Awareness Newsletter 1

issue 1 Spring 2011 newsletter of the awareness proactive initiativewww.aware-project.euAwareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7 Future and Emerging Technologies

awareness newsletter

Contents:All about Awareness

Exchange FundingSummer School

The Projects:ASCENS - Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles

EPICS - Engineering Proprioception in Computing SystemsRECOGNITION - Relevance and cognition for self-awareness in a content-centric Internet

SAPERE - Self-aware Pervasive Service EcosystemsSYMBRION - Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms

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EditorialWelcome to the first issue of the Awareness newsletter. The AWARENESS proactive initiative kicked off in October 2010, with the start of four new exciting research projects, and a new coordination action to oversee coordination and collaboration between the projects. The initiative was also joined by a project already running from a previous proactive initiative on Pervasive Adaptation (SYMBRION), bringing the total number of research projects to five.

As a coordination action, we seek to provide a common forum for cross-disciplinary interactions, by facilitating the exchange of ideas and personnel, and engaging with a wider scientific and technological audience. Building a sustainable and lively research community is central to our endeavours. Publishing this quarterly newsletter is just one of the things we’ll be doing over the next three years to help keep you informed and up to date with the latest goings on in the field of Self-Aware Autonomous Computing. In addition to the newsletter, we’ll be publishing an online magazine, with popular science style articles written by leading researchers and aimed at the informed public as well as academic communities. AWARENESS will also provide training and education through workshops, summer schools and researcher placements – situations for researchers to meet face to face and learn about each other’s work. We’ll also be engaging in road-mapping and agenda-setting activities, and towards the end of the project the community will be publishing a book and a documentary video, chronicling the project’s journey.

Clearly we have a busy three years ahead! The AWARENESS team look forward to meeting as many of you as possible over the course of the initiative, and to working with you to help build a strong and close-knit community of researchers who can push scientific boundaries in our field. We are sure that the journey ahead is going to be an enjoyable one!

Website: www.aware-project.eu

Facebook page: http://tinyurl.com/awareness-facebook

Join the Awareness CommunityWhat is the Awareness community ?

Awareness is a community of researchers that share an interest in ideas and concepts such as; artificial intelligence, network performance, distributed systems, machine learning and artificial consciousness.

What’s in it for me ?

By joining the Awareness community you will become part of a searchable database of Awareness researchers – use to find collaborators. By agreeing to receive mailings, you’ll be sure you are kept up to date with funding deadlines, AWARENESS news, etc, all from a single source

Great! How do I join ?

It’s easy! Just log on to our website www.aware-project.eu and fill in the very short form on our home page just four simple questions to answer which will only take you a minute!

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Awareness Inaugural Meeting Amsterdam December 2010

23 participants from the Awareness Initiative took part in a ‘kick-off’ meeting hosted by Awareness training partners from VU University Amsterdam on the 13th and 14th of December 2010.

On the morning of the 13th the Awareness CA had an Executive meeting. This was followed by an informal lunch involving the CA and the Projects. The afternoon session consisted of introductory presentations by members of the Awareness CA and Coordinators from each Project, setting the groundwork for more indepth discussions the following day. Jeremy Pitt delivered his presentation on the Awareness Magazine & Book and everyone participated in a card-sorting exercise to generate key terms/themes/questions pertinent to Awareness research. In the evening participants got to know each other better over a meal at ‘The Basket’ – an eatery within VU University’s grounds.

The 14th saw participants convene at VU for 9.30am, wherein the Awareness CA presented pitches to the Projects in an informal and participatory manner that elicited valuable feedback from the Projects on what the Awareness CA can do for them. Details of the approach to training where discussed; including the summer school format and timing, presentation of Awareness resources through an iTunes University Application, using blogs and videos to develop an Awareness Roadmap, running workshops alongside conferences that people will already be attending, funding for research

exchanges, utilising the Awareness website as the portal through which interested researchers discover information about Self-awareness in Autonomic Systems and associated topics. The Awareness CA offered their unique and professional skill-base to the Projects in the hope that they can help them and other reserachers to achieve their goals with regards to Awareness research. Project participants offered some useful insights and suggestions as to how the Awareness CA can help them. In the first instance the Awareness community can use the Who’s Who, introductory presentations and card-sorting terms to move things forward.

