issue 10 Autumn 2013 newsletter of the awareness proactive initiative www.aware-project.eu
awareness newsletter
News from the Awareness Co-ordination Action project
Awareness project conclusions 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) photo: CoCoRo project Awareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7
Editorial Welcome to the final AWARNESS newsletter at the end a busy but fruitful three years. Many readers will have attended an AWARNESS event over the lifetime of the project, whether a conference with an AWARENESS sponsored speaker, an AWARENESS run workshop or a Doctoral Student Forum. Outputs from all these events are archived on our website, but as the project draws to a close, we’d like to draw your attention to the vast wealth of material that AWARE has collated in a variety of forms to provide a lasting resource for researchers within the area beyond the life of the project itself and indeed the Proactive Initiative as a whole.
Dissemination of research Key to the AWARENESS philosophy was goal of disseminating research in the field to academic and more general audiences, to raise ‘awareness’ of some of the exciting work being undertaken. The Computer After Me documentary, and accompanying book (soon to be published by Imperial College Press) provide a fascinating summary of our field as it is today, but also take a look into the future of self-aware computing, asking some difficult questions. The title has three possible interpretations; is there a more powerful than those existing today just around the corner and what will the impact of such technologies be on everyday life ? Will the next generation of computers really be ‘after’ me in Big Brother sense of monitoring our every move and finally, from the computer’s perspective, will a machine ever achieve the required understanding of itself to be truly self-aware? Also appealing to a more general audience, the AWARENESS Magazine now contains around 50 articles written in an easy-to-read
popular science style by leading academics and industrialists on a broad range of topics with articles that can be downloaded as HTML or PDF.
Education materials One of our major aims was to create a collection of educational material, catering to a broad range of researchers, whether at the beginning of their careers or looking to update their knowledge. The AWARENESS App for IPad can be downloaded from iTunes and contains a range of material including videos and slides for an overiew of Awareness while you are on the move! We’ve also created three sets of slides suitable for different audiences; an educated layman seminar, an industrial training course, and an educational course consisting of 13 lectures. The slides can be viewed via our website or downloaded for personal use. Finally, the Virtual Lecture Series provides the perfect accompaniment to the Academic Course, discussing state-of-the art research and providing new insights into hot topics in the field.
Research Agenda Finally, we’ve done a lot of working in pulling together a Research Agenda for the field, soliciting opinions from top researchers across the globe, and collating as list of 101 Challenges that need to be addressed in the future. A taxonomy that provides a classification of the field by theme and keywords is also available. The Research Agenda marks the end of three years of work for us, but we hope define the start of new and exciting research for many others. Many AWARENESS researchers can find a new home within FOCAS – the new FET Proactive Initiative in Collective Adaptive Systems that shares many themes with the AWARNESS initiative – check out www.focas.eu for more information!
Complete our map of researchers working in Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems Please share your research details with us via our Awareness Interactive InfoGraphic: http://viz-awareness.appspot.com
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The Computer After Me Documentary and website An experts view on self-aware autonomic computing with Jeremy Pitt and Rebecca Mileham. To access this curated collection of Awareness resources visit The Computer After Me website: http://thecomputerafterme.eu
Recently completed International Research Exchanges These exchanges in the field of Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems were funded by the Awareness project. Full reports on all the exchanges are available here: www.aware-project.eu/category/funding-2/exchange-reports
Dr Tobias Becker from Imperial College London, Adib M. Monzer Habbal from a member of the EPiCS project, was invited to participate in collaborative discussions with Professor Jeong-A Lee of the Computer Systems Lab, Chosun University at Gwangju in Korea in June 2013. The research visit considered modelling and validation of perceptive self-aware systems with autonomous reconfiguration.
Dr Marcus Endler from Pontificial Catholic
University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) from Brazil visited Dr Nikola Serbedzija at Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin, Germany in September 2013 for 10 days. The purpose of the visit was to exchange ideas and develop a plan for the future collaboration in the areas of context awareness and self-adaptive systems. This collaboration included research-oriented activities, software development and testing, as well as deployment of software tools and middleware in real-world applications (e.g. Smart Cities and Green Computing).
InterNetWorks Research Lab, School of Computing, Universiti Utara in Malaysia visited Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, and Dr. Jose Luis Fernandez from UniversitÊ Genève in Switzerland this summer. The main aim of his research visit is to consider how self-aware mechanisms can enhance routing protocols and create opportunistic networks for improved performance.
