CREST: 1st Workshop on Causal-based Reasoning for Embedded and safety-critical Systems Technologies
April 8, 2016
Satellite event of ETAPS 2016, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Topic

Today’s IT systems, and the interactions among them, become more and more complex. Power grid blackouts, airplane crashes, failures of medical devices, cruise control devices out of control are just a few examples of incidents 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 such cases, 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. In the security domain, localizing instructions and tracking agents
responsible for information leakage is a central problem.

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, 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:

formal models of causal systems and structures
languages and logics for specification and causal analysis
definitions of causality and explanation
causality analysis on models, programs, and/or traces
fault localization
fault ascription and blaming
accountability
applications, implementations, and case studies of the above

Keynote speaker

Hana Chockler, King’s College, UK (title TBA)
Selection procedure, committees, and organization

All contributed papers will be reviewed by at least 3 PC members. Revised versions of selected papers will be published as formal post-proceedings at EPTCS (approval pending).

The second part of the workshop will be dedicated to a common discussion of a case study and/or a panel on challenges and a longer-term vision of causality analysis in computer science.
Program Committee (under construction):

Salem Benferhat, CRIL – Université d’Artois, France

Hana Chockler, King’s College, UK

Eric Fabre, INRIA, France

Gregor Gössler, INRIA, France (co-chair)

Alex Groce, Oregon State University, USA

Sylvain Hallé, University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, Canada

Joseph Halpern, Cornell University, USA

Stefan Leue, University of Konstanz, Germany

Dejan Nickovic, Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria

Andy Podgurski, Case Western Reserve University, USA

Oleg Sokolsky, University of Pennsylvania, USA (co-chair)

Jean-Bernard Stefani, INRIA, France

Louise Travé-Massuyès, LAAS-CNRS, France

Joost Vennekens, K.U. Leuven, Belgium

Chao Wang, Virginia Tech, USA

Georg Weissenbacher, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Organizers: Gregor Gössler (INRIA, France) and Oleg Sokolsky (U. Pennsylvania, US)
Important Dates:

abstracts due: January 10, 2016
full papers due: January 17, 2016
notification: February 18, 2016
revised papers for pre-proceedings: March 3, 2016
workshop: April 8, 2016
camera ready for post-proceedings: mid-May 2016