The meeting was followed by an informal lunch. Members then headed to their respective European homes.

Participants

Matthias Hölzl and Nora Koch from ASCENS,

Ben Paechter, Callum Egan, Emma Hart, Ingi Helgason, Jennifer Willies, Giacomo Cabri, Gusz Eiben, Jeremy Pitt, Martijn Schut and Willem van Willigen from Awareness (CA),

Marco Platzner, Christian Plessl, Rami Bahsoon, Tobias Becker and Stephan Stilkerich from EPiCS,

Roger Whitaker and Walter Colombo from RECOGNITION,

Franco Zambonelli and Andrea Omicini from SAPERE

Serge Kernbach from SYMBRION.

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EPICS Engineering Proprioception in Computing Systems

EPiCS is a trans-national multi-disciplinary research project which aims at laying the foundation for engineering the novel class of proprioceptive computing systems. Proprioceptive computing systems collect and maintain information about their state and progress, which enables self-awareness by reasoning about their behaviour, and self- expression by effectively and autonomously adapt their behaviour to changing conditions. Concepts of self-awareness and self-expression are new to the domains of computing and networking; the successful transfer and development of these concepts will help create future heterogeneous and distributed systems capable of efficiently responding to a multitude of requirements with respect to functionality and flexibility, performance, resource usage and costs, reliability and safety, and security.

Innovations from EPiCS are based on systematic integration of research in concepts and foundations for self-aware and self-expressive systems with novel hardware/software platform technologies and architectures for engineering autonomic compute nodes and networks. EPiCS drives and validates the research by the requirements of three challenging application domains that cover both high-end computers and embedded systems, as well as embeddings into technical and non- technical contexts.

Coordinator: Prof. Marco Platzner, University of Paderborn, Germany.

Consortium:

University of Paderborn, Germany, Imperial College London, United Kingdom, University of Oslo, NorwayKlagenfurt University, Austria, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, EADS Innovation Works Munich, Germany, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology – Safety & Security Department, Austria

ASCENS Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles

Self-aware, self-adaptive and self-expressive autonomic components, running within environments which are called “ensembles”, have been proposed to handle open-ended, highly parallel, massively distributed systems that can span millions of nodes with complex interactions and behaviours. However, these complex systems are currently difficult to develop, deploy, and manage. The goal of the ASCENS project is to build ensembles in a way that combines the maturity and wide applicability of traditional software engineering approaches with the assurance about functional and non-functional properties provided by formal methods and the flexibility, low management overhead, and optimal utilization of resources promised by autonomic, adaptive, self-aware systems.

Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Martin Wirsing , Institut für Informatik

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Consortium

The consortium consists of 12 partners from five EU member states (Germany, Italy, France, Ireland and Belgium) and one non-EU state (Switzerland).

The project is science-driven with seven universities at its core (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Università di Pisa, Università di Firenze, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, University of Limerick, Université Libre de Bruxelles and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) complemented by two research institutes (Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and VERIMAG Laboratory), one large company (Volkswagen AG) and one SME (Zimory). The Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione “A. Faedo” (ISTI), will be involved in the project as Third Party collaborating with Università di Firenze.

Awareness is a Coordination Action (CA), supporting research under the FP7: FET Proactive Intiative: Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems (Awareness). The CA is a 3 year project: 2010 – 2013.

Awareness provide a supportive environment for research into self-awareness in autonomic systems, helping to create a well-connected community of researchers and conveying a coherent prospect to a wider scientific and technological audience. Awareness reaches out to a diverse, multidisciplinary scientific community that researches the domain of Awareness. The five FET funded projects that we support are:

About AwarenessASCENS: Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles

EPICS: Engineering Proprioception in Computing Systems

RECOGNITION: Relevance and cognition for self-awareness in a content-centric Internet

SAPERE: Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems

SYMBRION: Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms (funded by PerAda)

The AWARENESS coordination addresses four fundamental activities: Community Building, Dissemination, Emerging Research Themes, Training

RECOGNITION Relevance and cognition for self-awareness in a content-centric Internet

The RECOGNITION project concerns new approaches for embedding self-awareness in ICT systems. This will be based on the cognitive processes that the human species exhibits for self-awareness, seeking to exploit the fact that humans are ultimately the fundamental basis for high performance autonomic processes. This is due to the cognitive ability of the brain to efficiently assert relevance (or irrelevance), extract knowledge and take appropriate decisions, when faced with partial information and disparate stimuli. Using the psychological and cognitive sciences as concrete inspiration, our approach is to develop functional models of the core cognitive processes that allow humans to assert relevance and achieve knowledge from information. This involves mechanisms such as inference, belief, similarity and trust. These will be translated to the ICT domain by development of flexible RECOGNITION algorithms that can be imbedded in ICT on a flexible basis for self-awareness.