Dr Peter Lewis of CERCIA, School of Computer
Science, University of Birmingham, UK, visited Professor Marco Santambrogio at the NECST Lab at the Politecnico di Milano. The aims were for Dr. Lewis to present his conceptual work on computational selfawareness and secondly, to brainstorm and establish collaboration opportunities between Dr. Lewis and researchers working at the Politecnico di Milano.
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As the Awareness Coordination Action comes to an end, we asked the research projects working on self-awareness in autonomic systems, to provide a summary of their activities to date.
Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles Interview with the Ascens project: What is the most significant achievement of your project? Among the main scientific contributions we achieved in ASCENS so far are the creation of a Service-Component Ensemble Language (SCEL), a multi-layer language for adaptive, self-aware and self-expressive autonomic service components (SCs) and service component ensembles (SCEs); the development of theoretical foundations and models for reliable and predictable system behaviour while exploiting the possibilities of highly dynamic, autonomic components; a process model for the development of ensemble-based systems; the integration of top-down and bottom-up approaches to adaptation and the investigation and description of patterns for adaptation and self-expression; and, through our case studies, ensuring that the methods developed are in sync with real-life problems, and that the state of the art in the subject matter of the case studies is advanced as well. To show the feasibility of our approach, our case studies cover a large spectrum of autonomous systems: swarm robotics, autonomic and cloud computing and electrically-powered vehicle ensembles.
With respect to the target outcomes of the call – what has your project achieved? a) Creating awareness at the level of autonomic nodes, by allowing them to interactively and selectively collect information about the system, and use it effectively. A central question is how to link awareness of performance, conditions, available resources, etc., to the nature of information that is exchanged. An interesting feature of autonomic systems is that many activities usually performed during design time by developers are now performed autonomously by the system at runtime. This process has to be supported by continuous feedback from the system such that adaptations performed can be monitored and analyzed by human developers and the results of continuing development activities integrated into the running system. ASCENS proposes the Ensemble Development Life Cycle (EDLC), a development process model which covers both design- and runtime of autonomic systems
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Self-aware, self-adaptive and self-expressive autonomic components, running within environments which are called “ensembles�, have been proposed to handle open-ended, highly parallel, massively distributed systems that can span millions of nodes with complex interactions and behaviours. However, these complex systems are currently difficult to develop, deploy, and manage. The goal of the ASCENS project is to build ensembles in a way that combines the maturity and wide applicability of traditional software engineering approaches with the assurance about functional and non-functional properties provided by formal methods and the flexibility, low management overhead, and optimal utilization of resources promised by autonomic, adaptive, self-aware systems. and their interaction in the form of deployment and feedback. For each of the eight identified phases of this process model, ASCENS provides methods and tools to support developers. b) Dynamic self-expression, namely the ability to autonomically use awareness to adapt the trade-off between abstraction and optimisation. There is a need for understanding the consequences of this principle on system behaviour and performance, and designing/ experimenting with related features.
In the ASCENS project we use a two-tiered approach to creating awareness and self-expressive systems: The Service Component Ensemble Language (SCEL) uses distributed knowledge repositories to coordinate the service components in an ensemble; individual knowledge repositories can provide awareness mechanisms that perform logical or Bayesian reasoning, learn from the system’s behavior and plan future actions. Strategies that the reasoning and learning mechanisms have adapted for the concrete circumstances encountered by the ensemble can then be passed back to the SCEL execution environment to enable self-expression of the system.
What might be the future impact of your work? Lower management costs of large networked systems through the ability to adapt to changing environments and patterns of use, and through a greater degree of flexibility and reliability. More efficient use of resources such as processing power, energy and bandwidth through autonomic decisions based on awareness. Lower barriers to design and development of large networked systems through the availability of a ”full-stack” solution ranging from architectural to implementation view of a system.
What are your three most significant publications? Martin Wirsing, Matthias Hölzl, Mirco Tribastone, and Franco Zambonelli. ASCENS: Engineering Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles. In Bernhard Beckert, Ferruccio Damiani, Marcello Bonsangue, and Frank de
Boer, editors, Formal Methods for Components and Objects, 10th International Symposium, FMCO 2011, LNCS. Springer, 2012. Rocco De Nicola, Gian-Luigi Ferrari, Michele Loreti, and Rosario Pugliese. A Language-based Approach to Autonomic Computing. In Formal Methods for Components and Objects, volume To appear of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 2012. Dhaminda Abeywickrama, Franco Zambonelli, and Nicklas Hoch. Towards Simulating Architectural Patterns for Self-Aware and Self-Adaptive Systems. In 2nd SASO Workshop on Awareness in Autonomic Systems, Lyon (F), September 2012. IEEE CS Press.
