Cognitive computing brings about a paradigm shift in computing by opening up new frontiers and computing models for software, and for design, programming, engineering and management of software and software-defined environments. These frontiers are building on the advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, big data processing technologies and natural language processing, some of which are inspired and empowered by learning from nature and our understanding of human brain function. Despite the sheer and rapid advances, engineering of cognitive software and services remain a challenge due to the lack of software engineering methods, tools and metrics to deal with unique and novel characteristics of cognitive systems and services.

In addition, recent advances with the convergence of advances in symbolic computing infused with cognitive control overlay, software engineering practices related to cloud computing, data science automation and autonomous software systems are demanding a new look at how to leverage these advances to create next generation distributed cognitive real-time self-managing intelligent systems. We believe that cognition and cognitive control overlay provide the glue that will bring a unifying framework creating the next generation cognitive software era. 

This workshop aims at providing a forum for researchers and professionals interested in the software engineering aspects of cognitive software and services, and in understanding, envisioning and discussing the opportunities and challenges of software engineering for cognitive services and cognition in software engineering theories and practices. Recognizing the broad scope of the potential areas of interest, the workshop is organized into two themes, as follows.

Theme 1: Foundations and Engineering of Cognitive Services

Building on advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, this theme focuses on the foundation and engineering challenges of cognitive computing in moving from the current paradigm where the computing logic is prescribed by humans to machine, to a paradigm where the computing logic is codified into models that are learned by machines, from data, interactions and experiences. These computing logics could potentially range from being co-created by human and machines to being autonomously maintained by machines.

Theme 2: Nature-inspired, Cyber-physical and Autonomous Cognitive Services

Nature-inspired computational technologies are gaining remarkable success these days, such as Deep Learning that found its inspiration in the learning in neural networks of the human brain. In order to solve the problem of control, maintenance and repair of huge and complex computational systems emerging with new technologies of Internet Of Things, Big Data, Cloud Computing, Cyber-physical systems, Augmented Reality and similar, one needs to look not only at the function of the brain, but also at the function of the whole living organism in interaction with the environment – the process known as cognition. Under this theme, the goal is to explore topics of interest in engineering of nature-inspired, cyber-physical and autonomous cognitive services.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. 

 Topics of interest includes but is not limited to the followings:

Theme 1: Foundations and Engineering of Cognitive Services

• Requirements engineering for cognitive services
• Methods and frameworks for data acquisition and user-led training of cognitive services
• Programming models, abstractions, languages for cognitive services development
• Model-driven and data-driven frameworks for cognitive services
• Agile methods for cognitive application development
• Trust, security and reliability of cognitive services
• Software architecture of cognition and cognition in software architecture
• Quality control of cognitive services
• Testing frameworks and methods for cognitive services and solutions
• Engineering of human factors and interactions in cognitive services and solutions
• Software engineering challenges for conversational systems (e.g. chatbots, dialog APIs, etc).
• Software engineering challenges for computer vision systems
• Aspects of composition and reusability of functional artificial intelligence assets such as algorithms or data management toolkits

Theme 2: Nature-inspired, Cyber-physical and Autonomous Cognitive Services

• Current limitations and new approaches to self-managing distributed systems
• Adaptive Distributed Cognitive Computing
• Collaborative and Autonomic Cognitive Computing
• Cyber Physical Systems and Cognitive Computing Architectures
• Emerging policies, algorithms and architectural frameworks for Service Level Agreement (SLA) for unified computing infrastructures
• Intelligent systems for deploying and configuration of Clouds and Grid Services
• Emerging infrastructures, middleware, frameworks for Unified computing platforms
• Cognitive systems for unified and federated utility computing infrastructures
• Self-protecting systems - Security, Privacy, Trustworthiness for Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds

• Paper Submission Instructions

  The workshop will accept two main contribution types:

  - Position papers, 4-page limit, describing a position statement on issues related to the topics of the workshop. Position papers would lead to interesting discussion by raising key questions, controversial point of views, challenges, and ideas to address the identified issues.

  - Research papers, 8-page limit, describing original and novel research work, including research results and evaluations. The papers may present the ongoing research, novel ideas with preliminary results, advances of the state of the art, analysis of the current results in state of the art or state of the practice, or experience in implementing the theories.

  Each paper will be reviewed by at least three reviewers.  Authors should submit their papers through EasyChiar through the following address:   https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=se4cog2018

  ICSE 2018 workshop proceedings will be prepared by IEEE CPS and published by ACM. Workshop papers must follow the ACM formatting instructions . Papers should not have been published or submitted for publication concurrently elsewhere.

  Important Dates:

  -     Paper submission deadline: February 19, 2018

  -     Paper notification deadline:  March 5, 2018

  -     Camera-ready deadline: March 19, 2018

  -     Workshop: May 28-29, 2018

Committees

Program Committee

• Mark Burgin, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
• Tarry Singh, deeplearning@Coursera, Deepaka.ai,  Amsterdam en omgeving, Nederland
• Giuseppe Primiero, Middlesex University London, UK
• Eugene Eberbach, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
• Robert Lowe, Chalmers Technical University, Sweden
• Fabrizio Messina, Catania University, Italy
• Giovanni Morana, C3DNA, Italy
• Ramana Reddy, West Virginia University, USA
• Ramiro Salas, Pivotal, USA
• Bernard Salvan, Clougnitive Technology Inc, Paris, France
• Samir Mittal, Micron, USA
• Stefaneas S. Petros, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
• Hector Zenil, University of Oxford and Wolfram Science
• Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic (dodig@chalmers.se)

Organizing committee

• Hamid R. Motahari Nezhad (motahari.hamid@gmail.com) 
• Rao Mikkilineni (rao@c3dna.com)
• Boualem Benatallah (boualem@cse.unsw.edu.au)
• Adrian Mos (adrian.mos@naverlabs.com)
• Schahram Dustdar (dustdar@dsg.tuwien.ac.at)
• Fabio Casati (fabio.casati@unitn.it)
• Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic (dodig@chalmers.se)

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Hamid R. Motahari Nezhad (motahari@us.ibm.com)  and Rao Mikkilineni (rao@c3dna.com)