Industry training slides from the Awareness Slides Factory

1. Awareness in Autonomic
Systems
Applications &
Research Projects

2. Outline
• Proprioceptive systems
– EPiCS
• Swarm robotics
– SYMBRION
– ASCENS
– CoCoRo
• Data management
– SAPERE
– RECOGNITION

3. PROPRIOCEPTIVE SYSTEMS
Applications

4. Proprioceptive Systems
• Collect and maintain information about their
state and progress
• Enable self-awareness by reasoning about
their behavior
• Enable self-expression by effectively and
autonomously adapting their behavior to
changing conditions

5. EPiCS
www.epics-project.eu
• Aims to derive novel design and operation methods
and tools from the proprioception, self-awareness and
self-expression principles of studied systems
• Intends to integrate multidisciplinary research from
several areas:
– concepts and foundations for self-aware and self-
expressive systems
– hardware/software platform technologies for autonomic
compute nodes
– self-aware network architectures and middleware layers
• Develops new hardware and software platforms

6. EPiCS Approach
• Integrate multidisciplinary research from several areas:
– concepts and foundations for self-aware and self-
expressive systems
– hardware/software platform technologies for autonomic
compute nodes
– self-aware network architectures and middleware layers
• Foundational and technological research validated by
the requirements of three challenging application
domains:
– heterogeneous compute clusters for financial modelling
– distributed smart cameras for person detection and
tracking
– hypermusic on an interactive mobile media system

7. EPiCS Videos
• How six independent mobile devices
synchronise to each other:
http://vimeo.com/67205605
• CamSim – a distributed smart camera network
simulator
http://vimeo.com/70176909
For more: http://vimeo.com/channels/epics/

8. EPiCS Consortium

9. SWARM ROBOTICS
Applications

10. Swarm Robotics
• Imagine a swarm of robots
that need to solve a certain
task, e.g.
– Cleaning a devastated area
– Exploring Mars
• In difficult environments with
holes, hills, obstacles, . . . the
robots have to cooperate
– Transport an object together
– Form organisms to cope better
with environment

11. Swarm Robotics
• Robots are aware of the task they are
supposed to perform and monitor their
performance in the environment
• Robots should be able to adapt to maximize
their performance
• Adaptations take place on an individual level
as well as on a collective level:
– Individuals adjust their behavior
– Collective behavior emerges (e.g. organisms are
formed by multiple robots)

12. SYMBRION
www.symbrion.eu
Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms
• Hundreds of small cubic robots are built and deployed in an
environment
• Robots sense each other and the environment and are capable of
aggregating into “multi-cellular” organisms
• Aggregation and disaggregation is self-driven, depending on the
circumstances: different environments, different tasks
• Questions addressed:
– Can we build such robots and program the basic behaviors needed for
appropriate (dis)aggregation?
– Can we provide adaptive mechanisms that enable newly “born” organisms
learn to operate (sense, move, act, …)?

13. SYMBRION Scenario
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkvpEfAPXn4

14. SYMBRION Approach

15. SYMBRION Current Results
• Different controllers have been developed for robots
• Evolutionary approaches are able to adapt the controllers
based upon fitness
• Different organisms are formed as required by the
environment
• Some initial versions of hardware have been developed and
are currently being deployed

16. SYMBRION Comsoritum

17. ASCENS
www.ascens-ist.eu
Autonomous service component ensembles
• Self-aware, self-adaptive, and self-expressive autonomous
components
• Components run in an environment and are called ensembles
• Systems are very difficult to develop, deploy, and manage
• Goal of ASCENS:
– Develop an approach that combines traditional SE approaches based
on formal methods with the flexibility of resources promised by
autonomic, adaptive, and self-aware systems
• Case studies:
– Robotics, cloud computing, and energy saving e-mobility

18. Ensembles
• Autonomic systems: typically distributed computing systems whose
components act autonomously and can adapt to environment changes.
• Ensembles have the following
characteristics:
– Large numbers of nodes
– Heterogeneous
– Operating in open and non-
deterministic environments
– Complex interactions between
nodes and with humans or other
systems
– Dynamic adaptation to changes in
the environment