Are there any other events or highlight that you would like to tell us about ? We plan to publish a book on Engineering Autonomic Systems in the Springer LNCS State-of-the-Art Series. A demo of some ASCENS results will be presented at the ICT 2013. In this exhibit we show the advantages that autonomic agents have when operating in changing or partially unknown environments. We present a scenario where robots perform autonomous tasks; the demonstration covers three different abstraction levels: Two real robots compete against each other - one programmed according to our autonomic paradigm and the other one controlled via a joystick by visitors, A robot simulator (ARGoS) lets visitors appreciate the adaptive behavior of robot swarms, Experimental results show how formal methods enable designers to predict the behavior of robots and the quality of the proposed solutions.
The Sapere Project The SAPERE scenario became reality at the Vienna City Marathon 2013. Both smartphone apps as well as public displays have been deployed. We were allowed to place the public display exactly in the foyer of the VIP lounge. The app features demo profile based interaction, crowd recogntion and steering, and attention spread. More than 5000 users has downloaded the app from Google Play. SAPERE inherently promotes situatedness and local interactions between agents, services, and devices colocated in a space. The situation awareness library enables applications to reach complex forms of awareness within the SAPERE ecosystem. Selected publications: Towards Situated Awareness in Urban Networks: A Bioinspired Approach Self-organising Semantic Resource Discovery for Pervasive Systems
One of the key results of the SAPERE project is a middleware for the deployment of SAPERE ecosystems. The middleware is implemented in both Java and Android and enables the programmer to easily develop self-aware and adaptive pervasive services. Selected publications: Programming Self-organizing Pervasive Applications with SAPERE Design and Implementation of a Socially-enhanced Pervasive Middleware
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Collective Cognitive Robots
CoCoRo
Interview with the CoCoRo project: What is the most significant achievement of your project? The "Collective Cognitive Robots" ("CoCoRo") project researches how collective cognition, that is cognitive capability that is not residing in the individual but among the group of robots, can be achieved in a robot swarm. We investigated a series of bio-inspired and biomimicking algorithms that, run exclusively, already achieve a certain level of collective cognition. However, and that is a main aspect of CoCoRo, fusing these algorithms into a novel algorithm, which has no actual natural counterpart anymore, novel forms of collective cognition arise/emerge. To allow the robots to perform such combined algorithms, we carefully considered the requirement on the hardware side, including actuation, sensing and electric signal processing. For example by choosing non-conflicting communication channels, the execution of parallel execution of bio-inspired algorithms can be achieved. Also hardware design (e.g. robots' shapes, placement of actuators and sensors) has to consider the way how CoCoRo aims to achieve collective and distributed cognition.
With respect to the target outcomes of the call – what has your project achieved? Very specific actuation in 3D space and smart sensing allows the robots to operate in challenging conditions (muddy water, many blocking obstacles, highly fragmented habitat). Even given these difficulties,
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the swarm successfully achieves tasks of target search, target discrimination, regulation of swarm size, self-regulation of division-of-labour, shoaling and collective decision making. In addition to that, benchmarks from psychology/ethology like the mirror test and the emergence of collective (social) memory can be performed with the system. All these collective functionalities arise from purely decentralized and localized communication without requiring a central unit of control.
What might be the future impact of your work? In CoCoRo, we propose a swarm-based robotic system that efficiently and autonomously searches areas of the ocean for specific, hard to find targets. Such targets could include black boxes of submerged planes, valuable resources or toxic waste dumps. The challenge lies in the difficulty of locating such targets from the water’s surface as it requires extensive scouting of the sea bed. Toxic waste, for example leaking barrels on the sea bed, could produce a very weak and irregular toxin gradient that is very difficult for a single autonomous underwater vehicle to traverse and locate the source of. However, whereas a single AUV would need to employ a complex and time-consuming search pattern, a swarm of AUVs could act as a distributed sensor network and quickly comb through the area. A swarm could navigate such a weak and irregular toxin gradient, locate the source, and send its location to the base station which in turn could forward GPS coordinates to the cleanup team.