The project aims to demonstrate this new paradigm for Internet content. The future Internet will see ever-increasing amounts of content that needs to be effectively managed and acquired, often from portable devices and in diverse spatial and social situations. The massive scale of content will swamp the user with information, impeding effective management and relevant acquisition by the user. By exploiting the self-awareness capability, the project will enable the users, content and network to cope effectively in a scalable manner, thus making unprecedented amounts of relevant content available and unleashing new classes of applications that extract maximum utility from content.

Coordinator: Prof Roger Whitaker, Cardiff University

Consortium:

Ubiquitous Internet group of the Institute for Informatics and Telematics (IIT), CNR (Italian Research Council), Computer Laboratory, Systems Research Group, University of Cambridge, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Centre for the Study of Complex Dynamics (CSDC), University of Florence, Institut Eurécom, Sophia Antipolis, France.

SYMBRION Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms

Although not funded under the AWARE proactive initiative, SYMBRION has been adopted under the AWARE umbrella. The project started in 2008 under the proactive initiative in Pervasive Adaptive Systems (PerAda). Although PerAda has now ended, Symbrion, as a 5-year project, still has two years to run. Its goals and objective align exactly with that of AWARE, hence its adoption into the AWARE programme. A warm welcome to SYMBRION and all its members from the AWARE community!

The main focus of SYMBRION (in conjunction with REPLICATOR) is to investigate and develop novel principles of adaptation and evolution for symbiotic multi-robot organisms based on bio-inspired approaches and modern computing paradigms. Such robot organisms consist of super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share energy and computational resources within a single artificial-life-form. When it is advantageous to do so, these swarm robots can dynamically aggregate into one or many symbiotic organisms and collectively interact with the physical world via a variety of sensors and actuators. The bio-inspired evolutionary paradigms combined with robot embodiment and swarm-emergent phenomena, enable the organisms to autonomously manage their own hardware and software organization. In this way, artificial robotic organisms become self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting from both hardware and software perspectives.

Consortium:

Universität Stuttgart Germany, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Universität Graz Austria, Artificial Life Lab, Department of Zoology, Vrije Universiteit , Computational Intelligence Group, Universität Karlsruhe , Institute for Process Control and Robotics, Flanders Institute for Biotechnology , Department of Plant Systems Biology , University of the West of England, Bristol ,Bristol Robotics Laboratories, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen , Animal evolutionary ecology University of York , Université Libre de Bruxelles Belgium, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique France INRIA

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SAPERE Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems

The objective of SAPERE is the development of a highly-innovative theoretical and practical framework for the decentralized deployment and execution of self-aware and adaptive services for future and emerging pervasive network

scenarios. The framework will be grounded on a foundational re-thinking of current service models and of associated infrastructures and algorithms. In particular, getting inspiration from natural ecosystems, the project will demonstrate and experiment the possibility of modelling and deploying services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, and of enforcing self-awareness and autonomic behaviours as inherent properties of the ecosystem, rather than as peculiar characteristics of its individuals only.

Coordinator: Franco Zambonelli, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia (Italy)

Consortium:

Université de Genève (Switzerland), University of St Andrews (UK), Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna (Italy), Johannes Kepler Universitaet Linz (Austria)

Summer SchoolWe’re pleased to announce our 1st Awareness Summer School (AWASS 1). The seven day event will be held from in September 2011 in Lucca, Tuscany, Italy.

The event starts on a Sunday the with an informal meal in the evening. This gives attendees the chance to travel on a day that does not disrupt teaching, thus we wrap up on Saturday for the same reason.

The Summer School will be hosted at IMT (Institutions, Markets, Technologies – Lucca).

