Awareness Slides Factory

Introduction As part of the activities and events organised by Awareness, we have organised in 2012 a Slides Factory with the objective of producing slides covering a wide range of subjects relevant to (self-)awareness in autonomic systems. This event was the first attempt to build a solid body of knowledge for two training events: a layman seminar and an academic course. The Slides Factory took place in Barcelona on September 24-26, 2012. Besides the 3 organisers from the VU University Amsterdam (Nivea Ferreira, Mark Hoogendoorn and Gusz Eiben), these were the participants:

Giacomo Cabri

Rene Doursat

Jose Luis Fernandez Marquez

Jose Halloy

Peter Lewis

Jeremy Pitt

Mark Read

Alan Winfield

Martin Wirsing

Our aim was to cover various angles and approaches of self-awareness in autonomic systems. For this purpose, the Slides Factory participants were chosen based on their (different) research experience and interests. The great collaborative process among participants resulted in two complete sets of slides. Slides topics were chosen in accordance with the targetted audience. For the layman seminar, we have a more generic set of topics, making use of comprehensible terms and definitions. Giving its character, the academic course goes much deeper on 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. All slides on this set were produced by all Slides Factory participants.

Layman Seminar Outline

1. Introductory examples

a. Robotics

b. autonomic systems (robots swarm, science cloud, cooperative e-vehicles)

c. networks (communication networks, power networks)

2. Motivation (self-* properties)

3. "Definition" / circumscription of

a. autonomic systems

b. self-awareness

4. Summary of existing research projects + issues tackled by these

5. Existing "self-aware" systems (sources of inspiration) –

a. in nature

b. man-made

6. Some related general properties

a. different levels of awareness (quality)

b. collectivity / swarm / distributedness

c. perception (sensing data + context)

d. (internal) model

7. Impact short / long term

a. Safety

b. sustainable future

c. philosophical issues

8. Research Questions & Challenges

Slides Set II – Industry Training The industry training is a set of 4 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.

Industry Training Outline (4 lectures)

1. A comprehensible introduction to self-awareness in autonomic systems

2. Self-awareness in autonomic systems: general properties, impact and open issues

3. Simulation tools and existing platforms for self-awareness

4. Self-awareness in autonomic systems: applications and research

Note that we have chosen not to include a detailed account on the design and engineering of self-aware autonomic systems in this set. However, this does not impose any restriction on the level of training that can be given: anyone interested in providing more details regarding various design and engineering approaches can make use of the academic lectures created for this purpose. The academic course content is given next.

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.

Each lecture was produced by one (up to three) participant(s). The name of the one(s) responsible for a specific lecture is clearly noted on the slides.

Academic Course Outline (13 lectures)

1. Self-awareness and computational self-awareness

2. Self-organization and emergence in networked systems

3. Autonomic multi-agent systems

4. Introduction to complex systems and agent-based modeling

5. Overview of methods for engineering autonomic self-aware systems - AIS, EC

6. Morphogenetic engineering

7. Introduction to formal engineering of autonomic systems

8. Pattern-based design of autonomic systems

9. Simulation tools and existing platforms for self-awareness

10. On-line adaptation, learning, and evolution

11. Systems with internal models

12. Safety and ethics of self-awareness

13. Applications of and challenges in self-awareness

Using the Slides Factory Material

Anyone can have access to the slides either through the Awareness website (under Training, Slides Factory 2012) or our Awareness App.

The researchers who took part in the Slides Factory are the ones responsible for such a great slides production effort. Even though they all agree that slides should be publicly available, we feel that their names should be mentioned when slides from either the layman seminar or academic course are used.

Therefore, we kindly ask that anyone making use of (all or part of) the available slides to mention which person(s) was/were involved in the design of such slides. And also mention that these were made available under the Training materials of the Awareness CA initiative.