Self-Awareness in Computing Workshop

27th June 2011, University of Birmingham

On 27th June, Cercia hosted a workshop on Self-Awareness in Computing. Here are details of the day.

Workshop Scope

As the development of computing systems continues, they are increasingly being composed of large numbers of heterogeneous components, each with potentially different goals or local perspectives, and connected in networks whose topologies change over time. Management of such systems quickly becomes infeasible for humans. As such, future computing systems, from robots to personal music devices to web services, should be able to achieve advanced levels of autonomous behaviour, in order to manage and adapt themselves. Nevertheless, users still expect high performance, reliability, security and other qualities.

In order for a system to effectively manage itself and adapt to changing circumstances, the system's ability to be self-aware becomes important. Self-awareness is concerned with the availability and collection of knowledge about a system by that system. The presence of such knowledge permits reasoning and intelligent decision making, which can support effective, autonomous adaptive behaviour.

In realising self-awareness in computing systems, contributions from many disciplines will be required; amongst them are psychology, philosophy, economics, complexity science, artificial and computational intelligence and electronic and software engineering. This workshop aims to bring together representatives of these fields and those working on building novel self-aware computing systems. It provides a forum for discussion of challenges in realising self-aware machines and likely fruitful directions for research.

Invited Speakers

Name Affiliation Title of Talk
Martijn Schut VU University, Amsterdam Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems
Aaron Sloman University of Birmingham Varieties of Self-Awareness and their Uses in Natural and Artificial Systems
Milton Martinez Luaces Politechnic University of Madrid A Neural Network Model of Self-Representation for Autonomous Agents in Competitive Multi-agent Systems
Kyrre Glette University of Oslo Self-Awareness in Hypermusic
Licia Capra UCL, London Self-Adaptation of Online Recommender Systems via Feed-Forward Controllers
Serge Kernbach University of Stuttgart Achieving Self-Awareness in Collective Systems
Some photos of the event will be added shortly.