You are hereANTIFRAGILE 2014, 2-5 June 2014. Call for papers and participation.

ANTIFRAGILE 2014, 2-5 June 2014. Call for papers and participation.


By eric.verhulst - Posted on 09 January 2014

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Call for papers and participation. Deadline extended till 21st February 2014.

This is the first International Workshop on the new topic of Antifragile systems.

“From Dependable to Resilient, from Resilient to Antifragile Ambients and systems”

Keynote speaker: Dr. Kennie H. Jones from NASA kindly agreed to give a keynote speech at ANTIFRAGILE 2014. He will discuss, among other issues, the role that antifragile engineering is playing within NASA and how this research direction may provide an answer to the design challenges of large and complex resilient and antifragile systems.

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 than its services; it implies that the system when subjected to faults and change 1) will continue providing its services 2) without losing its peculiar traits, its identity: the system will “stay the same”. Antifragility goes one step further and suggests that certain systems could actually “get better”, namely improve their system-environment fit, when subjected (to some system-specific extent) to faults and changes. Recent studies of Professor N. Taleb introduced the concept of antifragility and provided a characterization of the behaviors enacted by antifragile systems. 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.

The ambition and mission of ANTIFRAGILE is to enhance the awareness of the above challenges and to begin a discussion on how computer and software engineering may address them. As a design aspect cross-cutting through all system and communication layers, antifragile engineering will require 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 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 topic of the workshop is fully in line with the ARRL criterion introduced by Altreonic . One can consider   antifragility as a new level ( ARRL-6 ) whereby a system or component retains and even improves its QoS by adapting itself to changing conditions. This requires a feedback loop whereby accurate self-models are used as part of the control loop. Not a trivial goal, but in the process one can learn a lot, even for reaching lower ARRL levels. Join us in the discussion.

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