issue 4 Spring 2012 newsletter of the awareness proactive initiativewww.aware-project.eu

Awareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7

awareness newsletter

News from the Awareness Co-ordination Action project Awareness Projects: ASCENS 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 and also supporting:CoCoRo Collective Cognitive Robots SYMBRION Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms

INSIDE:Summer School 2012Research Exchange fundingOnline magazine and resourcesEvents

Editorial

Keep up to date with Awareness activities:

Website: www.aware-project.eu

Facebook page: Awareness: Self awareness in autonomic systems

Twitter: @euawareness

Linkedin group: Awareness CA

Cover pictureThe picture on the cover shows 3D-rendered swarm (or shoal) of the CoCoRo AUVs during a search mission. The signals depict that only short-range AUV-to-AUV communication is used.

The picture was created by Stefano Orofino from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. SSSA is the project partner that will develop the bigger CoCoRo AUVs (smaller AUVs for preliminary experiments are developed at the University of Stuttgart).

Awareness is already approaching the half-way mark. With all the projects well underway and making excellent progress, Awareness is turning its attention to ensuring that the research being conducted is being disseminated as widely as possibly. This includes reaching out to the wider public, as well as keeping academic communities informed of ongoing research. From a public engagement perspective, Awareness is hosting a talk at the Edinburgh International Science Festival presented by Prof. Alan Winfield, entitled The Thinking Robot’ – see page three for all the details of what is likely to be a popular event. The Awareness magazine continues to expand with an increasing range of articles written in a non-academic format. The latest articles have preview on page four which also gives details of how you can contribute.

From a researcher perspective, the second Awareness year sees us running a wide range of events at conferences which span a variety of disciplines - all the information you need is on page 10. You can also find a report on the successful Bionetics 2011, which was held in December in York. Awareness sponsored an invited speaker at this conference and also hosted a very informative PhD forum, which included a panel session and a talk on how to get a PhD.

We are continuing to develop the Awareness Research Agenda – the video wall and Awareness 101 challenges continue to grow on the website. On page six we review some of the latest articles to be published in the field – these reviews can also be found on the website with associated links, and details of how you can contribute can also be found here.

2012 sees the first Awareness summer school take place. AWASS 2012 will take place in Edinburgh in June. The

Self-awareness on WikipediaOne of the activities that the coordination action is tasked with is creating a Wikipedia entry to reflect the subject of the pro-active initiative. We’d like your help to create a Wikipedia page on Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems. However, within the community we recognise that there are existing Wikipedia pages that relate to this subject. We therefore propose to modify these pages in conjunction with the creation of the new page creating three tasks:

1. To create a new page on self-awareness in autonomic systems

2. To contribute an additional self-awareness component to the existing autonomic computing entry

3. To contribute an additional autonomic systems element to the existing self-awareness entry

Wikipedia pages emerge from community effort! We’d like your suggestions on updating these pages. We’ve already had some input from people who attended the inter-project meeting. You can access these suggestions and make comments of your own on a separate wiki we’ve set up to facilitate this before making any direct edits to Wikipedia. Please visit the wiki and leave your comments on any of the three topics, we'd really appreciate your input. It would be helpful if you could leave your name next to any entries you make to the wiki. The wiki can be accessed here: http://awarenessinterproject.wikispaces.com/Wikipedia+Entries

details can be found inside this issue, which lists invited speakers and gives further information on the format. Awareness is pleased to offer bursaries worth up to approximately 250 Euros for this event, however, they are limited in number so get your application in early! Researchers may also be interested in the Awareness Research Exchange, which provides funding for exchange visits between researchers and/or industry. All the details on page 11.

Finally, we are very pleased to report on the successful inter-project day held in January in Bologna (thanks to SAPERE!) which provided an opportunity for researchers from the projects to come together and discuss common challenges and issues relating to measuring confidence in self-aware systems. A full report can be found inside.

It only remains to say that we hope to meet as many of you as possible at one of the upcoming events, and as ever, are very pleased to receive any suggestions, comments or feedback on Awareness activities.

