Call for Workshops

The workshops at ACSOS 2023 provide a forum for groups of 20-50 participants to present and discuss novel research ideas on autonomic computing, self-adaptive, and self-organizing systems. Workshops can take on a number of forms, including but not limited to being organized around emerging research areas, challenging problems, and industrial applications.

Important Dates

Workshop proposal submission deadline:  April 1st, 2023 (extended)
Workshop acceptance notification:       April 7th, 2023
Workshop call for papers online:        April 28th, 2023
Workshops dates:                        TBD (expected Sept. 25th and Sept. 29th, 2023)

We will have an ongoing evaluation of the proposals after their submissions (i.e., workshops might be accepted before the acceptance notification).

Workshop Proposals

Proposals for workshops should be organized as a preliminary call for papers or call for participation, depending on the intended format of the workshop, with a maximum of two pages and contain the following information:

• Title of the workshop.
• A brief technical description of the workshop, specifying the workshop goals, the technical issues that it will address, and the relevance of the workshop to the main conference. * The names, affiliations, phone numbers, and email addresses of the proposed workshop organizing committee. We strongly encourage the organizing committee to consist of at least two people coming from multiple institutions knowledgeable about the technical issues to be addressed.
• The primary email address(es) for contacting the organizing committee.
• Expected duration of the workshop (half or full day).
• A brief description of the workshop format.
• The workshop deadlines, both internal and external, aligned with the ACSOS timeline.
• Description of the paper review process and acceptance standards in order to keep the workshop high in quality. Accepted workshop papers will be published in the proceedings and submitted for inclusion to IEEE Xplore. Papers must thus be in the same format as the conference proceedings and may not be more than 6 pages in length. Workshop organizers must ensure that suitable quality measures have been taken. All papers must be reviewed by an International Technical Program Committee with a minimum of 3 reviews per paper.
• List of potential program committee members, including their titles and affiliations.
• List of potential invited speakers, panelists, or disputants.

Please also provide the following information (not restricted to the two pages for the above proposal):

• Information about previous offerings of the proposed workshop: when and where it has been offered in the past, names and affiliations of organizers, number of submissions, acceptances, and number of registered and present attendees. Note: This is for workshops that are in their second edition or later.
• Expected number of submissions, accepted papers, and attendees (for all workshops).

For new workshops, which would be in the first edition if accepted, please also provide the following (not restricted to the two pages for the above proposal):

• List of researchers/practitioners who would be likely to submit a paper to the workshop.

Workshop proposals should be sent as a pdf via email to workshops@acsos.org.

Camera Ready Submission for Companion Proceedings

STEP 1: Important Dates

• At least one author per paper must early pay the registration fee by August 5, 2023.
• Failure to register will result in your paper not being included in the proceedings.
• Final camera-ready manuscripts must be submitted by August 5, 2023.

STEP 2: Page Limits

As defined by the CFP of the corresponding workshop

Please note: Extra pages are not accepted.

STEP 3: Formatting Your Paper

• Submitted abstracts should not exceed 200 words.
• Final submissions to ACSOS 2023 must be formatted in US-LETTER page size, must use the two-column IEEE conference proceedings format, and must be prepared in PDF format. Microsoft Word and LaTeX templates are available at the IEEE “Author Submission Site” HERE. The templates are available on the left-hand-side tab “Formatting Your Paper”.
• Please, DO NOT include headers/footers or page numbers in the final submission.

STEP 4: Submitting Your Final Version

• Once the format of your paper has been verified and validated, you may submit your final version.
• All papers should be submitted using the submission system provided by IEEE “Author Submission Site” HERE.
• After you login to the IEEE “Author Submission Site”, please, follow the instructions as you click the “Next” button on the top right corner of the site. Please, enter the following information exactly as appeared on your paper:

  1. Paper ID (CODES BELOW(Workshops track) - Paper ID from EasyChair, eg. WMRT-4279)

     a. WSISSY: Workshop on Self-Improving Systems Integration

     b. WSASSO: International Workshop on Sustainable and Scalable Self-Organisation

     c. WMRT: International Workshop on Models@run.time: in the Era of Emerging Computing Paradigms

     d. WAI4AS: International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous computing Systems

     e. ASMECC: 1st Workshop on Autonomic and Self-* Management for the Edge-Cloud Continuum

  2. Names of authors, affiliations, countries, E-mail addresses,

  3. Titles, and abstracts.

• To submit your final manuscript click HERE.

