event
Thursday 01 Dec 2016: Self-aware Computing Systems: From Psychology to Engineering
Peter Lewis - Aston University
Harrison 170 14:30-15:30
Novel computing systems are increasingly being composed of large numbers
of heterogeneous components, each with potentially different goals or
local perspectives, and connected in networks which change over time.
Management of such systems quickly becomes infeasible for humans. As
such, future computing systems should be able to achieve advanced levels
of autonomous adaptive behaviour. In order for a system to effectively
adapt itself in such a context, its ability to be self-aware becomes
important.
There are a number of disparate clusters of research in computer science
and engineering which have used the term self-awareness explicitly. In
this context, we have developed a conceptual framework that provides
researchers with a common language with which to describe the
self-awareness capabilities of their systems.
In this talk, I shall begin by surveying definitions and current
understanding of self-awareness in psychology. I will then describe how
these concepts are being translated from psychology to the computing
domain, and show how their explicit consideration may be beneficial in
the engineering of adaptive computing systems. I will discuss how
computational self-awareness may include knowledge of internal state,
history, social or physical environment, goals, and further, even a
system's own way of representing and reasoning about these things.
Finally, I will describe some of our work in an example application
domain, distributed smart-camera networks, where decentralised
self-awareness can increase runtime adaptivity and robustness, and avoid
the need for a priori information at design-time.