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The Thinking Robot Professor Alan WinfieldUniversity of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Press headlines frequently refer to robots that think like humans, have feelings, or even behave ethically, but is there any basis of truth in such headlines, or are they simply sensationalist hype? Computer scientist EW Dijkstra famously wrote “the question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarine can swim”, but the question of robot thought is one that cannot so easily be dismissed. In this talk I will describe the current state-of-the-art in robot intelligence. I will attempt to answer the question “how intelligent are present day intelligent robots?” and describe efforts to design robots that are not only more intelligent but also have a sense of self. But if we should be successful in designing such robots, would they think like animals, or even humans? And are there risks, or ethical issues, in attempting to design robots that think?

www.sciencefestival.co.uk/whats-on/categories/talk/the-thinking-robot

Awareness talk at the Edinburgh International Science Festival12th April: National Museum of Scotland

The Awareness project is delighted to be presenting a talk by Professor Alan Winfield at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in 2012. The Festival is one of Europe’s largest celebrations of science and technology, and this event will be an opportunity to raise the profile of awareness research amongst the public. The full programme was launched recently and is available online: www.sciencefestival.co.uk

Project news...Recognition project sponsors AOC 2012The AOC 2012 workshop aims at serving as a meeting point and a forum for exchanging ideas, discussing solutions, and sharing experiences among researchers, professionals, and application developers, both from industry and academia. As with the previous five editions of the AOC workshop series, the scope of this year’s workshop will remain on general issues related to opportunistic networking and computing. Yet, AOC 2012 will have a primary interest in new directions of opportunistic communications, such as service composition techniques, scenarios of co-existence with infrastructure networks, and insights to their operation coming from other disciplines such as game theory and cognitive psychology.

The 2012 edition of AOC, will be held June 25th, 2012, in San Francisco, California. http://cnd.iit.cnr.it/aoc2012/The RECOGNITION project concerns new approaches for embedding self-awareness in ICT systems. RECOGNITION is a 7th Framework Programme project funded under the FET initiative.

www.recognition-project.eu

ASCENS project publishes first white paper:Engineering EnsemblesToday’s developers often face the demanding task of developing software for ensembles: systems with massive numbers of nodes, operating in open and non-deterministic environments with complex interactions, and the need to dynamically adapt to new requirements, technologies or environmental conditions without redeployment and without interruption of the system’s functionality. Conventional development approaches and languages do not provide adequate support for the problems posed by this challenge.

The goal of the ASCENS project is to develop a coherent, integrated set of methods and tools to build software for ensembles. To this end we research foundational issues that arise during the development of these kinds of systems, and we build mathematical models that address them. Based on these theories we design a family of languages for engineering ensembles, formal methods that can handle the size, complexity and adaptivity required by ensembles, and software-development methods that provide guidance for developers.

http://www.ascens-ist.eu/whitepapers

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Awareness online MagazineFor an overview of the range of research work underway in self-aware autonomic systems, have a look at the new Awareness online magazine. These short, two-page articles are written in an informal style and aimed at a general audience. All articles have a DOI and can be viewed online or downloaded in pdf format. They are are written in a lively style and cover recent advances and research news.

If you would like to write an article for the magazine, please contact Dr Jeremy Pitt. j.pitt@imperial.ac.uk

The latest articles include:

Pervasive computing needs better situation-awarenessJuan Ye and Simon DobsonA context lattice is a hybrid knowledge - and data-driven approach to situation-awareness that supports semantic situation management. Pervasive computing systems use sensing, computing and communication capabilities to observe and respond to environmental phenomena. They have many potential applications in the office, home, healthcare, gaming, environmental monitoring and public transportation.

Energy-efficient distributed computingAlbert Y. Zomaya and Young Choon LeeIn recent years, the performance of distributed computing systems, particularly large facilities such as data centres and clouds, has been significantly constrained by their excessive power requirements. The Energy-Conscious Scheduling algorithm improves the energy efficiency of distributed computing systems by targeting consumption when processors are idle as well as when they are busy.

Affective teaching: learning more effectively from empathic robotsGinevra Castellano, Iolanda Leite, Ana Paiva, and Peter W. McOwanChildren perceive robots as more helpful when the robot reacts to emotion by displaying empathic behaviour.

