Workshop on Engineering Cyber-Physical Ecosystems
Date: 12 October 2008 (Sunday)
Time: 9.00am to 4.00pm
Venue: Suntec Singapore International Convention & Exhibition Centre, Level 3, Meeting Room 323
Fee: S$200 per pax
Download the Workshops Registration Form.
Chair and Organizer:
Prof. Mihaela Ulieru
Canada Research Chair
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~ulieru/index.htm
There is no doubt that our World has evolved to be complex, with life having emerged as the ultimate manifest of self-organized superior structure. While biologists wonder at the miracles natural evolution has created trying to decipher its mysteries, we, electrical and electronics engineers have found high delight in competing with nature to create more and more sophisticated technological artifacts that are enriching our lives, yet seamlessly increasing its complexity. With the ICT pervading everyday objects and infrastructures, the ‘Future Internet’ is envisioned to leap towards a radical transformation from how we know it today (a mere communication highway) into a vast hybrid network seamlessly integrating knowledge, people and machines into techno-social systems whose behavior transcends the boundaries of today’s engineering science. Global enterprises and businesses merge seamlessly into a forever growing open market economy in which dynamic adaptation and seamless evolution are equivalent to survival. The Global Collaborative Ecosystem becomes more and more hybrid, inclusive and capable of almost everything imaginable… Where are the limits of the impossible? And are we ready to touch them with the same daring attitude which fuels our drive to push continuously the technological frontiers?
This future “Internet of Things” enables the spontaneous creation of collaborative societies of artifacts, referred to as “cyber-physical ecosystems”. In such “opportunistic ecosystems”, single devices / departments / enterprises become part of a larger and more complex infrastructure in which the individual properties or attributes of single entities are dynamically combined to achieve an emergent desired behavior of the ecosystem. Such a large scale system has to be able to continuously adapt to unforeseen situations and to evolve in an autonomic way, without requiring the need of human intervention. While we are too busy crafting these technological advances – they start to live a life of their own – and have already caught us in their agendas unexpectedly. Mainly because they have evolved to unanticipated complexity which transcends the boundaries of the sciences under which these artifacts were conceived and incrementally crafted. Time has come to take a closer look at the symphony joining cyber-physical ecosystems into societies that grow and cluster, reconfigure and adapt – to identify any dissonant cords that without fine tuning may compromise the splendor of the whole concert… To give ourselves the chance to understand and be able to manage the complexity of this “Internet of Things” we will have to change the reductionist paradigm on which we have built systems and software engineering - from the current static, centralized, linear ‘top-down’ design - to a dynamic, decentralized ‘design by emergence’ that embraces Cybernetics in its wholeness, as Wiener and its disciples have developed it - with nature and life as inspiration - to enable seamless adaptation to accommodate gradual or abrupt change (the only ‘constant’ in today’s networked world).
This Workshop joins those in search for the new paradigm in a common quest to develop new laws of cybernetics linking The Internet of Things into evolving communities of adaptive, self-organizing resilient structures. We aim to push together the frontier of interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to engineer and architect large scale networks of smart cooperative systems designed so that the simple interactions between their elementary components create collectively a desired global behavior, in which novel cybernetic formalisms are capable to control the emergence of useful robust structures ensuring functional optimality and resilience.
