Monday 28 October 2019

The Sixth International Workshop on

Computational Antifragility
and
Antifragile Engineering

in the framework of the 11th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, April 6 - 9, 2020, Warsaw, Poland




Resilience is one of those "general systems attributes" that appear to play a central role in several disciplines--including ecology, business, psychology, industrial safety, microeconomics, computer networks, security, management science, cybernetics, control theory, crisis and disaster management. Despite being such an important systemic ingredient, no consensual definition of resilience has been proposed. Perhaps resilience could be better captured by considering the Aristotelian concept of entelechy: a resilient system is an entelechy, namely one that strives to preserve its characteristics; or with the words of Aristotle, it "is-at-work to stay-the-same", meaning that an antifragile system autonomosly adapts its function, structure, and identity, in order to systematically improve its system-environment fit. An antifragile system is thus one that may sacrifice some of its peculiar characteristics so long as it matches better with the conditions timely expressed by its deployment environment. It is a system able to take autonomic decisions as to its own adaptation and evolution.

Engineering a resilient system thus means designing a system whose major goal is to preserve its identity, and does so by adapting its function and structure so as to compensate for faults, failures, and attacks. In the context of computer systems, system identity is the set of functional and non-functional properties that are to characterize the system given the specifications of that system.

If we define resilience as above, it is easier to understand what is Antifragility, the concept recently highlighted by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book. Antifragility is the property of a system that "is-at-work to get better",

This means that an antifragile system would autonomosly adapt its function, structure, and identity, in order to systematically improve its system-environment fit. An antifragile system is thus one that may sacrifice some of its peculiar characteristics (at least, peculiar with reference to its specification!) so long as it matches better with the conditions timely expressed by its deployment environment. It is a system able to take autonomic decisions as to its own adaptation and evolution.

As explained, e.g., in this article by Dr. Kennie H. Jones of NASA, 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.
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 last six Editions of our workshop were enriched by the participation of Professor Taleb and Dr. Kennie H. Jones who kindly provided their keynote speeches. Today we aim to further enhance the awareness of the challenges of antifragile engineering and extend the discussion on how computer and software engineering may address them, also considering additional domains where antifragile behaviors would be very desirable. In particular, we shall consider two new domains to this seventh Edition of ANTIFRAGILE:

  • A first domain is antifragile transition onto sustainable development: Thus far, societal transitions have been spontaneous collective behaviors that did not result in any sustainable relationship with our environments. Interaction between the human societies and the global eco-system they inhabit interaction has resulted in phenomena that in the long run could endanger our species and the whole planet. Is an antifragile, human-induced transition onto sustainable development possible? How to design and steer such a transition so that our societies learn to systematically improve the human-environment fit?
  • A second domain is antifragile drone control: The focus here is air traffic management and how the advent of drones is impacting on all aspects of the air transportation industry. Self-learning, self-safe drones could represent a key ingredient to prevent disruptions and accidents.

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, develop, and evaluate antifragile systems and ambients
  • devise computational models and paradigms for antifragile engineering
  • provide analytical and simulation models and tools to measure a system's ability to withstand faults, adjust to new environments, and enhance their identity and resilience in the process
  • foster the exchange of ideas and promote discussions able to steer future research and development efforts in the area of computational antifragility
The main topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:
  • Antifragile Societal Transitions
  • Antifragile Drone Systems
  • Antifragile Social Systems
  • Antifragile Cities
  • Antifragile Communities
  • Antifragile Services
  • Antifragile Learning (Evolving Learning Machines)
  • Machine learning as a foundation to antifragile behaviors: Reinforcement learning, deep learning, and so on
  • Antifragile games
  • Antifragile cars
  • Internet-of-(Antifragile?)-Things
  • 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
  • Discussion and analysis if 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 methods for 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
  • Modeling of antifragile systems (e.g., through Petri Nets)
  • Antifragility and the Cloud
  • Resilience and antifragility in human-computer interaction
  • Identity drifting in evolving systems (e.g., security aspects)
  • Specification and verification of resilient and antifragile systems
  • Programming language support for antifragility
  • Models of concurrent behaviors of "parts" leading to antifragile behaviors of the "whole"
  • Safety and security issues with reference to systems able to self-evolve their identity
  • Ethics issues related to antifragility
All ANT-2020 accepted papers (thus including the ANTifragile 2020 papers) will be published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science series on-line. Procedia Computer Sciences is hosted on Elsevier.com and on Elsevier content platform ScienceFirect.com, and will be freely available worldwide.
All papers in Procedia will be indexed by Scopus.com and by Thomson Reuters' Conference Proceeding Citation Index. 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 may be invited for publication in special issues of international journals. For example, the December 2015 issue of the Springer's Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environment was one such special issue.

Finally, as in previous editions, this year ANTifragile shall include a t-Workshop, namely an event taking place at the same time in the physical venue of the Workshop in Warsaw and in the Twitter social space! We're evaluating solutions making it possible for the live talks to be streamed to Twitter users, and at the same time to allow Twitter users to interact with the speakers, pose questions at the end of their presentations, and also to participate to our open discussion on the future of computational antifragility. People interested in the event may follow the hashtag #ANtWorkshop to receive fresh news about our event!

Contact Information

For any further information, please do not hesitate to contact any of the Chairs of this edition:
  • Vincenzo De Florio - Global Brain Institute - vincenzo.deflorio at gmail.com
  • Stefano Serafini - Bio Urbanism - stefano.serafini at biourbanism.org
  • Stefano Marrone - Second University of Naples - stefano.marrone at unicampania.it
  • Bryan Knowles - University of Wisconsin Madison - baknowles at wisc.edu

Important Dates

Submission deadline: January 10, 2020
Review reports sent to authors: January 17, 2020
Final submission deadline: January 24, 2020
Workshop date: April 6 or 7, 2020 date to be confirmed

Resources

Antifragile computing systems are those resilient systems that are:
  • auto-resilient, namely open to their own system-environment fit
  • auto-predictive, namely able to extrapolate on the reconfigurations that improve their own system-environment fit
  • and that develop wisdom as a result of matches between available strategies and obtained results
A few resources on computational antifragility are listed herein:
  • A description of two of the papers of the first edition of the workshop, as well as their presentations, is available here
  • The ERACLIOS blog (Elasticity, Resilience, Antifragility in CoLlective and Individual Objects and Systems)
  • "On Resilient Behaviors in Computational Systems and Environments", by V. De Florio - download - bibtex
  • "On environments as systemic exoskeletons: Crosscutting optimizers and antifragility enablers", by V. De Florio - download - bibtex
  • "Antifragility = Elasticity + Resilience + Machine Learning Models and Algorithms for Open System Fidelity", by V. De Florio - download

Submission and Camera Ready Instructions

Submissions shall be managed by sending submissions to vincenzo.deflorio at gmail.com.
Paper size is limited to 6 pages. Two additional pages may be added for a price. Please refer to the pages of ANT 2020 for more detail on this.

1 comment:

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