User interacting with the iCat robot In the LIving with Robots and intEractive

Companions (LIREC) project.

www.awareness-mag.eu

Research has shown that robots used in applications requiring direct interaction with human users—for example robot companions—benefit from the integration of socially intelligent behaviour

Awareness and self-awareness for multi-robot organismsSerge KernbachWhen multicellular systems acquire awareness and self-awareness they become highly adaptable and can develop unexpected abilities. Awareness and self-awareness are two different notions related to an entity knowing the environment and knowing itself, respectively.

Caring agents make good teachers and friendly companionsRuth AylettIntelligent graphical and robot agents that are able to express emotional states can help educate children against bullying, improve empathy with other cultures, and act as real-world companions. The new field of affective computing makes it possible to develop intelligent agents (graphical characters and robots) that are able to understand and respond to human emotions.

Engineering autonomic ensemblesMartin Wirsing, Matthias Hölzl, Annabelle Klarl, and Nora KochNew techniques aim to cope with the complexities of designing and developing ensembles: self-aware swarms of autonomous components that adapt their collective behavior to different situations. A very good example of an ensemble is a swarm of robots autonomously performing complex tasks, similar to the way some animals do in nature.

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Self-Awareness in Autonomic SystemsManaging systems is increasingly becoming more challenging. Different devices,

heterogeneous platforms and different programming models can now be connected into a single system, and devices are increasing in technological complexity. These

factors not only make systems unmanageable but lead to systems exhibiting unplanned behaviours. To counter this, systems must become self-aware, exhibiting

context-awareness at an internal and external level.

10th-16th June 2012 Edinburgh Napier University

Topics include: Self-organising and self-adaptive systemsPervasive computing technologies Security and socio/economic aspects of autonomic computing

Activities include: Keynote talk by Maarten van Steen

Presentation by Alberto Lluch Lafuente, Jim Torresen, Giovanna di Marzo, Roger Whitaker , Jon Timmis, Serge Kernbach

Four case studies for the team assignments), one for each of the Awareness projects (Andrea Vandin for Ascens, Jose Luiz Fernandez for Sapere, Arjun Chandra for Epics, Martin Chorley for Recognition)

PhD poster session

Plenty of opportunity for mentoring and workshop activities

Team presentations and feedback

Provisional list of speakers: Alberto Lluch Lafuente (Ascens Project)Jim Torresen (Epics Project)Giovanna di Marzo (Sapere Project)Roger Whitaker (Recognition Project)Jon Timmis (Cocoro Project) Serge Kernbach (Symbrion Project)

The Awareness network at Edinburgh Napier Universitywww.aware-project.eu

Awareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7

This is an active and participative summer school with great social events and networking opportunities included. You will learn a lot and have great fun too!

Aimed at graduate/PhD students, and researchers from different disciplines, this summer school will cover theoretical, practical, and technological issues related to autonomic self-awareness and its various facets.

Student travel bursaries are available! Deadline for travel bursary applications is 31st March.

Awareness is offering bursaries worth 210 British pounds sterling, the equivalent of approximately 250 Euros, which means a 50% reduction on registration fees. These are available on a first-come, first-served basis and allow you to register for the 2012 Awareness summer school at half price.

RegistrationRegistration is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. More details at: www.aware-project.eu/awareness-training/awass-2012

VenueAWASS 2012 takes place at the historic Craighouse Campus, part of Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. www.napier.ac.uk

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The latest additions include:

Towards Self-Awareness in Cloud Markets: A Monitoring Methodology

Ivan Breskovic, Christian Haas, Simon Caton, Ivona Brandic.9th IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC 2011), December 12-14, 2011, Sydney, AustraliaMonitoring and measuring are two important aspects that can enable self-awareness of complex systems. This paper presents an interesting approach applied to cloud markets, based on a set of monitoring metrics that are mapped to the system goals.

Apoptotic Computing: Programmed Death by Default for Computer-Based Systems

R. Sterritthttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5688151“Apoptosis” if a mechanism of biological cells that enables to self-destruct when need (i.e., when they become not useful or even dangerous). The author connects this mechanism to autonomic computing discussing Apoptotic Computing. An interesting paper in particular in the context of the application in the space exploration context.

