No.060 Systems Resilience ? Bridging the Gap Between Social and Mathematical

The goal of this meeting is to bridge the gap between the “social“ and “mathematical” camps of resilience research so that the social aspects of resilience are more appropriately incorporated into the mathematical models and at the same time the mathematical models can provide practical guidance to the design, policy making, and operations of real-world societal systems.

Resilience is said to be an ability of a system to absorb and recover from perturbations. It is considered to be a critical characteristic for a system to survive, especially for social systems like organizations, communities, cities, and our civilization as a whole. Resilience has been studied in many different domains, such as psychology, biology, ecology, engineering, and social sciences, but often their approaches are widely different. We observe that there are at least two seemingly incongruent approaches ? social and mathematical.

The social camp, mainly dealing with problems such as socio-ecological resilience and urban resilience, is concerned with resilience as a social norm. Their research approaches are based on case studies, best practices, processes, communication, decision making, consensus building, and other disciplines, and little mathematical models are used except for relatively simple system dynamics to compare different scenarios. Policy makers can learn from these studies to make better decisions in face of possible disruptions. However, these approaches do not guarantee nor give quantitative assurance to how much the resilience strategies can contribute to the survivability of the system.

The mathematical camp, on the other hand, is interested in the mechanisms of how systems can collapse and in what conditions resilience strategies work for recovery. The well-known Bak-Tang- Wiesenfeld “sandpile” model [1] and the study on early-warning signals by Scheffer, et al. [2], as well as the SR-Model [3] built by the Systems Resilience project of ROIS, are good examples of mathematical approaches to resilience. They use abstract mathematical models to describe the internal workings of a system, and thus, we can draw logical conclusions in what conditions catastrophe can occur (at least probabilistically) and what strategies are effective to make the system resilient. However, their interests are often limited to the abstract models, and the results of these studies are rarely applied to real-world problems. Also these mathematical models are usually not capable of the adaptation (or “innovation”) aspect of resilience, meaning that the system will evolve to something new after the shock.

The goal of this meeting is to bring researchers in those two camps and to explore common grounds so that the social and mathematical approaches are integrated to make objective and practical resilience strategies. In order to make our discussions focused, we will first define a layered domains, with the real world at the bottom, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) as the second layer, and cyber security at the top. In this process of layered abstraction, we keep the essential aspects of socio-technical systems, including human behaviors, social and economic factors, and technical and systems workings intact so that the microcosm at the top still retains similar (albeit not the same) characteristics of the real world. Then, we will discuss how the case studies, best practices, human factors, etc. are interconnected to selected mathematical models using this narrowed domain. As an outcome of this meeting, we expect to have a joint view on resilience, which is an amalgamation of both social and mathematical approaches.

We shall invite participants from diverse disciplines. Resilience domain in itself is multidisciplinary (relating to several disciplines) and transdisciplinary (using approaches that transcend specialization boundaries). Secondly, these academicians have shown significant interest and contributions to advancing resilience thinking as they have demonstrated in international meetings that our team members also attended. We shall also invite PhD candidates who have demonstrated in our previous meetings critical thinking and research communication skills. Hence, we believe that we can leverage this diversity of participants to achieving the goals we have set for this workshop.

References

[1]. P. Bak (1996). How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, New York: Copernicus.

[2]. M. Scheffer, J. Bascompte, W.A. Brock, et al. (2009). Early-warning signals for critical transitions, Nature 461:3, pp. 53-59.

[3]. N. Schwind, T. Okimoto, K. Inoue, et al. (2013). Systems Resilience: a challenge problem for dynamic constraint-based agent systems. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).