The following lecturers have already confirmed:

Matthias HolzMarco PlatznerFranco ZambonelliAndrea OmiciniSerge KernbachXin YaoRocco De Nicola

Watch the AWARENESS website for further details on the programme, travel and hotel arrangements (or subscribe to AWARENESS to receive regular mailings

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Exchange FundingAre you a researcher looking to collaborate with another researcher?

Would your Awareness project benefit by sharing ideas with other FET-funded projects?

Have you some experience to share with companies or SMEs?

Would you like to invite an expert from another institution to work with you, or explain their ideas to your own research group?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then Awareness can help you do this!

We can “match-fund” travel and accommodation costs for researchers engaged in research related to self-awareness in autonomic systems, especially if they aim to learn from different disciplines or transfer knowledge between academia and industry. This means we can pay costs as long as the host organisation or the individual visiting researcher makes a similar contribution, either in cash or in kind.

Why are we doing this?

To encourage knowledge exchange by stimulating:

interdisciplinary research

collaborative visits between researchers

visits to companies

research exchanges between organisations

What do you need to do?

1. First read the FAQs - http://www.aware-project.eu/community/funding/

2. Download and complete an application form from the website

3. If you are successful, and your visit is funded, afterwards you will need to complete an evaluation form and provide a short report for the website

4. You will claim expenses after your visit by contacting the Awareness Project Manager who will send you a claim form to complete

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What is it all about?

The Awareness Coordination Action exists to support and promote the work of our project partners: Ascens, Epics, Recognition, Sapere and Symbrion, but wider than this we reach out to the scientific community interested in the practice and theory of building self-aware computing systems.

Tell us about your experience of working with other academic communities and what you have learnt?

I’ve been working on the PerAda project (www.perada.eu) for 3 years which comes to an end in June 2011, and I also built and manage the RLS Website (www.robert-louis-stevenson.org). Both projects have involved expert stakeholders from diverse academic communities with high expectations. I’ve learnt that web content needs to be of a high calibre and up-to-date. Content needs to be linked intelligently throughout the web experience and the tone of a site has to encourage further engagement with the subject. Encouraging users to get in contact – enables the site to grow organically in-line with stakeholders needs. Lastly, optimised content and meta-data makes it easy for interested people to find what they’re seeking, quickly and hassle-free – this lies at the heart of my ten years’ experience of designing and developing web systems.

What is your vision for the Awareness website?

I’d like the Awareness website to be an immersive experience – interweaving: texts, graphics, audio and video with news, comment, opinion and expertise in a way that leaves the user better informed and maybe even enlightened a little. The website needs to make people think, unfold the technological history and inform them of the challenges ahead within the self-aware systems domain.

Can you tell us about some of the things that will be appearing in the future?

The website will continue to develop conduits for social interaction through Twitter and Facebook integrations. The ‘researcher of the week’ spot started recently will be developed into an online gallery. Further down the road with our partners

from VU University we hope to develop an Awareness App for iTunes University and we’re also looking at an Awareness iBook. Future challenges and visions will be compounded into an audio-visual research agenda – pointing the way to beyond 2013.

I’ll be deploying the full range of multimedia tools to the website: audio, video, graphics, photos, animations etc. User-generated content is key to the success of this, so I hope everyone will send me their quality content when they have it. I can really help them to publicise their work if they keep me informed.

How will the website engage with the community and vice versa ?

At present users can contact me ([email protected]) with their suggestions, or use the website contact form, or the who’s who to contact other coordinators. We have a Twitter account (@euawareness) live now, so Twitterers get Twittering! We’ve also set-up a Facebook page which you can get to through the website, and there’s an RSS feed too. The website runs on the Wordpress architecture, so we can switch on commenting when and where people deem it is appropriate. I’d like this to develop organically so please let me know your thoughts. By joining the Awareness community (http://www.aware-project.eu/community/join-us/) – users will receive our occasional mailings containing all the relevant Awareness news. We can of course implement forums etc, but in my experience they too often go underused.

Can the community do anything to help?

‘Content is King’. Send me content and your suggestions anytime. At the very least use our Twitter hashtag (#euawareness) to keep our community informed. Tell your friends and colleagues about our website and ask them to join us!

Website: www.aware-project.eu

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @euawareness

Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/awareness-facebook

In the hotspot: an interview with the Awareness webmaster: Callum EganOver the next few years, we aim to put key players “into the hotspot” to ask them a few questions about what they see as the priorities for Awareness in the next three years. First up – Callum Egan: webmaster and multi-media manager for Awareness.

