CREST: 1st Workshop on Causal-based Reasoning for Embedded and safety-critical Systems Technologies

Topic

Today's IT systems, and the interactions among them, become more and more complex. Power grid blackouts, airplane crashes, failures of medical devices, cruise control devices out of control are just a few examples of incidents due to component failures and unexpected interactions of subsystems under conditions that have not been anticipated during system design and testing. The failure of one component may entail a cascade of failures in other components; several components may also fail independently. In such cases, determining the root cause(s) of a system-level failure and elucidating the exact scenario that led to the failure is today a complex and tedious task that requires significant expertise. In the security domain, localizing instructions and tracking agents responsible for information leakage is a central problem.

Formal approaches for automated causality analysis, fault localization, explanation of events, accountability and blaming have been proposed independently by several communities - in particular, AI, concurrency, model-based diagnosis, formal methods. Work on these topics has significantly gained speed during the last years.

The goals of this workshop are to bring together and foster exchange between researchers from the different communities, and to present and discuss recent advances and new ideas in the field.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- formal models of causal systems and structures
- languages and logics for specification and causal analysis
- definitions of causality and explanation
- causality analysis on models, programs, and/or traces
- fault localization
- fault ascription and blaming
- accountability
- applications, implementations, and case studies of the above

Keynote Speakers

Hana Chockler, King's College, UK
TBA

Selection procedure, committees, and organization

All contributed papers will be reviewed by at least 3 PC members. Revised versions of selected papers will be published as formal post-proceedings at EPTCS (approval pending).

The second part of the workshop will be dedicated to a common discussion of a case study and/or a panel on challenges and a longer-term vision of causality analysis in computer science.

Program Committee

Salem Benferhat, CRIL - Université d'Artois, France
Hana Chockler, King's College, UK
Eric Fabre, INRIA, France
Gregor Gössler, INRIA, France (co-chair)
Alex Groce, Oregon State University, USA
Sylvain Hallé, University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, Canada
Joseph Halpern, Cornell University, USA
Stefan Leue, University of Konstanz, Germany
Dejan Nickovic, Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria
Andy Podgurski, Case Western Reserve University, USA
Oleg Sokolsky, University of Pennsylvania, USA (co-chair)
Jean-Bernard Stefani, INRIA, France
Louise Travé-Massuyès, LAAS-CNRS, France
Joost Vennekens, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
Chao Wang, Virginia Tech, USA
Georg Weissenbacher, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Organizers: G. Goessler (INRIA, France) and O. Sokolsky (U. Pennsylvania, US)

Important dates:

- abstracts due: January 10, 2016
- full papers due: January 17, 2016
- notification: February 18, 2016
- revised papers for pre-proceedings: March 3, 2016
- workshop: April 8, 2016
- camera ready for post-proceedings (EPTCS, approval pending): mid-May 2016