Milestones
Establishment of the second "Junior professorship" in the scope of OC in Germany
Establishment of the second "Junior professorship" in the scope of OC in Germany: Second JP Mathias Pacher.
Foundation of the Special Interest Group
Foundation of the Special Interest Group (Fachgruppe) "Organic Computing" of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik - GI) and the Informationstechnische Gesellschaft (ITG)
Foundation of the first full professorship dedicated to OC in Germany
Head Jörg Hähner since 01/2012
Link: https://www.uni-augsburg.de/de/fakultaet/fai/informatik/prof/oc/
The 8th International Conference on Autonomic Computing
The 8th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2011) with special tracks on Organic Computing in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Dagstuhl workshop on Design of Self-Organizing Systems
Design in the classical sense follows a hierarchical top-down constraint propagation starting from a purely functional specification. All eventual environmental influences and disturbances on computing systems have to be anticipated by the designer "design time". Due to this anticipatory nature the resulting system is rigid and not able to sufficiently react to run time events. The consequence of this would mean a replacement of the design process (at design time) to controlled self-organization (at run time). The 2011 OC seminar was held to answer questions resulting from this shift from design time to run time. Is OC a realistic or even desirable vision? How can we replace rigid human design time control by self-adaptive run time control without stifling the creativity of the emergent bottom-up processes? How can we balance top-down control and bottom-up emergence?
Start of priority program
The goal of this priority program is to develop new methods and architectures at system level as to eliminate the effects associated when migrating to new technology nodes like malfuntioning, performance degradation, and increased power consumption.
Start of the FSB
The main idea of invasive computing is to introduce resource-aware programming support in the sense that a given program gets the ability to explore and dynamically spread its computations to neighbor processors similar to a phase of invasion, then to execute portions of code of high parallelism degree in parallel based on the available (invasible) region on a given multi-processor architecture. Afterward, once the program terminates or if the degree of parallelism should be lower again, the program may enter a retreat phase, deallocate resources, and resume execution again, for example, sequentially on a single processor.
Start of the IEEE workshop series on Self-Organizing Real-Time Systems (SORT)
Both self-organizing systems and real-time systems are key technologies in many complex systems (e.g., in the embedded systems area). Combining the flexible and - to some extent - uncertain behavior of self-organizing systems with time-predictability necessary for real-time systems is a grand challenge. The SORT workshop series is meant as a forum for scientists to present and discuss major advances in this area.
Start of research unit (Forschergruppe)
Organic Computing systems differ from classical software systems as the topology of the system and the participating components of the system are not predefined and are subject to unforeseeable change during the system's runtime. Thus, completely new challenges to the verification and validation of such systems as well as for interactions between system components and, of course, the user interface arise. These challenges can be subsumed by the term trustworthiness or trust. Trust encompasses different aspects, as, for example, safety, reliability, credibility, and usability, the investigation of which requires appropriate methods for each case.
Participants: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Reif, Prof. Dr. Theo Ungerer, Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André, Prof. Dr. Christian Müller-Schloer, Prof. Dr. Jörg Hähner
Start of the third phase priority program
The third phase of the priority program shifted its emphasis from research on fundamental insights into the principles of self-organization to the design and experimental investigation of generic concepts for architectures and tools for realizing organic computer systems. The research projects focused on the following topics:
Controlled self-organization in technical systems
Technologies for Organic Computing
Dagstuhl workshop on Controlled Self-organization
Due to increasing complexity we will not be able to explicitly design and manage all intelligent components of a digitally enhanced environment in every detail and anticipate every possible configuration. Therefore, our technical systems will have to act more independently, flexibly, and autonomously. We call such systems "organic". Hence, an "Organic Computer System" is a technical system, which adapts dynamically to the current conditions of its environment. It will be self-organizing, self-configuring, self-healing, self-protecting, self-explaining, and context-aware. This seminar focused on controlled self-organization (SO). The major objective of the seminar was to explore the question "How can we build useful self-organizing systems?".
Start of the second phase of priority program Organic Computing
The second phase of the priority program shifted its emphasis from research on fundamental insights into the principles of self-organization to the design and experimental investigation of generic concepts for architectures and tools for realizing organic computer systems. The research projects focused on the following topics:
Emergent behavior in technical systems
Technologies for Organic Computing
Establishment of the first Junior professorship
Establishment of the first "Junior professorship" in the scope of OC in Germany: First JP Jörg Hähner
Dagstuhl workshop on Controlled Emergence
This Dagstuhl seminar was meant as a forum for scientists from various disciplines working on key aspects of "Organic Computing" or on closely related concepts. The challenge of "Controlled Emergence" is the possible contradiction of free running emergent processes generating new and unexpected results on the one hand, and the requirement of system engineering to design and manage a system with emergent properties in order to guarantee desired system behaviors and to avoid unwanted sideeffects. These problems have been discussed from the perspective of different neighboring disciplines (like physics, chemistry, biology) and computer science with the objective of investigating the applicability of self-organizing and emergent mechanisms to technical systems.
Link: http://www.dagstuhl.de/de/programm/kalender/semhp/?semnr=06031
Start of the first phase of the DFG priority program (SPP)
The first phase of the priority prgram concentrated on research to obtain fundamental insights into the principles of self-organization and to develop a technological basis for Organic Computing systems. Each project focused on one of the following topics:
Emergent behavior in technical systems
Technologies for Organic Computing
2nd OC Philosophy workshop at Kloster Irsee
Definition of four OC beacon projects and cross-sectional OC technologies
1st OC Philosophy workshop at Kloster Irsee
Discussion of basic OC concepts and nomenclature like emergence and self-organization
Foundation of the Organic Computing Initiative
The OC Initiative was announced during a press conference at Hotel Bayerischer Hof, Munich. The conference was led by Peter Börmann (VDE/ITG), Christian Müller-Schloer and Hartmut Schmeck.