Conferences and Workshops

Complexity in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is still increasing, driven by the growing number of devices with vast amounts of computational resources. These systems also increasingly interwoven into the very fabric of society, playing a role in how we connect together and socialize, how we move, work, and do business, and considering the role of technology in the spread of information, even what we know. As a result, the control of these systems is polycentric and necessarily complex and adaptive. Approaches for control and governance go way beyond traditional notions of central administration, which we note is often simply impossible for human operators.

Based on these insights, a growing movement considers the necessity of capabilities that allow these systems to successfully act and survive in such complex, real environments – they are supposed to be 'lifelike'.

Inspired by organic systems, our future socio-technical and cyber-physical systems also need to exhibit such characterizing self-x properties. Research initiatives such as Organic Computing, Autonomic Computing as well as Self-aware Computing all share the common goal of understanding and engineering technical-systems capable of dealing with uncertainty due to continually changing and highly dynamic environments.

Characterized by lifelike, or self-x properties such as being highly distributed and thereby acting self-motivated, self-organizing, self-adaptive, self-improving, self-healing, etc., Lilelike Computing systems foster a paradigm shift regarding their design and deployment. As a result, the vision of Organic and Autonomic Computing manifests itself – traditional design-time decisions are moved to the productive runtime and, thus, the systems themselves take over control. Although this would dramatically increase the degree of system autonomy, it also satisfies the conditions for emergence occuring. This aspect, however, should be envisioned as a double-edged sword, since emergent effects can be beneficial but also detrimental; at least for our technical computing systems. In any case, technical systems mus comply with necessary safety boundaries apparent in nearly any real-world application with humans involved. Therefore, we deem Lifelike Computing Systems as urgendtly required to self-explanatory!

This workshop is intendet to provide a forum for discussing the implications and new insights from adopting Artificial Life principles to technical computing systems acting in real-world environments. Additionally, we explicitly emphasize the aspects of interpretability and explainability of the involved algorithms in order to provide a basis for system transparency already at the core of its mechanisms. Besides this self-explanatory property, further key ingredients to reach a specific level of intelligence are self-awareness and the resulting ongoing pursuit for continual self-improvement by means of learning and optimization.

LIFELIKE website: https://www.lifelikecs.organic-computing.de/

Information and communication technology (ICT) pervades every aspect of our daily lives. This inclusion changes our communities and all of our human interactions. It also presents a significant set of challenges in correctly designing and integrating our resulting technical systems. For instance, the embedding of ICT functionality in more and more devices (such as household appliances or thermostats) leads to novel interconnections and a changing structure of the overall system. Not only technical systems are increasingly coupled, a variety of previously isolated natural and human systems have consolidated into a kind of overall system of systems – an interwoven system structure.

This change of structure is fundamental and affects the whole production cycle of technical systems – standard system integration and testing is not feasible any more. The increasingly complex challenges of developing the right type of modelling, analysis, and infrastructure for designing and maintaining ICT infrastructures has continued to motivate the self-organising, autonomic and organic computing systems community.

In this workshop, we intend to study novel approaches to system of system integration and testing by applying self-* principles; specifically we want approaches that allow for a continual process of self-integration among components and systems that is self-improving and evolving over time towards an optimised and stable solution.

SISSY website: https://sissy.telecom-paristech.fr/
(SISSY started as an annual meeting in the year 2014, older websites are not available anymore.)

Initiatives such a Autonomic Computing (AC) and Organic Computing (OC) are based on the insight that we are increasingly surrounded by large collections of autonomous systems, which are equipped with sensors and actuatros, aware of their environment, communicating freely, and organising themselves in order to perform the required actions and services. The presence of networks of intelligent systems in our environment opens fascinating application areas but, at the same time, bears the problem of their controllability.

Hence, different design concepts (such as the MAPE cycle and the Observer/Controller framework) have been developed to allow for a self-organised control process at runtime that relieves the designer from specifying all possibly occurring situations and configurations within the design process. Instead, the system itself takes over responsibility to find proper reactions on perceived changes in the environmental conditions. As designers are not able to foresee all possibly occurring situations and circumstances the system will face during its operation time, the self-organisation process of the system has to focus on self-optimising the system's behavior. Such self-optimising behavior can be achieved at various levels of the system's design, ranging from basic control architectures over self-organised coordination or collaboration methods and domain-specific optimisation techniques to the application and customisation of machine learning algorithms. Furthermore, several related topics (e.g. trust and security in collaborative systems) provide necessary functionality to enable self-optimisating behavior in AC and OC systems.

Since 2020, SAOS's continues as LIFELIKE workshop.

The intent of the DDC is to bring together PhD students who have their research focus within the broader Organic Computing community and not have defended their thesis. The main goal of this colloquium is to foster excellence in OC-related research by providing students with feedback and advice that are particularly relevant to their doctoral studies and career development. Each participant will take part in the colloquium organisation and the review process for the other participants. Keynote speakers will present current research in the field. They will be available during the OC-DDC and participate in the feedback process for the PhD students.

OC-DDC 2023: https://sites.google.com/view/ocddc-2023
OC-DDC 2022: https://sites.google.com/view/ocddc-2022
OC-DDC 2021: http://ocddc2021.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/
OC-DDC 2020: http://ocddc2020.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/
OC-DDC 2019: http://ocddc2019.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/
(OC-DDC started as an annual meeting in the year 2014, older websites are not available anymore.)

During the past decade, many different research communities have explored the aspects of (self-)adaptation in pervasive computing (PerCom) systems or related system domains, such as Organic/Autonomic Computing, SASO systems (self-adaptive systems and self-organizing systems), or Self-aware Computing Systems. Those systems often integrate nature- or biologically inspired approaches to adjust the systems resources to changes in the dynamic environment and to establish robustness against disturbances.

The Workshop on Adaptive, Learning PervAsive Applications (ALPACA) provides a forum to foster interaction and collaboration between the research communities of adaptive, learning and pervasive computing systems, raising the awareness about related research efforts and synergies that can be exploited to advance the state of the art. ALPACA takes place in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).

ALPACA website: https://sites.google.com/view/alpaca-workshop

The SOCO workshop is on self-organised construction. We want to cumulate, present, discuss, and advance new research results from theory and practice, as well as novel scientific concepts and methodologies. Originally inspired by nest construction in social insects, the general concept relies on a large number of agents that coordinate their construction efforts by prompting and reacting to local stimuli. Recently, with the wake of robotic swarms and novel material processing approaches – for instance 3D printing techniques and innovative deployment of carbon fibres – self-organising construction is quickly gaining tremendous transformative significance in the context of various design and construction processes. The relevant research areas include: autonomous construction, maintenance, supervision, and renovation of buildings and infrastructure, as well as biological nest construction, fundamental models and robotic control methods, structural engineering, architectural design, industrial assembly, landscape architecture, and city infrastructure. Our focus is on the design and management of self-organising construction from a computational perspective. We especially would like to encourage vision papers, presenting challenges for the future of self-organised construction. To expand the scope, compared to the previous editions of the workshop, we encourage participation from industry and will include two invited industry talks.

SOCO website: https://www.selforganisedconstruction.org/