The Challenge of Developing Autonomic Systems

E. Vassev, M. Hincheyhttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5662557The authors of this paper list the requirements of developing autonomic systems and point out that awareness is one of the key issues. They sketch also

how awareness can be implemented, highlighting different aspects such as monitoring, adaptability, autonomy, dinamicity, robustness and mobility.A short but yet must-read for AWARENESS people.

The first connection system for modular underwater bio-inspired robots

S. Mintchev et.alIEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011), S. Francisco, California, September 2011.This paper was exploited by the CoCoRo project.Adding modularity to robots involve both awareness aspects at the single module level, and self-awareness aspect at the ensemble level. This paper presents some technical details, but they can turn out to be useful also at higher levels.

Collective Perception in a Robot Swarm

T. Schmickl et. alLecture Notes in Computer Science 4433 (2007), 144-157.http://zool33.uni-graz.at/artlife/node/27This paper was exploited by the CoCoRo project.The “collective perception” is at the base of the awareness of a group of entities. Moreover, a collective action requires the awareness of the other participants in a group, raising self-awareness at ensemble level. This paper presents two approaches to realize ‘collective perception’ in a robot swarm.We welcome your contributions to the Awareness Research Agenda - please email Giacomo Cabri: giacomo.cabri@unimore.it

To see the complete collection of paper reviews and find out more about the Awareness Research agenda see: www.aware-project.eu/research-agenda

Research Agenda Paper ReviewsAn important task for the Awareness CA project is to survey existing research that is related to the Awareness initiative. Reviews of relevant papers are included on the Awareness project website and updated regularly.

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Bionetics 2011, YorkAwareness sponsored the opening keynote talk entitled A Methodology for Engineering Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems by Dr Jeremy Pitt, Reader in Intelligent Systems from Imperial College London. Jeremy’s primary research interest is in the science, technology and application of multi-agent systems, especially in communications. Recently, he has been applying socio-economic principles to examine self-organising institutions.

A second keynote was given by Prof Dario Floreano, who in 2000 was awarded the first Swiss National Science Foundation professorship in bio-inspired robotics at EPFL. In 2005 he established the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, and in 2011 became Director of the newly established Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics.

The conference paper topics ranged from robotic coordination to attack detection in peer-to-peer networks, and several work-in-progress papers were inspired by biological mechanisms including evolution, flocking and artificial immune systems. In addition to the main conference track, the conference hosted a parallel stream in the field of Nano-scale Communication and Networking, chaired by Tadashi Nakano and Michael Moore.

Awareness also hosted a PhD forum at Bionetics 2011 to give an opportunity to young researchers to present their work, whatever the stage of their PhD, in a friendly and supportive environment. Prof Gusz Eiben from the Vrije

University, Amsterdam, gave a talk entitled Methodological Issues in Bio-inspired Computing, or How to Get a PhD in….?

This was followed by six presentations from PhD students who received useful feedback from the audience. All papers were included in the Bionetics 2012 conference proceedings (Springer LNICST series).

Applying Bees Algorithm for Trust Management in Cloud Computing: Mohamed Firdhous, Osman Ghazali, Suhaidi Hassan

Artificial Negative Selection: Searching for an Appropriate Application Scenario: Yevgen Nebesov

Spatio-Temporal Modeling and simulation of Mycobacterium Pathogenesis using Petri nets Rafael Carvalho, Fons J. Verbeek, Annemarie Meijer, Willem Davids

Immune Inspired Adaptive Information Filtering: Focusing on Profile Adaptation: Nurulhuda Mohd Azmi, Fiona Polack, Jon Timmis

Design and Modeling for Self-Organizing Autonomic Systems: Paul Snyder, Giuseppe Valetto

Asynchronous Idiotypic Network Simulator (Demo Paper): Kevin Sim

A general “Ask the Experts” discussion session followed, aimed at providing useful advice to PhD students and the audience of approximately 25 members, and this was led by Prof Gusz Eiben and Bionetics 2012 co-chairs, Prof Emma Hart (Edinburgh Napier University) and Jon Timmis (York University).

Awareness was pleased to sponsor Bionetics 2011, the 6th International ICST Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information and Computing Systems, held in December in York, UK.