 

Hiroshi Maruyama, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics

Guenter Muller, Freiburg University

Kazuo Furuta, University of Tokyo

Christian Brenig, The University of Freiburg

Hei Chan, Transdisciplinary Research Integration Center

Maxime Clement,?National Institute of Informatics

Sven Dietrich, CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Rony G. Flatscher, WU Vienna University

Katsumi Inoue,?National Institute of Informatics

Florian Kerschbaum, SAP Applied Research

Ryoichi Komiyama, The University of Tokyo

Satoshi Kurihara, The University of Electro-Communications

Roberto Legaspi, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics (Research Organization of Information and Systems, Transdisciplinary Research Integration Center)

Patricia Longstaff, Syracuse University

Morgan Magnin, École Centrale de Nantes, IRCCYN/ NII

Kazuhiro Minami, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics

Rungsiman Nararatwong, National Institute of Informatics

Hitoshi Okada, National Institute of Informatics

Tony Ribeiro,?National Institute of Informatics

Peter Y. A. Ryan, University of Luxembourg, LU

Taisuke Sato, Tokyo Institute of Technology

Nicolas Schwind, National Institute of Informatics (Transdisciplinary Research Integration Center)

Tomoya Tanjo, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics

Richard Zahoransky, The University of Freiburg

Program at a Glance

February 22, 2015 (Sunday) 19:00 ? 21:00

Welcome Banquet @ Restaurant Katsura?

February 23, 2015 (Monday) 09:00 ? 12:00
Venue: Research Wing, Room?208

Introductory Video of the NII Shonan Meeting

Organizers’ ?Welcome Address
Hiroshi Maruyama, Günter Müller, Kazuo Furuta

Part I.?Cast Anchor: Situating Real World Contexts

The objective here is to cite real incidents that threaten the resilience of the target domains. For example, at least three things come to mind, namely, Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, the Sony hack, and the resilience (or vulnerability) of the bitcoin. Throughout the discussions, the presenters should give the feel of real-world resilience problems so that the succeeding discussions will “anchor” our theories, formulations, concepts and frameworks to real problems where these may be applied realistically, and that the application is significant, relevant and compelling.

Resilience of cryptocurrencies
Christian Brenig
Abstract:?Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, are intended as innovative means to conduct transactions and are even considered as substitute for traditional fiat based currencies by some proponents. Our ongoing research is targeted at the economic opportunities and challenges associated with cryptocurrencies. How resilient are they against threats and attacks from inside and outside the system? Do they have the potential to serve as currency?

Bitcoin: the reason why the decentralized currency achieves justice as fairness
Hitoshi Okada
Abstract:?Bitcoin is a decentralized virtual currency based on P2P technology. It enables the unique distribution of electronic value from one person to another without the existence of a centralized issuer. Virtual currency circulates in an open-looped system as if it were real money, whereas existing electronic money circulates in a closed-looped system. The decentralization issue of virtual currency raises a question concerning the seigniorage profit, which ought to be under state monopoly. This presentation discusses the state for what reason currency issuance should be decentralized. We also discuss the ideal public policy for virtual currency in order for decentralized currency to achieve justice as fairness.

Recent incidents and trend of Cyber Security
Shiroh Ohtsuru (Executive Architect, Global Technology Service, IBM Japan)

A contribution to generalize the scenarios
Hiroshi Maruyama and Günter Müller
Abstract:?With real-world scenarios referenced in the previous talks, this two-fold presentation will discuss the Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) framework in light of these incidents, as well as position the incidents within an over-all resilience concept while making connections to various resilience techniques.

February 23, 2015 (Monday) 13:30 ? 17:30
Venue: Research Wing, Room?208

Part II. Explore Uncharted Grounds: Sharing our Novel Perspectives

This will occupy much of the meeting’s schedule. Presenters in both camps, each with even diverse disciplines, shall discuss their novel research works relevant to resilience. It may even make sense that each camp’s presenter provides insights as to what is the gap that needs to be bridged with the other camp and how their work will benefit or can be applied by the other camp. This will pave the way for discussing plausible integrated approaches.

The goal here is to learn the depth and breadth (especially the latter) in resilience research. Even focusing on a single domain, the participant will (hopefully) realize the diversity of perspective to the same set of problems. The organizers are expecting that at the end of this 1.5-day, the participants will come up with a few “themes” that may integrate some of the presented ideas.

Privacy-preserving spot checking ? A new kind of license plate
Florian Kerschbaum
Abstract: We show using a simple game-theoretic model that current solutions to spot checking for electronic invoicing require to survey all transactions and hence are not resilient at all. Then we present a cryptographic solution where users carry a device that randomly authenticates. We show that we can achieve a socially acceptable, resilient balance between privacy and the need for surveillance.

