Call For Papers: 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 website: http://www.aero.org/laft

LICS website:
http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/lics/lics09/


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



IMPORTANT DATES: 


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

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.

The results must be unpublished and not submitted for publication
elsewhere, including the proceedings of other symposia or
workshops. The workshop chair should be informed of closely related
work submitted to a conference or journal in advance of
submission. All authors of accepted papers will be expected to sign
copyright release forms. One author of each accepted paper will be
expected to present it at the LAFT Workshop.


Committee:

Leo Marcus, Chair   (The Aerospace Corporation, USA)
Borzoo Bonakdarpour (Michigan State University, Verimag, USA/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 (Harvard University USA)
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)