CREST 2020

5th Workshop on Formal Reasoning about
Causation, Responsibility, and Explanations
in Science and Technology

Dublin, Ireland, 25 April 2020
A satellite event of ETAPS 2020

https://sites.google.com/view/crest2020

Call for Papers

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Topic

Today’s IT systems, and the interactions between them, become increasingly complex. Power grid blackouts, airplane crashes, failures of medical devices and malfunctioning automotive systems are just a few examples of incidents that affect system safety. They are often due to component failures and unexpected interactions of subsystems under conditions that have not been anticipated during system design and testing. The failure of one component may entail a cascade of failures in other components; several components may also fail independently. In the security domain, localizing instructions and tracking agents responsible for information leakage and other system attacks is a central problem. Determining the root cause(s) of a system-level failure and elucidating the exact scenario that led to the failure is today a complex and tedious task that requires significant expertise. Formal approaches for automated causality analysis, fault localization, explanation of events, accountability and blaming have been proposed independently by several communities - in particular, AI, concurrency, model-based diagnosis, software engineering, security engineering and formal methods. Work on these topics has significantly gained speed during the last years.

The goals of this workshop are to bring together and foster exchange between researchers from the different communities, and to present and discuss recent advances and new ideas in the field. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- foundation of causal reasoning about systems in the philosophy of sciences
- languages and logics for causal specification and causal analysis
- definitions of causality and explanation
- causality analysis on models, programs, and/or traces
- fault localization
- causal reasoning in security engineering
- causality in accident analysis, safety cases and certification
- fault ascription and blaming
- accountability, explainability of algorithms and systems
- applications, implementations, tools and case studies of the above


Submissions

Submissions should be prepared in EPTCS style (http://style.eptcs.org) with a length of up to 15 pages. All contributions must be submitted via the EasyChair submission web site for CREST 2020: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=crest2020. All contributed papers will be reviewed by at least 3 PC members. Revised versions of selected papers will be published as formal post-workshop proceedings in the Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science. At least one of the authors of an accepted paper needs to register for the workshop and present the paper in order for it to be included in the post-workshop proceedings.


Important Dates

Paper submission: Saturday, January 25, 2020
Notifications: Saturday, February 29, 2020
Workshop: April 25, 2020
Papers for post-workshop EPTCS proceedings due: Monday, June 1, 2020


Program Committee

Armen Aghasaryan, Nokia Bell Labs
Ebru Aydin Gol, Middle East Technical University
Georgiana Caltais, University of Konstanz
Hana Chockler, King's College London
Bernd Finkbeiner, Saarbrücken University
Ashish Gehani, SRI International
Gregor Goessler, INRIA
Jean Krivine, CNRS
David Landsberg, University College London (co-chair)
Alexander Pretschner, Technical University of Munich (co-chair)