Autonomous Systems – Self-Organization, Management, and Control: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop held at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, October 6-7, 2008

The 2008 TUB-SJTU joint workshop on “Autonomous Systems – Self-Organization, Management, and Control” was held on October 6, 2008 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. The workshop, sponsored by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Technical University of Berlin brought together scientists and researchers from both universities to present and discuss the latest progress on autonomous systems and its applications in diverse areas. Autonomous systems are designed to integrate machines, computing, sensing, and software to create intelligent systems capable of interacting with the complexities of the real world. Autonomous systems represent the physical embodiment of machine intelligence.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to theory and modeling for autonomous systems; organization of autonomous systems; learning and perception; complex systems; multi-agent systems; robotics and control; applications of autonomous systems.

The International Workshop on "Autonomous Systems - Self-Organization, Management, and Control " is the eighth in a successful series of workshops that were established by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Technische Universitat Berlin. The goal of these workshops is to bring together researchers from both universities in order to present research results to an international community. In recent years autonomy of action has become a broadly desirable property of systems which operate in complex technical, societal and natural environments.

Moving or flying robots, for example, need to act on sensor data in real time, semantic services need to adapt to changing requirements of their users, and information systems which are based on huge information sources, like the World Wide Web, need to select information in view of their user's opinions and interests. To develop such systems and applications advanced techniques, algorithms, languages, methodologies, and architectures are required, which allow for self-organization, selfmanagement, and self-control.

Reporting on recent developments in autonomous systems and on studies of their specification and analysis, this workshop addresses the following topics:

Techniques of Sensing and Recognition

Applications of Autonomous Behavior

Self-Reference and Formal Analysis

Architecting and Management

Opinion Mining and User Interest