[agents] [SPAM] ANTIFRAGILE 2020: Call for papers

[V. De Florio]

Dear Sirs / Madams,

this is to kindly invite you to submit a paper
to the Sixth International Workshop on Computational Antifragility and
Antifragile Engineering, held in the framework of the 11th International
Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, April 6 - 9,
2020, Warsaw, Poland

https://antifragile-2020.glitch.me/

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 drone
agents 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.

-- Vincenzo De Florio   


Con Mobile Open 7 GB a 9 euro/4 sett navighi veloce con 7 GB di Internet e hai 200 minuti ed SMS a 15 cent. Passa a Tiscali Mobile! http://tisca.li/Open7GB0617

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.cs.umbc.edu/pipermail/agents/attachments/20191028/36e6dd7c/attachment-0001.html>