What are your three most significant publications? These papers can be found on our homepage here: http://cocoro.uni-graz.at/drupal/publications EMANN - a model of emotions in an artificial neural network Social Inhibition Manages Division of Labour in Artificial Swarm Systems Algorithmic requirements for swarm intelligence in differently coupled collective systems
Are there any other events or highlights that you would like to tell us about? a) The CoCoRo AUVs currently represent the largest interacting AUV swarm in the world. At the moment we have 20 AUVs, towards the end of the project in 2014 the swarm size will increase to 40 AUVs.
b) In August 2013 we invited journalists to the KarlFranzens-University of Graz to have a look at our AUV swarm. This generated quite a big media echo, as can be seen in the top entries here: http://cocoro.uni-graz.at/drupal/ media Furthermore, in the upcoming weeks ServusTV (a well-known Austrian private TV channel) will show a report on the CoCoRo project. c) CoCoRo will participate at the CeBIT 2014 in Hannover in March 2014. At the moment we are in talks to also show our project at the upcoming Techfest in Mumbai, India, which is Asia's largest science and technology festival. d) At the second Review Meeting in Pontedera, Italy, the reviewers graded our project success as "excellent". f ) Due to the success of the project, the reviewers and project officer have agreed to a project extension for 6 months.
http://cocoro.uni-graz.at/drupal/media
Engineering Proprioception In Computing Systems EPiCS is a trans-national multi-disciplinary research project which aims at laying the foundation for engineering the novel class of proprioceptive computing systems. Proprioceptive computing systems collect and maintain information about their state and progress, which enables self-awareness by reasoning about their behaviour, and self-expression by effectively and autonomously adapt their behaviour to changing conditions. Concepts of self-awareness and self-expression are new to the domains of computing and networking; the successful transfer and development of these concepts will help create future heterogeneous and distributed systems capable of efficiently responding to a multitude of requirements with respect to functionality and flexibility, performance, resource usage and costs, reliability and safety, and security. Innovations from EPiCS are based on systematic integration of research in concepts and foundations for self-aware and self-expressive systems with novel hardware/software platform technologies and architectures for engineering autonomic compute nodes and networks. EPiCS drives and validates the research by the requirements of three challenging application domains that cover both high-end computers and embedded systems, as well as embeddings into technical and non-technical contexts.
Latest from EPiCS Introduction to the Ella Middleware We have just published an introductory article for the Ella middleware on the Codeproject developer portal. The article covers the basics of publish/subscribe and how to write publishers and subscribers using Ella.
Best paper award at the ReConFig’2012 conference: In the publication “M. Happe, H. Hangmann, A. Agne, and C. Plessl. Eight ways to put your FPGA on fire – a systematic study of heat generators. In Proc. Int. Conf. on ReConFigurable Computing and FPGAs (ReConFig), pages 1–8. IEEE Computer Society, Dec. 2012.”, University of Paderborn has presented a study on the systematic design and evaluation of circuits that are optimised for generating a maximum amount of heat on FPGAs.
CamSim simulator for distributed camera networks released CamSim, the simulator for distributed smart camera networks, has just been released in its first version. In the last few months, the pre-release of CamSim went through various major refactoring processes.
www.epics-project.eu www.vimeo.com/channels/epics
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See the latest results and publications here:
www.recognition-project.eu The RECOGNITION project concerns new approaches for embedding self-awareness in ICT systems. This will be based on the cognitive processes that the human species exhibits for self-awareness, seeking to exploit the fact that humans are ultimately the fundamental basis for high performance autonomic processes. This is due to the cognitive ability of the brain to efficiently assert relevance (or irrelevance), extract knowledge and take appropriate decisions, when faced with partial information and disparate stimuli. Using the psychological and cognitive sciences as concrete inspiration, our approach is to develop functional models of the core cognitive processes that allow humans to assert relevance and achieve knowledge from information. This involves mechanisms such as inference, belief, similarity and trust. These will be translated to the ICT domain by development of flexible RECOGNITION algorithms that can be imbedded in ICT on a flexible basis for self-awareness.
Awareness Resources
We will demonstrate this new paradigm for Internet content. The future Internet will see ever-increasing amounts of content that needs to be effectively managed and acquired, often from portable devices and in diverse spatial and social situations. The massive scale of content will swamp the user with information, impeding effective management and relevant acquisition by the user. By exploiting the self-awareness capability we will enable the users, content and network to cope effectively in a scalable manner, thus making unprecedented amounts of relevant content available and unleashing new classes of applications that extract maximum utility from content.