Socio-technical analysis of resilience in secure, verifiable voting systems
Peter Ryan
Abstract: Voting systems are typically large, complex socio-technical systems. Recently significant progress has been made towards developing voting systems that provide so-called end-to-end verifiability (E2E V), typically using techniques and mechanisms from modern crypto. But like all large, security critical systems, the security and resilience depends not only the technical components but also on humans, procedures etc. the properties that voting systems much satisfy are very subtle, including accuracy, ballot privacy, resilience, receipt-freeness and coercion resistance, accountability etc. and they must be robust insider and outsider threats. In this talk I will sketch how such E2E V systems work and the challenges of analysing them w.r.t. the above properties.

Mathematical modeling for resilient energy system
Ryoichi Komiyama
Abstract: This presentation attempts to discuss the potential mathematical modeling for the evaluation of resilient energy system. The case study will be presented about energy security and power grid issues through applying mathematical methods such as stochastic dynamic programming.

Resilient graph partitioning for electrical grids
Kazuhiro Minami
Abstract: We introduce a graph partitioning problem for electrical grids such that a given grid is partitioned into multiple ones that are self-contained concerning electricity balance. Our goal is to find a resilient partition against time-changing power demand and supply over the year.

Robust multi-team formation and its application to robot rescue simulation
Tony Ribeiro
Abstract: In many multi-agent applications, forming teams which can accomplish given missions is a key issue. In a dynamic environment that offers the possibility of losing agents during a mission, e.g. an agent is injured in a rescue mission, robustness of team is crucial. How to form robust teams that can continue to perform their own mission in face of agent lost is what we try to tackle in our work.

Resilience and Intelligence
Katsumi Inoue
Abstract: I will discuss the relationship between Systems Resilience and (Artificial) Intelligence. The relationship is multifold. Resilience can be formalized in terms of AI methodology, and AI can benefit from the concept of resilience. Moreover, future work on resilience should rely on the progress of AI.

February 24, 2015 (Tuesday) 09:00 ? 11:30
Venue: Research Wing, Room?208

Part ?II. Explore Uncharted Grounds: Sharing our Novel Perspectives
(Continuation.)

Securely leaking a secret
Sven Dietrich
Abstract: The risk taken by whistleblowers can be enormous, both in magnitude of their revelations and for their livelihood. In order for their secret leak messages to get through to the secure repository, they need a resilient and secure infrastructure. That infrastructure keeps it indistinguishable as to whether important information or just chaff is being broadcast over it, but also adds enough resilience to the transmission to tolerate bad actors interfering with the messages. We discuss such an infrastructure based on online ads.

Impact on capabilities in enterprises exemplified by ooRexx
Rony Flatscher
Abstract: Employing the “human-centric” programming language ooRexx (acronym for “Open Object Rexx”) for modelling of services, to empower end-user programmers to define and implement algorithms for their work-domain to improve resilience. To exemplify the ideas a demonstration of this approach will be given.

Resilience in business process management
Günter Müller
Abstract: Workflows are small computer programs that require fixed resources. Resilience is shown here that results can be guaranteed even if resources lack to be available. Three cases of resilience will be identified, where always one part of the specified resources fail. In computer science this leads to a stop and a non-termination. It will be demonstrated that bridging the gap is possible.

Towards a resilience oriented decision support system for business processes
Richard Zahoransky
Abstract: This ongoing work demonstrates the possibility for IT-Systems to evaluate resilience of business processes. First, data from process logs is examined. Operating on this data, in a second step, the resilience oriented decision support system assists humans by finding optimal strategies for processes facing failures or losses, thus increasing robustness and agility.

Benefits of parametric model-checking to assess the resilience of mammalian circadian rhythm
Morgan Magnin
(A joint work with Alexander Andreychenko and Katsumi Inoue)
Abstract: Understanding the mechanisms involved in oscillatory biological regulation is a fundamental issue to analyze living systems. Time delays play a major role in the sustainability and control of oscillations, as shown for example in phenomena related to the mammalian circadian clock, a system well-known for its reactivity and adaptability with regard to various but major changes. In this talk, we formalize these properties in terms of resilience through modal logics (TCTL) and show the benefits of parametric model-checking to analyze the dynamics of a simplified model of circadian clock.