Introducing the Awareness Team Prof. Ben Paechter (Coordinator)

Prof Ben Paechter is Assistant Dean responsible for research and innovation within his faculty at Edinburgh Napier University. He is PANORAMA/PerAda Coordinator; and was deputy Coordinator of EvoNet and EvoNet II. He was a Principal Investigator of the “Speckled Computing”

consortium of Scottish universities developing “spray on” computers for wireless sensor networks. He coordinated the DREAM project and was the scientific officer in charge of the Metaheuristics Network. He was scientific officer in charge of the NEWTIES project and is an Associate Editor of “Evolutionary Computation” (MIT Press).

Jennifer Willies (Project Manager)

Jennifer Willies is project manager for the PANORAMA/PerAda CA concentrating on community building and bringing diverse research fields in shared activities. As project manager for EvoNet and EvoNet II, she initially developed, and

now continues to, coordinate the annual EvoStar cluster of conferences as self-funding events, receiving the first EvoStar “outstanding services to evolutionary computing” award for community development.

Community Building, Coordination and ManagementProf. Emma Hart (Deputy Coordinator)

Prof Emma Hart is Director of the Centre for Emergent Computing and a world expert in Artificial Immune Systems. She is deputy coordinator of the PANORAMA/PerAda Coordination Action. She was a principal investigator on the EU SIGNAL Project and the nationally funded Hyperheuristics project. She was a lead member of the ARTIST

network of AIS researchers. She is leading research into the use of AISs for self-organisation in wireless sensor networks and adaptive semantic overlay networks.

Callum Egan (Multimedia & Information Design)

Callum worked on the PerAda project (www.perada.eu) for three years as multimedia producer. He also developed and

edits the Robert Louis Stevenson Website (www.robert-louis-stevenson.org) and regularly consults on new media development.

Ingi Helgason (Research and Publicity)

Ingi has worked on the PerAda and Peach Co-ordination Actions, and also teaches technology design with the Open University in the UK. Her research interests

include new-media art and design, public outreach work, and interaction design for public, social spaces. She has an MSc Multimedia and Interactive Systems and is working towards a PhD in Interaction Design.

Emerging Research Themes

Assoc. Prof. Giacomo Cabri, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia.

His current research interests include: distributed systems, complex agent systems, software engineering, mobile computing, and object-oriented programming. He has published more than 100 papers, among which 26 in peer-reviewed international journals, and he has

received 4 best paper awards. He was involved in different national and international research projects, and he was the local coordinator of the MEnSA (Methodology for Enginering of Complex Software systems: Agent-based approach) project.

Dissemination

Dr Jeremy Pitt, Reader in Intelligent Systems, and Deputy Group Head of the ISN Group, Imperial College London

Dr Pitt is well known for his research in computational logic applied to multi-agent systems, and in particular his

contribution to the theory, technology, and standardisation of Agent Communication Languages. He has published over 100 articles in workshops, conferences and journals, often with an emphasis on inter-disciplinary collaboration, in particular with respect to agent societies, affective

computing and complex systems. He was the Project Manager of the highly successful FET project ALFEBIITE, and was Work package Leader of the Public Dissemination work package on the FET Pervasive Adaptation programme’s Coordination Action PANORAMA.

Training

Dr M C Schut, assistant professor in the Computational Intelligence group.

His research investigates self-organisation, social simulation, organisational modelling, self-adaptive evolutionary methods,

decision-theoretic and distributed planning. In particular, he researched evolutionary learning of communication under different cooperation requirements, comparison of distributed versus centralised communication protocols; collective neuro- evolution for collective gathering tasks; combination of life-time and evolutionary

learning.

Prof Dr A E Eiben is one of the European early birds of evolutionary computing.

His first EC paper dates back to 1989. He has been co-organiser or organising committee member of practically all major international evolutionary conferences, and is editorial

board member of all major EC journals. His main research interests relate to evolutionary computing and range from fundamental issues such as reproduction operators and self-calibrating algorithms to applications in engineering collective intelligence, ALife and social simulations, and evolution as enabler of

specialisation in multi-robot systems. He was WPL for training activities in EvoNet I and II.

www.aware-project.eu