Virtual Lectures Aimed at researchers from different disciplines, the Awareness Virtual Lecture Series covers theoretical, practical, and technological issues related to autonomic self-awareness including self-organising and self-adaptive systems, pervasive computing technologies as well as security and socio/economic aspects of autonomic computing. Watch online here:
www.aware-project.eu/ lectures
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Awareness Magazine
New articles online now
www.awareness-mag.eu Also available on RSS
Norm-aware socio-technical systems
THEMES
Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu and Aditya Ghose Systems under development in several domains consider awareness of normative behaviour as a core element of their design and operation. Social norms play an important role in shaping human behaviour. They guide people on how to behave under certain circumstances by prescribing what is permitted and what is prohibited.
Artificial Intelligence, Computer Organization, Interactive Robotics, Networks & Infrastructure, Situational Awareness, Swarm Robotics
Adaptive negotiation strategy for agents in electronic markets
The official magazine for the Awareness: Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems project. Browse from our latest articles below, use our search engine, or view by category using the menu on the left.
Latest Articles:
The formal characterization of selfdeception Andrew J. I. Jones Current work investigates applying formal logic to the definition of self-deception in humans, and highlights the relevance of the phenomenon to research in informatics. Awareness is of central interest not only to cognitive scientists but also to computer scientists who are developing models of intelligent, adaptive systems. Self-awareness is a significant aspect of awareness, given that some, at least, of the agents in such systems are capable of representing and reasoning about both the cognitive processes of other agents and also their own. Any comprehensive attempt to analyse and characterize self-awareness will have to consider ways in which it may be constrained, among which, it has often been maintained, self-deception figures prominently, at least in humans. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). His remark about self-deception was the point of departure for Jaakko Hintikka’s formal-logical analysis in his book ‘Knowledge and Belief.’ Our work criticizes and develops Hintikka’s approach. (Image credit: ©Georgios Kollidas, Dreamstime.com.)
Ho-fung Leung A model based on dynamic situation awareness offers agents a generic strategy for reaching agreement among themselves that is applicable in a wide variety of trading environments. A common requirement of distributed multi-agent systems is for the agents to be able to negotiate an agreement or settlement among themselves, for example in applications such as load balancing, resource allocation or job scheduling.
Self-organized middle-out abstraction of complexity Sebastian von Mammen and Jan-Philipp Steghöfer Automatic adaptive abstraction at the meso level can dramatically reduce the complexity of multi-scale computational models and open up a new way of tackling large-scale simulations. Today, the inherent complexity of many man-made or naturally occurring challenges—such as understanding the influence of human interference in ecosystems or interacting biological processes—is widely acknowledged.
Interactive design activism Petar Goulev and Joan Farrer An app-based mobile system can help users understand safe levels of sun exposure and so serve public health goals. How people behave in the sun is a key public health issue. Although the promotion of healthy lifestyles encourages people to play sport outdoors or enjoy nature, the human body is at risk due to exposure to UV radiation from sunlight, which can cause health problems that are both serious (e.g. skin cancer) and aesthetic (e.g. wrinkles).