STEP 5: Submitting a Signed Copyright Release Form

• ACSOS 2023 requires users to submit a fully digital version of the electronic IEEE Copyright-release Form (eCF). eCF is provided at the IEEE “Author Submission Site”.
• Follow the instructions in the IEEE “Author Submission Site” to properly fill-out, and submit the IEEE Copyright-release Form (eCF), including:
  1. Paper’s full title
  2. All authors names
  3. Conference title: 2023 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS)
  4. Signature (on appropriate line)

• The signed IEEE Copyright-release Form (eCF) should be submitted together with your camera-ready manuscripts on August 5th, 2023.

If you have any questions about the above procedures, please contact the Proceedings Chair Norha Villegas (nvillegas@icesi.edu.co)

Note: Extra pages are not allowed. Please complete each of the above steps - the conference organizers will not be responsible if your paper is omitted from the proceedings, is not available online on IEEE Xplore, or is subject to additional processing costs, if these steps are not performed.

List of Workshops

The 4th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2023) will be accompanied by the following workshops:

• 10th Workshop on Self-Improving Systems Integration (SISSY)
• First International Workshop on Sustainable and Scalable Self-Organisation (SaSSO)
• 16th International Workshop on Models@run.time: in the Era of Emerging Computing Paradigms
• First International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous computing Systems (AI4AS)
• 1st Workshop on Autonomic and Self-* Management for the Edge-Cloud Continuum (ASMECC)

10th Workshop on Self-Improving Systems Integration (SISSY)

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 are technical systems increasingly coupled, but also numerous previously isolated natural and human systems have merged 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.

Integration is more than just putting things together. Consequently, this workshop intends to study novel approaches to system-of-systems integration, maintenance and testing by applying self-* principles. Specifically, we seek approaches that allow for a continual process of self-integration among components and systems that are self-improving and evolving over time towards an optimised and stable solution.

Workshop organizers:

• Lukas Esterle
• Kirstie Bellman
• Ada Diaconescu
• Sven Tomforde

More information can be found on the workshop’s website: https://sissy.telecom-paristech.fr/

First International Workshop on Sustainable and Scalable Self-Organisation (SaSSO)

The goal of this inter-disciplinary workshop is to address two contrasting pairs of inter-related research questions:

• firstly, the sustainability of self-organisation, given the features of path dependency (where prior decisions significantly constrain present choices); the iron law of oligarchy which identifies the tendency of self-organisation to slide into oligarchy; and the avoidance of tyranny at the core of Ober’s Basic Democracy;
• secondly, and conversely, self-organisation for sustainability, building on the pioneering work of Ostrom’s self-governing institutions for common-pool resource management, but also considering self-sustainability, e.g. in the form of cooperative survival dilemmas;
• thirdly, scalability of self-organisation, for example as the number of components in a system changes over time, how are structures and processes for decision-making, dispute resolution and monitoring affected by such changes, even with new ‘generations’; and
• fourthly, and conversely, self-organisation for scalability, both for pro-active management of anticipated growth or contraction, but also how the values or incentives implied by self-organised rules change over time (the rule-based equivalent of concept drift).

Workshop organizers:

• Ada Diaconescu
• Peter Lewis
• Jeremy Pitt

More information can be found on the workshop’s website: https://amertzani.github.io

16th International Workshop on Models@run.time: in the Era of Emerging Computing Paradigms

The vision of eternal software systems, which are meant to run forever, raises the need for self-adaptation techniques, to adjust the running system to its changing environment while meeting their goals and requirements uninterruptedly. In other words, software is required (i) to reflect on itself and its environment and (ii) to therefore, adjust itself accordingly.

