CREST 2020

CREST 2020 5th Workshop on Formal Reasoning about Causation, Responsibility, & Explanations in Science & Technology

The CREST 2020 workshop is the fifth in a series of workshops addressing formal approaches to reasoning about causation in systems engineering. The topic of formally identifying the cause(s) of specific events - usually some form of failures -, and explaining why they occurred, are increasingly in the focus of several, disjoint communities.

The main objective of CREST is to bring together researchers and practitioners from industry and academia in order to enable discussions how explicit and implicit reasoning about causation is performed. 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.

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.

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, explainability of algorithms and systems
• applications, implementations, tools and case studies of the above