IMPORTANT DATES
Papers due April 17, 2009
Notification May 22, 2009
Final papers July 10, 2009
Workshop August 15, 2009

 

  • COMMITTEE
  • Leo Marcus, Chair (The Aerospace Corporation, USA)
  • Borzoo Bonakdarpour (Verimag Laboratory, France)
  • Vincenzo De Florio (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
  • Joe Fitzsimons (Oxford University, UK)
  • Adrian Francalanza (University of Malta, Malta)
  • Morten Hartmann (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)
  • Shinichi Kikuchi (Keio University, Japan)
  • Jean Krivine (Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), France)
  • Sandeep Kulkarni (Michigan State University, USA)
  • Yaohang Li (North Carolina A&T, USA)
  • Alessio Lomuscio (Imperial College, UK)
  • Tom Maibaum (McMaster University, Canada)
  • Abdul-Rahman Mawlood-Yunis (Carleton University, Canada)
  • Annabelle McIver (Macquarie University, Australia)
  • Chris Meyers (University of Utah, USA)
  • Mark Reynolds (University of Western Australia, Australia)
  • Sandeep Shukla (Virginia Tech, USA)
  • Michael Wooldridge (Liverpool University, UK)

Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT)
a LICS 2009 Workshop

The Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance workshop will be held August 15, 2009 in conjunction with the Logic in Computer Science Symposium, August 11-14, 2009, at The University of California, Los Angeles.

LAFT will bring together researchers with specialities in various fields (computer science, quantum information, biology) to discuss the phenomenon of fault tolerance at a higher level with the purpose of defining and reasoning about the general logical principles that transcend specific implementation domains.


Call for Papers (Expired)

We are soliciting papers on logical aspects of fault tolerance.
The concept of “fault” underlies essentially all computational systems that have any goal. Loosely speaking, a fault is an unintended event that can have an unintended effect on the attainment of that goal. “Fault tolerance” is the term given to a system’s ability to cope  in some way with a fault, either inherently or through design. Starting from the work of Von Neumann, fault tolerance has been studied for its application to circuits, and then branching out to distributed systems and more recently to quantum computers, where the concern with fault tolerance is almost the paramount issue. The relevance to “service-oriented architectures” and biological and intercellular computation is also obvious.

More pragmatically, when safety/mission critical systems are deployed in environments that are not totally predictable or controllable (i.e., in the real world),  assurance of their correctness and reliability (and the other “ilities”) can be strengthened through fault tolerance.

We feel that an abstract, logical approach to the concept of fault tolerance has the potential to

  1. identify general principles that may have not been apparent previously in the special cases,
  2. provide the capability to state and prove theorems which may be applicable to current and future architectures and computational paradigms, and
  3. provide a supply of new and interesting problems of a purely logical nature.
Topics of interest include:

  1. Specification-based fault tolerance
  2. Model-theoretic fault tolerance
  3. Graph-theoretic fault tolerance
  4. Axiomatic fault tolerance
  5. Composition of fault tolerance
  6. Fault tolerance architectures
  7. Abstract fault tolerance mechanisms
  8. Metrics for fault tolerance
  9. Logics and reasoning for fault tolerance
  10. Semantics of fault tolerance and “graceful degradation”
  11. Verification and synthesis of fault-tolerant systems
  12. Fault-tolerance of security properties
  13. Property maintenance (or transformation) through system (model, graph) degradation
  14. Specification of faults
  15. Error-correction and the relation to fault-tolerance
  16. Threshold theorems for abstract fault tolerance (ala threshold theorems for quantum computation)
  17. Logic of fault tolerance in quantum logic
  18. Category theory of fault tolerance
  19. Biologically inspired logic for fault tolerance


Please send all workshop correspondence, including submissions, to marcus@aero.org

Papers must be concerned with the logic of fault tolerance, not simply fault tolerance. All papers must be in English. Please include a list of keywords chosen from the above “topics of interest.”  Papers should be no longer than 10 pages, begin with a succinct statement of the issues, a summary of the main results, and a brief explanation of their significance and relevance to the workshop and to computer science.  Technical development directed to the specialist should follow. References and comparisons with related work should be included.


One author of each accepted paper will be expected to present it at the LAFT Workshop. Selected papers will appear in a special issue of Logic Journal of the IGPL published by Oxford University Press.