CREST 2017

Today’s IT systems, and the interactions between them, become increasingly complex. Power grid blackouts, airplane crashes, failures of medical devices and malfunctioning automotive systems are just a few examples of incidents that affect system safety. They are often 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 the security domain, localizing instructions and tracking agents responsible for information leakage and other system attacks is a central problem. 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. 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, software engineering, security engineering and 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:

• foundation of causal reasoning about systems in the philosophy of sciences
• languages and logics for causal specification and causal analysis
• definitions of causality and explanation
• causality analysis on models, programs, and/or traces
• fault localization
• causal reasoning in security engineering
• causality in accident analysis, safety cases and certification
• fault ascription and blaming
• accountability
• applications, implementations, tools and case studies of the above

The CREST 2017 workshop is the second in a  series of workshops addressing approaches to causal reasoning in the  engineering of complex embedded and safety-critical systems. The main  objective is to bring together researchers and practitioners from  industry and academia in order to enable discussions how explicit and  implicit causality reasoning is performed in the design of these  systems. A further objective is to link to the foundations of causal  reasoning in the philosophy of sciences and to causal reasoning  performed in other areas of computer science, engineering and beyond.

The organizers can be reached via email address crest2017 "at" easychair.org.

• Alex Groce, Northern Arizona University, USA
• Stefan Leue, University of Konstanz, Germany

All contributed papers will be reviewed by at  least 3 PC members. Revised versions of selected papers will be  published as formal post-workshop proceedings in the Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS). At least one of the authors of an accepted paper needs to register for  the workshop and  present the paper in order for it to be included in  the post-workshop proceedings.

Papers should be prepared in  EPTCS style with a length of up to 15 pages.

All contributions must be submitted via the EasyChair submission web site for CREST 2017.

• abstracts due: extended to February 3, 3017
• papers due: extended to Wednesday February 8, 2016
• notification: March 10, 2017
• papers for informal participant's proceedings due: March 24, 2017 April 20, 2017.
  Send your paper in pdf format to Martin Kölbl (martin.koelbl@uni-konstanz.de)
• workshop date: April 29, 2017
• papers for post-workshop EPTCS proceedings due: June 9, 2017