19. ASCENS Approach

20. ASCENS Consortium

21. CoCoRo
cocoro.uni-graz.at
Collective Cognitive Robotics
• Aims at creating an autonomous swarm of
interacting, cognitive underwater vehicles
• Tasks to be performed by the swarm:
– Ecological monitoring
– Searching
– Maintaining
– Exploring
– Harvesting resources

22. CoCoRo Scenario
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OStLml7pHZY

23. CoCoRo Approach
• Draw inspiration from nature to generate
behavior:
– Cognition generating algorithms:
• Social insect trophallaxis
• Social insect communication
• Slime mold
• ANN
– Collective movement:
• Bird movement
• Fish school behavior

24. CoCoRo Consortium

25. DATA MANAGEMENT
Applications

26. Data management
• More and more content is being generated
• Content needs to be effectively managed in
order to avoid user form being swamped
• Task is to:
– Manage existing content
– Acquire new content

27. SAPERE
www.sapere-project.eu
Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems
• Computers for handling data and providing services are
integrated into an “ecosystem”
• System is extended with
– methods for data and situation identification
– decentralized algorithms for spatial self-organization, self-
composition, and self-management
• Thus, we obtain automated deployment and execution of
services and for the management of contextual data items

28. SAPERE Scenario
• Pervasive computing
– Sensor rich and always connected smart phones
– Sensor networks and information tags
– Localization and activity recognition
– Internet of things and the real‐time Web
• Innovative pervasive services arising
– Situation‐aware adaptation
– Interactive reality
– Pervasive collective intelligence and pervasive participation
• Open co‐production scenario, very dynamic, diverse
needs and diverse services, continuously evolving

29. SAPERE Architecture
• Open production model
• Smooth data/services
distinction
– live semantic annotations (LSA)
• Interactions
– Sorts of bio‐chemical reactions
among components
– In a spatial substrate
• Eco‐laws
– Rule all interactions
– Discovery + orchestration
seamlessly merged
• Built over a pervasive network
world

30. SAPERE Infrastructure and applications
• Infrastructure
– A very lightweight infrastructure
– Ruling all interactions (from discovery to data exchange and
synchronization) by embedding the concept of eco‐laws
– To most extent, acting as a recommendation and planning engine
– Possibly inspired by tuple space coordination models
– Yet made it more “fluid” and suitable for a pervasive computing
continuum substrate not a network but a continuum of tuple spaces
• Applications
– The “Ecosystem of Display” as a general and impactful testbed
– To put at work and demonstrate the SAPERE findings
– Active and dynamic information sharing in urban scenarios
– Active participation of citizens to the working of the urban
infrastructure

31. SAPERE Consortium

32. RECOGNITION
www.recognition-project.eu
Relevance and Cognition for Self‐Awareness in a
Content‐Centric Internet
• Project draws inspiration from human cognitive
processes to achieve self-awareness
• Try to replicate core cognitive processes in computer
systems:
– e.g. inference, beliefs, similarity, and trust
– embed them in ICT
• Application domain: internet content
– Manage and acquire content in an effective manner by
means of self-aware computing systems

33. RECOGNITION Motivation
Technological Trends
• Participatory generation of content
– Prosumers, diversity, expanding edges
– Long tail, swamping, scale!
• Content in the environment
– Linkage of the physical and virtual worlds
– Embedding content and knowledge
• Acquiring knowledge through social mechanisms
– Blogging, social networking, recommendation, RSS feeds…
• How content reaches users will continue to change…

34. Supporting technological trends
• Intention: Paradigm to support ICT functions
– Enabling content centricity
• Better fitting of users to content and vice-versa
– Synchronize content with human activity and
needs
• Place, time, situation, relevance, context, social search
– Autonomic management
• Of content, its acquisition and resource utilization

35. RECOGNITION Approach
Human Awareness Behaviour
• Capture & exploit key behaviours of the most
intelligent living species
– Human capability is phenomenal in navigating
complex & diverse stimuli
– Filter & suppress information in “noisy” situations
with ambient stimuli
– Extract knowledge in presence of uncertainty
– Exercise rapid value judgment for prioritisation
– Engage a and multi‐scale social context multi learning

36. RECOGNITION Consortium

37. Acknowledgment
The slides in this presentation were produced
with contributions from all participants of the
Awareness Slides Factory.