The 2021 Special Session on Cyber Resilience and Antifragility in Complex Distributed Systems (CyRA 2021) will be part of the 3rd International Workshop on Self-Protecting Systems (SPS’21). It will be held in conjunction with the 2nd International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2021), which will be taking a virtual format from 27 September to 1 October 2021.

Call for Papers:

From inter-connected medical devices, traffic lights and autonomous vehicles, to air-traffic control systems, data centres and large-scale enterprise applications, software systems of varying levels of complexity are increasingly being used to either control or support essential business services and operations. Ongoing advances in various edge-oriented computing paradigms, inclusive of the Internet of Things (IoT), Edge computing, Fog computing, and others, have served to significantly increase the complexity and ubiquity of these software systems (indeed, the IoT paradigm can be seen as an evolution of ubiquitous computing from the 1990s), and, as a result of this, to make them more critical. Given their criticality, in addition to being able to resist malicious attacks (security) and handle accidental failures (reliability), the resilience of such systems, namely, their ability to `bounce back’ from both attacks and failures and autonomously maintain operation, is becoming increasingly important. Going beyond resilience, in some situations (e.g. in highly dynamic, unpredictable environments) it is also desirable, and sometimes even essential, for software systems to have the ability to improve their own functionality and `bounce back’ even more resilient than before. This characteristic is termed antifragility.

Both resilience and antifragility can be achieved through a variety of means, but one particularly promising approach is to apply techniques from autonomic and/or self-adaptive computing – realizing various self-* properties via adaptation, including the special property of self-improvement via meta-adaptation – in conjunction with AI and other research areas such as distributed computing and software engineering.

This special session aims to disseminate the latest research ideas and results that are based on, or arrived at by using, autonomic and/or self-adaptive computing (but also self-aware computing, CAS, and related variants), as these ideas and results pertain to cyber resilience and antifragility in complex, distributed systems; and to stimulate discussion on a range of topics within this overarching theme. Topics include, but are not limited to the following, as they apply to resilience and/or antifragility in complex, distributed systems via self-adaptive/autonomic/etc. computing:

decentralized decision-making and decision coordination;
multi-agent systems/distributed AI;
decentralized learning and meta-learning for self-improvement;
decentralized architectures, including the use of micro-service architectures;
architectural patterns;
self-organisation and self-assembly techniques, including self-organization/self-assembly of the adaptation logic;
realizing self-* properties in a cross-cutting fashion;
model-driven approaches and domain-specific languages;
formal adaptation and meta-adaptation guarantees, in conjunction with learning.
Submission Process:

We invite original research papers that have not been previously published and are not currently under review for publication elsewhere. All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 international experts in the field. Acceptance/rejection will be based on relevance to the workshop topics, technical quality, originality, and presentation (coherent structure, readable figures, etc.). Novel ideas, papers showing promising early results (prior to comprehensive validation), or papers which are more controversial and could trigger discussions, are especially welcome. For such submissions, criteria pertaining to originality and sound argumentation will be given greater weight during the review process.

Accepted papers will be included in the ACSOS’2021 Companion Volume published by IEEE Computer Society Press and made available as a part of the IEEE Digital Library. Papers must thus be in the same format as the conference proceedings and may not be more than 6 pages in length.

Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cyra2021

Important Dates:

Paper Submission Deadline: June 14, 2021
Notification of Acceptance: July 31, 2021
Camera Ready Submission: August 20, 2021
Organizing Committee:

Anton V. Uzunov, Defence Science and Technology Group, Australia
Mohan Baruwal Chhetri, CSIRO’s Data61, Australia
Surya Nepal, CSIRO’s Data61 and Cyber Security CRC, Australia
Program Committee:

Barry Porter, Lancaster University
Claudia Szabo, University of Adelaide
Kjell Jørgen Hole, Simular UIB Research Lab
Mohamed Abdelrazek, Deakin University
Partha Pal, Raytheon BBN Technologies
Ryszard Kowalczyk, Swinburne University of Technology
Thomas Prantl, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg
Thomas Vogel, Humboldt Unviersity of Berlin
Vijay Vardharajan, University of Newcastle