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Report from Awareness Inter-Project meeting January 2012Universitá di Bologna, Italy

Full information about the day, including downloads and audio, is available from: www.aware-project.eu/2012/ awareness-inter-project-day.

A wiki is also available for use by the projects to share information and ideas: http://awarenessinterproject. wikispaces.com.

Feedback“I liked the discussions with people from different backgrounds. They lead to a better understanding of the way in which people with other specialities and research interests think about awareness, and they provide some perspective about the breadth of our research area.”

“The project overview session was informative. It was helpful to build up a picture of overlapping concerns between projects.”

Although each project within the Awareness network has its own goals and objectives, each faces some common challenges. The two-day workshop held in Bologna and hosted by the SAPERE project was attended by approximately 25 people from each of the projects funded in the initiative.

The workshop focused on identifying areas of common interest, and common challenges, and looked at ways in which expertise can be shared to address these problems.

A keynote speech by Prof. Mag. Dr. Alois Ferscha titled “From awareness to adaptation: large scale recognition and opportunistic configuration” opened the workshop and set the scene for the following discussions. Each project presented a short talk on current challenges faced in relation to the topic before a brainstorming exercise was held to identify challenges which are shown in the illustration. A number of discussion groups then examined these challenges in more detail.

Outcomes and Next StepsFollowing the workshop the Awareness team are working to identify events that could be put in place to address some of the common concerns of the projects.

A follow-up inter-project day is currently being planned in cooperation with the projects – watch this space!

How to observe awareness?

What are the metrics/instruments?

How to account for space-time behaviour & probabilistic nature of systems?

How to create models?

Dealing with big data

Difference between confidence & reliability

How to model risk?

How much confidence do we need to adapt?

Are there different levels of confidence ?

How do we specify desired behaviour ?

How to specify limits of desired behaviour?

How to protect against malware?

How do we define scope of adaptivity we want to measure confidence over?

How does confidence change with context?

How to prevent runaway adaptation?

Distinguishing between innovation and bad behaviour

Challenges from the Brainstorming Exercise:

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Challenges Outlined by Awareness Projects

In order to measure confidence in self-aware systems we

must be able to monitor both global and emergent properties. We must be able to specify

and control adaptation and understand the interaction of global and local

confidence

In order to make claims about what self-aware systems will or will not do,

we need to know what the scope of the claims is, with respect to problem instances and

dynamics

How can we identify proper measures/metrics to “quantify” self-

adaptation and self-awareness ?

How can we deal with the multiple dimensions of “awareness”: social, environmental, system-level,

component-level, etc.

Quantifying awareness is a first key challenge in itself - and

there are not necessarily only metric dimensions

How can we deal with the notion of systemic self-awareness:

awareness as an emergent observable property and no individual component

can claim self-awareness.

Measures of self-awareness must be external by observing behaviour

– there are no intrinsic measures. This introduces the notion of situation or application dependent

awareness. However, if self-awareness is an observable property, then we can might be able

to measure the response to solicitations

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Events for Awareness ResearchersIf you know of any relevant conferences and events that Awareness researchers should be adding to their calendars, drop an email to Ingi at the Awareness Project: i.helgason@napier.ac.uk.

WIVACE 2012Italian Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation: Artificial Life, Evolution and Complexity Parma, Centro S.Elisabetta University Campus.

20-21 February 2012

Awareness is pleased to announce three final candidates for the best paper award related to self-awareness in autonomic systems at WIVACE 2012

Awareness are sponsoring the invited speaker Domenico Parisi, ISTC-CNR, Italy, and also a best paper award. The prize is a free place at the Awareness Summer School to be held in Edinburgh from 10-16 June 2012

www.aware-project.eu/2012/awareness-sponsor-wivace-2012 Eligible papers submitted to WIVACE2012 have now been judged by: Prof Emma Hart, Edinburgh Napier University, UK, Assoc Prof Giacomo Cabri, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, Prof Gusz Eiben, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Dr Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College London, UK. The WIVACE organisers have arranged a session for the best papers to be presented at the event. (see the programme at http://wivace2012.ce.unipr.it).