To enable these features, systems need to keep the appropriate information and offer systematic ways for processing it. The models@run.time paradigm proposes to use modeling techniques to capture and process this information using run-time models, i.e., models representing a view on the current state of the system. By this, models@runtime is an enabler of current and future software systems, having the property of being self-adaptive or self-organizing, in different domains such as cyber-physical systems, cloud computing and big data, to name but a few.

Models@run.time bridges the gap between research on reflection and adjustment of systems at runtime with research on model-driven software development, which traditionally focused on the design phase of software systems. On the one hand side, the model-driven software development community provides a variety of approaches to support or enable the construction and operation of systems reflecting upon themselves using a mixture of runtime and design time models. On the other hand side, the application of modeling techniques at runtime poses new challenges for the model-driven software development community. For example, the question of how much time is available for a model transformation, which is meant to optimize the system’s performance.

Workshop organizers:

• Sebastian Götz
• Nelly Bencomo

More information can be found on the workshop’s website: http://st.inf.tu-dresden.de/MRT23/

First International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous computing Systems (AI4AS)

Modern computing systems are large and heterogeneous. Their complexity is hardly manageable by a human being, especially when it comes to take timely decisions in highly dynamic environments or to guarantee strict Quality-of-Service requirements. Not surprisingly, recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) significantly impacted and fostered the development of autonomous computing systems, providing new or enhanced methodologies to cope with system complexity and uncertainty. AI and ML techniques are increasingly adopted to assist or guide system self-adaptation, as they are used, e.g., to extract relevant information from highly-dimensional and noisy monitoring data, to predict internal or external dynamics, to automatically plan adaptation actions.

However, there are still several challenges to face for researchers and practitioners aiming to take advantage of these methodologies and incorporate them in their systems. Fundamental issues towards the applicability of AI and ML techniques across diverse domains must be investigated, especially as regards the accuracy, robustness, explainability, safety, security, performance and sustainability of AI-driven autonomous computing systems.

Workshop organizers:

• Gabriele Russo Russo
• Valeria Cardellini
• Stefano Iannucci

More information can be found on the workshop’s website: https://ai4as.github.io

1st Workshop on Autonomic and Self-* Management for the Edge-Cloud Continuum (ASMECC)

The edge-cloud computing continuum is a paradigm enabling distributed/pervasive computing and networking to support a variety of novel ICT-based applications and services. It represents a deployment target and a management plane for the software elements (components, microservices, functions) making up modern distributed applications. The heterogeneity, pervasiveness, dynamism, and interplay with applications, that characterise the cloud-edge continuum provide significant opportunities and challenges, in terms of operational flexibility and efficiency. A major challenge lies in supporting the automatic management of applications while respecting and opportunistically optimising against the set of constraints, requirements, and preferences indicated by applications, users, owners, and providers. Edge-cloud continua have to become intelligent, embedding cognitive-like capabilities for monitoring, reasoning, planning, and acting on infrastructures and applications.

A number of specific issues arise, requiring novel ideas and techniques to be developed. For instance, how can MAPE-K architectures be adapted to work on the edge-cloud continuum? How may learning be exploited to refine dynamic deployment policies or anticipate changes? How can the learned models be explained? What programming models can be used to adequately express application logic independently of its deployment across the continuum? What formal specification languages can support architectural descriptions while enabling analysis of properties of interest? How can the infrastructure vertically/horizontally self-organise into resilient structures supporting connectivity and distributed task allocation? How to promote sustainability, energy/resource-efficiency and carbon-awareness across the edge-cloud continuum?

Workshop organizers:

• Roberto Casadei
• Lukas Esterle
• Stefano Forti

More information can be found on the workshop’s website: https://asmecc-workshop.github.io/2023/

We are proud to have two keynotes within our workshops:

• Heather Love (University of Waterloo) — Feedback Loops, Black Boxes, and Self-Reflexivity: Tracing Cybernetics’ Cultural Lineage and Ecological Implications
• Sherif Abdelwahed (Virginia Commonwealth University) — A Journey into Integrating Machine Learning and Model-Based Techniques for CPS Autonomy

Heather Love (University of Waterloo) — Feedback Loops, Black Boxes, and Self-Reflexivity: Tracing Cybernetics’ Cultural Lineage and Ecological Implications @SaSSO/ASMECC

