As well-known, dependability refers to a system’s trustworthiness and measures several aspects of the quality of its services – for instance how reliable, available, safe, or maintainable those services are. Resilience differs from dependability in that it focuses on the system itself rather that its services; it implies that the system when subjected to faults and changes 1) will continue distributing its services 2) without losing its peculiar traits, its identity: the system will “stay the same”. Antifragility goes one step further and suggests that certain systems could actually “get better”, namely improve their system-environment fit, when subjected (to some system-specific extent) to faults and changes. Recent studies of Professor N. Taleb introduced the concept of antifragility and provided a characterization of the behaviors enacted by antifragile systems. The engineering of antifragile computer-based systems is a challenge that, once met, would allow systems and ambients to self-evolve and self-improve by learning from accidents and mistakes in a way not dissimilar to that of human beings. Learning how to design and craft antifragile systems is an extraordinary challenge whose tackling is likely to reverberate on many a computer engineering field. New methods, programming languages, even custom platforms will have to be designed. The expected returns are extraordinary as well: antifragile computer engineering promises to enable realizing truly autonomic systems and ambients able to meta-adapt to changing circumstances; to self-adjust to dynamically changing environments and ambients; to self-organize so as to track dynamically and proactively optimal strategies to sustain scalability, high-performance, and energy efficiency; to personalize their aspects and behaviors after each and every user. And to learn how to get better while doing it.

The ambition and mission of ANTIFRAGILE is to enhance the awareness of the above challenges and to begin a discussion on how computer and software engineering may address them. As a design aspect cross-cutting through all system and communication layers, antifragile engineering will require multi-disciplinary visions and approaches able to bridge the gaps between “distant” research communities so as to

• propose novel solutions to design and develop antifragile systems and ambients;
• devise conceptual models and paradigms for antifragility;
• provide analytical and simulation models and tools to measure systems ability to withstand faults, adjust to new environments, and enhance their resilience in the process;
• foster the exchange of ideas and lively discussions able to drive future research and development efforts in the area.


The main topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:
• Conceptual frameworks for antifragile systems, ambients, and behaviours;
• Dependability, resilience, and antifragile requirements and open issues;
• Design principles, models, and techniques for realizing antifragile systems and behaviours;
• Frameworks and techniques enabling resilient and antifragile applications;
• Antifragile human-machine interaction;
• End-to-end approaches towards antifragile services;
• Autonomic antifragile behaviours;
• Middleware architectures and mechanisms for resilience and antifragility;
• Theoretical foundation of resilient and antifragile behaviours;
• Formal modeling of resilience and antifragility;
• Programming language support for resilience and antifragility;
• Machine learning as a foundation of resilient and antifragile architectures;
• Antifragility and resiliency against malicious attacks;
• Antifragility and the Cloud;
• Service Level Agreements for Antifragility;
• Antifragile and resilient services.


ANTIFRAGILE is co-located with the 5th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, June 2 - 5, 2014, Hasselt, Belgium (http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-14/).
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: January 4, 2014.
Review reports sent to authors: March 1, 2014
Final submission deadline: April 4, 2014
Workshop date: day to be scheduled in [June 2, June 5], 2014


Submission information:
Accepted papers will appear in the Proceedings of the ANT Conference, published by Elsevier in their Series "Procedia Computer Science".

Formatting instructions and templates are available at http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-14/#paperSubmissions.

Maximum number of pages is 6.

Submissions will be managed through Easychair via the following URL: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=antifragile2014.

Outstanding papers presented at the workshops, after further revision, will be considered for publication in special issues of renowned international journals.

Programme Committee:
CHAIR: Vincenzo De Florio, PATS/Universiteit Antwerpen and PATS/iMinds, Antwerp, Belgium

Abraham Ajith, MIR Labs & Southern Illinois University, USA
Mohamed Bakhouya, School of Engineering, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
Enrico Barbierato, Oracle, Pavia, Italy
Maher Ben Jemaa, National School of Engineering of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia
Gabriella Caporaletti, EICAS Automazione, Torino, Italy
Llorenç Cerdà-Alabern, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Walid Chainbi, University of Sousse, Tunisia
Andrea Clematis, CNR - IMATI, Genova, Italy
Antonio Coronato, Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking, Italian National Research Council, Naples, Italy
Masoud Daneshtalab, University of Turku, Finland
Jose Luis de la Vara, Simula Research Laboratory, Lysaker, Norway
Tom Dhaene, INTEC / University of Ghent, Belgium
Felicita Di Giandomenico, ISTI Institute, Italian National Research Council, Pisa, Italy
Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Masoumeh Ebrahimi, University of Turku, Finland
Fernando Ferri, Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies, Rome, Italy
Jaafar Gaber, Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard, Belfort, France
Cristina Gacek, Centre for Software Reliability, City University London, London, UK
Matteo Gagliolo, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
Liang Guang, University of Turku, Finland
Muddesar Iqbal, University of Gujrat, Gujrat, Pakistan
Kennie H. Jones, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, U.S.A.
Eija Kaasinen, VTT, Finland
Bryan Knowles, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky, U.S.A.
Marc Leeman, BARCO, Belgium
Levi Lúcio, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
Danilo Mandic, Imperial College, London, UK
Leo G Marcus, The Aerospace Corporation, U.S.A.
Gianluca Mazzini, University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy
Daniele Miorandi, CREATE-NET, Trento, Italy
Thabo Mophiring, Emanation, Johannesburg, South Africa
Ethiopia Nigussie, University of Turku, Finland
George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Greece
Eric Pardede, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia
Nearcos Paspallis, UCLan Cyprus, Larnaca, Cyprus
Juha Plosila, University of Turku, Finland
Massimiliano Rak, Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, Aversa, Italy
Philipp Reinecke, Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Matthieu Roy, Dependability Group, LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Francesca Saglietti, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
Kathleen Spaey, PATS group, Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
Basile Starynkevitch, CEA LIST Institute, Paris, France
Lorenzo Strigini, Centre for Software Reliability, City University London, London, UK
Hong Sun, AGFA healthcare, Ghent, Belgium
David Taniar, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
Gianluca Tempesti, Department of Electronics, University of York, York, UK
Dora Varvarigou, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Eric Verhulst, Altreonic, Belgium
Xinheng Wang, University of the West of Scotland, UK
Katinka Wolter, Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Yan Zhang, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway

NEWS! Dr. Kennie H. Jones from NASA kindly agreed to give a keynote speech at ANTIFRAGILE 2014. Dr. Jones will report about the role that antifragile engineering is playing within NASA and how this research direction may provide an answer to the design challenges of large and complex reliable systems.