The concept of self-awareness has become a hot research topic in a variety of disciplines such as robotics, artificial intelligence, control theory, networked systems, and so on. Its applicability has been explored in various application domains such as automotive, military, consumer electronics, industrial control, medical equipment, and so forth. The topic owes its attractiveness to many examples in insects, animals and humans, where self-awareness is attributed to facilitate highly resilient and outstandingly efficient behaviors. Thus, self-awareness holds the promise to promote dependability in all types of smart gadgets and artificial agents in the interconnected world of future.
The main purpose of this workshop is to build a community and to try to develop a shared and communal understanding of the main concepts underlying self-awareness with respect to CPS. Currently, self-awareness is studied in a range of different communities, where the underlying assumptions, definitions and goals differ significantly. This workshop will provide a forum for reflections and in-depth discussions of the pivotal concepts of this field which will serve as a basis for building an integrated scientific community and for developing future research projects.
In addition to invited keynote speech and participants’ talks, we will study and scrutinize specific systems and underlying concepts of self-awareness and its respective properties in hands-on exercises and group discussions. Some procedures will be proposed, based on which workshop participants will work on identification and quantification of awareness properties in specific systems (described in the literature or proposed by participants). This exercise will serve as a platform for analyzing the principles and basic concepts of self-awareness, the efficiency or deficiency of the various evaluation procedures, and level of self-awareness in the systems under study as well as the elements creating that awareness. By engagement of the community in this hands-on joint practice we hope to generate new ideas for future research directions and foster new and stronger collaborations.