Last CFP: 1st ETAPS Workshop on Causal Reasoning for Embedded and safety-critical Systems Technologies (CREST)

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: Causality and Responsibility for
Formal Verification and Beyond

Chao Wang, Virginia Tech, USA: Constraint-based Analysis for Verifying
and Debugging Concurrent Software

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.

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
Görschwin Fey, University of Bremen & DLR, Germany
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: mid-May 2016