The prize is a free place at the Awareness summer school (www.aware-project.eu) being held in Edinburgh from 10-16 June 2012 and this includes all accommodation costs. The prize is transferrable to anyone of the authors’ choosing.

Shortlisted Papers:

A bio-inspired learning signal for the cumulative learning of different skills. Vieri G. Santucci, Gianluca Baldassarre, Marco Mirolli.

Development of categorization abilities in evolving embodied agents : a study of internal representations with external social inputs. Francesco Pugliese.

An Evolutionary Approach to Grid Computing Agents. Yvonne Bernard, Lukas Klejnowski, David Bluhm, Jörg Hähner, Christian Müller-Schloer.

UKCI 2012September 5th – 7th, CFP Deadline: 1st May 2012

Edinburgh, UK

Awareness is pleased to sponsor an award to the best paper submitted to UKCI 2012 that deals with the topic of self-awareness in autonomic systems. The 12th Annual Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI 2012) is hosted by Heriot Watt University

www.aware-project.eu/2012/awareness-sponsor-ukci-2012

WETICE 201225-27 June

Toulouse, France

Awareness are sponsoring a best paper award and a best student paper award at ACEC the 10th Track on Adaptive Computing (and Agents) for Enhanced Collaboration hosted at WETICE 2012. WETICE is an annual IEEE International conference on state-of-the-art research in enabling technologies for collaboration, consisting of a number of cognate conference tracks.

www.aware-project.eu/2012/awareness-wetice-2012

WiOPt 2012 May 14th – 18th, 2012

Paderborn, Germany

Awareness is sponsoring keynote speaker Jean-Pierre Hubaux, EPFL, France.

This symposium intends to bring together researchers and practitioners working on modeling and optimization of wireless network design and operations. It welcomes original, high-quality works on different perspectives, including performance analysis and simulation, algorithms and protocol design, optimization theory and application, information theoretic analysis including capacity scaling, for all forms of wireless networks: cellular, metropolitan, ad hoc, delay-tolerant, mesh, sensor networks as well as any combination of these.

For more information visit the WiOPT 2012 website.

www.wi-opt.org

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Working in the field of Self-Aware

Autonomic Systems?

• Are you a researcher looking to

collaborate with another researcher from

another institution?

• Do you want to kick-start a collaboration

with someone from a different discipline?

• 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?

• Would your Awareness project benefit by

sharing ideas with other FET-funded

projects?

FundingforAwarenessResearchExchanges

Awareness is the European Commission’s FET

Proactive Initiative on Self-Awareness in Autonomic

Systems. The coordination action funds research

exchanges to encourage interaction between

institutions, organisations, industry and SMEs. 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 up to 50% of the costs as long

as the host organisation or the individual visiting

researcher pays the balance of costs.

Full details including an FAQ and application form

are available on the Awareness website

www.aware-project.eu

Deadlines:30thSeptember/December/March/June2011‐2013

Awareness is a Future and Emerging

Technologies Proactive Initiative funded

by the European Commission under FP7

Next deadline

30th March!

see reports from previous exhanges at www.aware-project.eu/category/funding-2/exchange-reports

Awareness is a Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative funded by the European Commission under FP7

2010-2013

www.aware-project.eu

What the Awareness project does:Organises summer schools and virtual lectures to train the researchers of the future and for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Arranges workshops relevant to the self-awareness community of researchers. Presents public showcase events. Creates widely accessible publications, and training materials for use in teaching and outreach work. Provides funding for research exchanges. Disseminates the research output of our supported FET funded projects. Shapes the Reseach Agenda of the future: this will gather opinion relating to the Awareness Initiative from expert researchers and scientists.

The Awareness Coordination Action project provides a collaborative environment for research into self-awareness in autonomic systems, supporting the network of researchers and engaging with a wider scientific and technological audience.

Awareness reaches out to a diverse, multidisciplinary scientific community that researches self-aware autonomic systems. As technology continues to rapidly advance, the management of systems becomes more difficult, and they must increasingly be able to manage themselves implying that they must be self-aware. Achieving truly self-aware systems is of interest to almost everyone in society as it will have technical, social and economic impacts. The FET funded projects that we support are:

ASCENS: Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles

CoCoRo:Collective Cognitive Robots

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)