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG)
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