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SASO
workshop The third Awareness workshop on Challenges for Achieving SelfAwareness in Autonomic Systems took place at the IEEE International Conference on SelfAdaptive and Self-Organising Systems (SASO) on 13 September 2013 at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. It was organised by the Awareness Coordination Action by Programme Chairs Emma Hart (Edinburgh Napier University), Jeremy Pitt (Imperial College London) and Giacomo Cabri (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), in conjunction with the Awareness projects. The programme consisted of short presentations of the following accepted papers which addressed some key concepts for the theory, design and implementation of SASO systems, followed by separate panel sessions to discuss ideas emerging from the presentations:
Design Designing Self-Aware Adaptive Systems: from Autonomic Computing to Cognitive Immune Networks by Nicola Capodieci, Emma Hart, Giacomo Cabri A Modelling and Simulation Environment for Selfaware and Self-expressive Systems by Tatiana Djaba Nya, Stephan Stilkerich, Peter Lewis A Life Cycle for the Development of Autonomic Systems: The e-Mobility Showcase by Tomas Bures, Rocco De Nicola, Ilias Gerostathopoulos, Nicklas Hoch, Michal Kit, Nora Koch, Giacoma Valentina Monreale, Ugo Montanari, Rosario Pugliese, Nikola Serbedzija, Martin Wirsing, Franco Zambonelli (presented by Philip Mayer)
Open Systems Parking assisting applications: effectiveness and sideissues in managing public goods by Evangelia Kokolaki, Evangelia, Merkourios Karaliopoulos, Ioannis Stavrakakis Partial Scalability to Ensure Reliable Dynamic Reconfiguration by Mohammad Ghafari, Abbas Heydarnoori The Autonomic Cloud: A Vision of Voluntary, Peer-2Peer Cloud Computing by Philip Mayer, Annabelle Klarl,
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Rolf Hennicker, Mariachiara Puviani, Francesco Tiezzi, Rosario Pugliese, Jaroslav Keznikl, Tomas Bures
Synchronisation, Space and Reflection The Challenge of Decentralised Synchronisation in Interactive Music Systems by Kristian Nymoen, Arjun Chandra, Jim Torresen Reasoning and Reflection in the Game of Nomic: SelfOrganising Self-Aware Agents with Mutable Rule-Sets by Stuart Holland, Jeremy Pitt, Dave Sanderson, Dídac Busquets A Novel Spatial Property Aware Multihop Communication Solution for Autonomous Mobile Networks by András Kőkuti, Vilmos Simon, Bernát Wiandt
Workshop: Research Challenges In addition, a workshop activity considered some important research challenges for self-aware autonomic systems. Awareness has compiled a list of 101 Research Challenges, by inviting the research community to suggest key research questions (available at www. aware-project.eu/research-agenda/awareness101 ) . In a workshop activity organised by Giacomo Cabri for the Awareness Research Agenda, these 101 challenges were reviewed and the most relevant were identified, including : 1. How can distributed systems with no central controller become collectively self-aware, rather than at individual node level? 21. To combine computer science with social science 30. How to engineer the system to produce the correct emergent behavior? 53. Letting different systems inter-operate and collaborate 54. Considering sociological aspects besides technical aspects 59. How to manage the relationship between individual and group levels 71. To address real problems by means of exemplars 74. How to measure adaptiveness
Panel Discussion at SASO 2013
Social Implications of SASO Systems and Technologies Thursday, Sept. 12th SASO 2013, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. Panel chair: Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College of London, UK Panelists: Ingo Scholtes, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Mihaela Uliery, The Impact Institute for the Digital Economy, Canada Giuseppe Valetto, Drexel University, USA and Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy The discussion considered adaptive systems with emergent properties, exemplified by machine learning, autonomic computing, and self-organisation which are making the transition from laboratory and field trials to fully-fledged deployment. However, many aspects of adaptive and autonomic systems found in things like
mobile networks or swarm robotics seem to be primarily 'hidden' to the user. The aim of this panel discussion was to consider whether SASO systems are destined to be forever closed to human involvement; or if not, what will be the nature of 'human-SASO system interaction'? Moreover, what are some of the social implications of these SASO-systems? And what impact might they have when adaptive systems are reasoning about qualitative such as legal or organisational rules, health and wellbeing, environmental issues, dispute resolution etc, issues of great human concern.
Awareness Academic Courses The Awareness project has produced slides covering a wide range of subjects relevant to (self-)awareness in autonomic systems during a Slides Factory event. The process resulted in three complete sets of slides: A layman seminar, industry training and also an academic course going much deeper into the definitions, engineering and evaluation of self-aware systems.
Slides Set I – Layman Seminar For the layman seminar, the idea is to have the slides used as “building blocks”. The person giving the seminar can choose, for instance, between a small number of introductory examples and tailor his/her presentation accordingly.
Slides Set II – Industry Training The industry training is a set of four lectures to give an overview of self-awareness in autonomic systems, present relevant properties, platforms and simulation tools, and review the domain scenarios considered in the Awareness projects.
Slides Set III – Academic Course The academic course is a set of 13 lectures, covering in depth the relevant topics for self-awareness in
autonomic systems and touching on research carried out by the Awareness projects. In special in lecture 13, Applications of and challenges in self-awareness, a brief overview of each Awareness project is given, including research aims, achievements and examples. All of the slides are also available for download on our SlideShare site, and are also viewable in our Awareness App:
www.aware-project.eu/awareness-training/awarenessslides-factory-2012
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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