Abstract: Cybernetics theorists such as Norbert Wiener, W. Ross Ashby, and Gregory Bateson are often heralded as the “fathers” of cybernetics thanks to their technically oriented work on (respectively) feedback mechanisms, black-box models, and second-order, self-reflexive orientations to information networks. In this talk, Heather A. Love invites attendees to consider an alternative “origin story” to the cybernetic movement—one that boasts a longer and more diverse cultural history rooted in early twentieth-century literary experimentation. Drawing from analyses that appear in her new book, Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data(Cambridge University Press, 2023), Love will present a case study that triangulates Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde, ethnographic writing about American culture in the 1930s, Margaret Mead’s 1968 keynote on the “Cybernetics of Cybernetics” (which she presented to the American Society of Cybernetics), and Mary Catherine Bateson’s deeply personal works of cultural anthropology from the 1990s. All three authors embrace cybernetically inflected attitudes towards scale and perspective; in doing so, Love argues, they generate insights that resonate with ongoing questions concerning the complex socio-technical systems we inhabit and the urgency of grappling with those systems’ environmental, geological, and global implications.

Biography: Heather A. Love is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, where she conducts interdisciplinary research and teaches courses on topics related to communication in STEM disciplines, literature and culture, technology and health, and engineering ethics education. This work has been funded by several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grants.
Love’s is author of Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data (2023, Cambridge University Press), and her work on modernist literature and on the cultural and intellectual history of cybernetics has appeared or is forthcoming in both literary studies venues (Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Literature, Feminist Modernist Studies, New Literary History) and more tech- and education-focused publications (IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, The Routledge Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education).
Dr. Love holds a B.Mus. in Piano Performance (2005) and B.A. in Honours English (2006) from the University of Victoria, an M.A. in English (2007) from Queen’s University, and a Ph.D. (2015) in English from Indiana University. She is Member-at-Large on the Board of Governors for the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), an IEEE TechEthics Ambassador, IEEE/SSIT Representative to the National Institute for Engineering Ethics (NIEE), and Associate Editor for the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (TSM).

Sherif Abdelwahed (Virginia Commonwealth University) — A Journey into Integrating Machine Learning and Model-Based Techniques for CPS Autonomy @AI4AS

Abstract: The realm of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is rapidly evolving, with increasing demands for systems that possess not only automation and intelligence but also the capability to autonomously manage themselves in dynamic environments. This presentation delves into the synergistic integration of machine learning (ML) and model-based techniques as a novel approach to address the complexities of designing self-managing CPS. This presentation explores the fusion of machine learning (ML) and model-based techniques in the design of self-managing cyber-physical systems (CPS). By combining domain knowledge and data-driven insights, this integrated approach enhances CPS autonomy, adaptability, and decision-making. The talk covers real-world applications, benefits, challenges, and strategies for achieving synergy between ML and model-based methods. Attendees will gain insights into the evolving landscape of CPS design, learning how to create more sophisticated and self-managing systems through this collaborative paradigm.

Biography: Sherif Abdelwahed is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where he teaches and conducts research in the area of computer engineering, with specific interests in autonomic computing, cyber-physical systems, formal verification and cyber-security. Before joining VCU in August 2017, he served as the associate director of the Distributed Analytics and Security Institute at Mississippi State University (MSU). He was also is also an Associate Professor in the ECE Department at MSU. He received his Ph.D in 2002 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. Throughout his academic tenure, Dr. Abdelwahed pioneered work on model-based design of autonomic computing systems and self-managing systems using control-theoretic techniques and model-integrated computing concepts. His research interests also include Cyber security and model-based self-protection, design and analysis of cyber-physical systems, fault diagnosis, modeling and analysis of discrete-event and hybrid systems, and formal verification. Dr. Abdelwahed has chaired several international conferences and conference tracks, and has served as technical committee member at various national and international conferences. He received the StatePride Faculty award for 2010 and 2011, the Bagley College of Engineering Hearin Faculty Excellence award in 2010, and the 2016 Faculty Research Award from the Bagley College of Engineering at MSU. He has more than 180 publications and is a senior member of the IEEE.