February 24, 2015 (Tuesday) 13:30 ? 17:30
Venue: Research Wing, Room?208

Part II. Explore Uncharted Grounds: Sharing our Novel Perspectives
(Continuation.)

Understanding human behaviors through plan recognition
Taisuke Sato
Abstract: Understanding human behaviors in cyber space is a big problem. We present a novel plan recognition method applicable to incomplete observations of human behaviors.

False rumor diffusion analysis based on the SIR-extended information diffusion model
Satoshi Kurihara
Abstract: Twitter is a famous social networking service and has received attention recently. Twitter user have increased rapidly, and many users exchange information. When 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami happened, people were able to obtain information from social networking service. Though Twitter played the important role, one of the problem of Twitter, a false rumor diffusion, was pointed out. In this research, we focus on a false rumor diffusion. We propose an information diffusion model based on SIR model, classify the way of diffusion in four categories, and reappear the real diffusion by using this new model.

Perception-based resilience: Theories and models of human perception for resilience thinking
Rungsiman Nararatwong and Roberto Legaspi
(A joint work with Hitoshi Okada and Hiroshi Maruyama)
Abstract:?Perception-based resilience is the ability of a system to be resilient to stakeholder perceptions during crisis. We introduce this concept as a framework, together with our related theories and models, which particularly focus on the dynamics social media user perceptions. In a two-fold elucidation, we shall explain (a) our mental state model that explains individual perception changes when exposed to negative attributions to the system and (b) how theories of social identity may help understand and manage the crisis appropriately by leveraging public perceptions.

On the evolution of beliefs in social networks
Nicolas Schwind
(A joint work with Katsumi Inoue, Gauvain Bourgne, Sébastien Konieczny, Pierre Marquis)
Abstract: In brand crisis management, negative content regarding a brand could disseminate rapidly over social media and generate negative perceptions. In such a case, identifying how information is propagated within a social network and which are the influential agents (the opinion leaders) is a hot research topic. In this work, we introduce a framework to model the evolution of beliefs in social networks, called Belief Revision Games (BRGs). BRGs are zero-player games where at each step every agent revises her own beliefs by taking account for the beliefs of her acquaintances. We provide a general definition for such games where each agent has her own revision policy. We point out a set of appealing properties for BRGs and investigate the extent to which these properties are satisfied by some merging-based policies under consideration. BRGs are useful to model the evolution of beliefs in a group of agents in social networks, and to study several interesting notions such as influence, manipulation, gossip.

Limiting Perturbations in Dynamic DCOP: Model with quality guarantee.
Maxime Clement
Abstract: Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOP) is a framework to model many artificial intelligence and multi-agent coordination problems.
In many real world problems, new solutions must be found whenever changes occur. However, a transition to a new solution induces an additional cost in real situations. We propose the Limited Perturbation Problem (LPP) where the goal is to find the best possible solution while limiting perturbations in a Dynamic DCOP.

Measuring a concept that has gone mustang
Patricia Longstaff
Abstract: The basic concept of “resilience” has escaped from various disciplinary stables and is living in an interdisciplinary “wilderness”. Should we tame it again? Will this inhibit its ability to adapt and evolve to new conditions? A partial “taming” is suggested to allow resilience to be measured and used in a variety of research and policy debates.

February 25, 2015 (Wednesday) 09:00-12:00
Venue: Research Wing, Room?208

Part III.?Find Common Grounds: Establishing Integrated Approaches

In this session, the organizers will facilitate discussions around the “themes” identified in the previous parts, focusing on how the approaches by the two camps can be synthesized or amalgamated (thus, bridging the gap). The discussion among all present will be free-flowing. At the end, the organizers as moderators shall present the proposed integrations.

?13:30 ~?Excursion @ Kamakura

18:00 ~?Main Banquet?

?February 26, 2015 (Thursday) 09:00-12:00
Venue: Research Wing, Room?208

Part IV. Anchors A-weigh: Upholding Concrete Action Plans Sailing Forward

To assure lasting fruits for the meeting, the organizers and participants will identify concrete actionable items, which may be short-term and/or long-term (e.g., future projects, workshops or joint publications).