[agents] ANTIFRAGILE 2014 - News and Call for Papers

[Vincenzo De Florio]

 Dear Sirs, dear Madams,

I'm very glad to be able to announce that Dr. Kennie H. Jones from NASA 
kindly agreed to give a keynote speech at ANTIFRAGILE 2014! Dr. Jones 
will report about 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 reliable systems.

Antifragile and resilience engineering are gaining momentum, and their 
application span through multiple and interconnected domains. 
Sharing ideas and creating communities of thought and practice is thus
an important and timely opportunity. I invite you to collaborate with me on this by exchanging ideas, e.g., through my blog on the engineering aspects of elasticity, 
resilience, and antifragility:
                http://eraclios.blogspot.be/
In my latest posts I focus on community resilience and describe a 
tentative answer to its challenges.

This is also to remind you that the deadline for submitting papers 
to ANTIFRAGILE 2014, the 1st International Workshop “From Dependable to Resilient,
from Resilient to Antifragile Ambients and Systems”, is set to February 21, 2014. 
Please find herein the call for papers.

All ANT-2014 accepted papers (thus including papers accepted for presentation at 

ANTIFRAGILE 2014) will be printed in the conference proceedings published by Elsevier 

Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science series (on-line). Procedia Computer 

Sciences is hosted on www.Elsevier.com and on Elsevier content platform ScienceDirect 

(www.sciencedirect.com), and will be freely available worldwide. All papers in Procedia
will also be indexed by Thomson Reuters' Conference Proceeding Citation Index 
http://thomsonreuters.com/conference-proceedings-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 will be invited for publication in special issues of international 

journals.

Should you require further information please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards,
Vincenzo De Florio.



ANTIFRAGILE 2014

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 that its services; it implies that the system when subjected 

to faults and changes 1) will continue distributing 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 main topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

•    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; 
•    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 modeling of 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;
•    Antifragility and the Cloud;
•    Service Level Agreements for Antifragility; 
•    Antifragile and resilient services.


ANTIFRAGILE is co-located with the 5th International Conference on Ambient Systems, 

Networks and Technologies, June 2 - 5, 2014, Hasselt, Belgium (http://cs-

conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-14/).


Important Dates:
Submission deadline: February 21, 2014 (final).
Review reports sent to authors: March 21, 2014
Final submission deadline: April 2, 2014
Workshop date: day to be scheduled in [June 2, June 5], 2014


Submission information: 
Accepted papers will appear in the Proceedings of the ANT Conference, published by 

Elsevier in their Series "Procedia Computer Science".

Formatting instructions and templates are available at http://cs-

conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-14/#paperSubmissions.

Maximum number of pages is 6.

Submissions will be managed through Easychair via the following URL:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=antifragile2014.

Outstanding papers presented at the workshops, after further revision, will be considered 

for publication in special issues of renowned international journals.



Programme Committee: 

•  CHAIR: Vincenzo De Florio, PATS/Universiteit Antwerpen and PATS/iMinds, Antwerp, 

Belgium
•  Abraham Ajith, MIR Labs & Southern Illinois University, USA
•  Mohamed Bakhouya, School of Engineering, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
•  Enrico Barbierato, Oracle, Pavia, Italy
•  Maher Ben Jemaa, National School of Engineering of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia
•  Gabriella Caporaletti,  EICAS Automazione, Torino, Italy
•  Llorenç Cerdà-Alabern, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
•  Walid Chainbi, University of Sousse, Tunisia
•  Andrea Clematis, CNR - IMATI, Genova, Italy
•  Antonio Coronato, Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking, Italian 

National Research Council, Naples, Italy
•  Masoud Daneshtalab, University of Turku, Finland
•  Jose Luis de la Vara, Simula Research Laboratory, Lysaker, Norway
•  Tom Dhaene,  INTEC / University of Ghent, Belgium
•  Felicita Di Giandomenico, ISTI Institute, Italian National Research Council, Pisa, 

Italy
•  Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
•  Masoumeh Ebrahimi, University of Turku, Finland
•  Fernando Ferri,  Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies, Rome, Italy
•  Jaafar Gaber, Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard, Belfort, France
•  Cristina Gacek, Centre for Software Reliability, City University London, London, UK
•  Matteo Gagliolo, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
•  Liang Guang, University of Turku, Finland
•  Muddesar Iqbal, University of Gujrat, Gujrat, Pakistan
•  Bryan Knowles, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA
•  Marc Leeman, BARCO, Belgium
•  Levi Lúcio, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
•  Danilo Mandic, Imperial College, London, UK
•  Leo G Marcus, The Aerospace Corporation, USA
•  Gianluca Mazzini, University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy
•  Ethiopia Nigussie, University of Turku, Finland
•  George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Greece
•  Eric Pardede, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia
•  Nearcos Paspallis, UCLan Cyprus, Larnaca, Cyprus
•  Juha Plosila, University of Turku, Finland
•  Massimiliano Rak, Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, Aversa, Italy
•  Philipp Reinecke, Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
•  Matthieu Roy, Dependability Group, LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France
•  Francesca Saglietti, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
•  Kathleen Spaey,  PATS group, Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
•  Basile Starynkevitch,  CEA LIST Institute, Paris, France
•  Lorenzo Strigini, Centre for Software Reliability, City University London, London, UK
•  Hong Sun,  AGFA healthcare, Ghent, Belgium
•  David Taniar, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
•  Gianluca Tempesti, Department of Electronics, University of York, York, UK
•  Eric Verhulst, Altreonic, Belgium
•  Xinheng Wang, University of the West of Scotland, UK
•  Katinka Wolter, Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
•  Yan Zhang,  Simula Research Laboratory, Norway


For more information please contact Vincenzo De Florio (vincenzo.deflorio at 

uantwerpen.be)

Kind regards,
Vincenzo De Florio