2nd International Workshop on Computational Antifragility and Antifragile Engineering

in the framework of the 6th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2015), June 2-5, 2015, London, United Kingdom

LATEST NEWS: PROFESSOR N. N. TALEB TO GIVE THE ANTIFRAGILE KEYNOTE SPEECH !


Resilience may be described as an intended emerging property resulting from the coupling of a system and its environment(s). Depending on the interactions between these two "ends" and on the quality of the individual behaviors that both system and environment(s) may exercise, different strategies may be chosen:

Elasticity (preserving system identity by masking changes);
Entelechism (guaranteeing the identity of the system by tolerating changes);
ANTIFRAGILITY: adapting both the system and its identity so as to best fit a changing environment; and, while doing so, learning how to manage "better" the adaptation processes.


The major focus of this workshop is computational and engineering aspects of antifragility, the term recently introduced
by Professor N. Taleb in his book "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder". Antifragile computing systems are those resilient systems that are

open to their own system-environment fit;
able to exercise complex auto-predictive behaviors;
and that develop wisdom as a result of matches between available strategies and obtained results.


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.

Building atop the very positive response of last year, this second edition of ANTIFRAGILE aims to further enhance the awareness of the above challenges and to continue the initiated discussion on how computer and software engineering may address them. 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 and develop antifragile systems and ambients;
devise conceptual models and paradigms for computational 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;
Verification and validation of resilience and antifragility;
Antifragile and resilient services.


All accepted papers of the previous edition of the workshop are freely available at this page: http://goo.gl/LafdXa.
A detailed description of two of the papers of the previous edition of the workshop,
as well as their presentations, are available at this page: http://goo.gl/wpAcNn
For more information about computational antifragility, please visit also the LinkedIn
group at this page: http://goo.gl/BBSNvj

ANTIFRAGILE is co-located with the 6th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, June 2 - 5, 2015, London, UK (http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-15/). ANTIFRAGILE is likely to take place on June 3 (though this has not been confirmed yet.)


All ANT-2015 accepted papers (thus including the ANTIFRAGILE 2015 papers) will be 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 be indexed by Scopus (www.scopus.com) and 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.

For more information do not hesitate to contact Vincenzo De Florio (vincenzo.deflorio at uantwerpen.be)