The Self- tar Vision

Achieving various selfproperties has been a grand challenge of computer science and engineering since the building of the first computer. The latest reincarnation of this challenge is due to the fact that large, complex and dynamic information systems have suddenly become a key part of the infrastructure of modern societies. Accordingly, it has become very important to be able to build, manage, and exploit these systems in the most efficient way possible. In other words, these systems have to become self. We are now in the process of finding out how to deal with this challenge. It is a complex problem because information systems are deployed over a very wide range of environments from wireless sensor networks to powerful supercomputing clusters, from home networks to the entire Internet. It is very likely that to meet this challenge, we need to draw ideas from many disciplines that have been dealing with the design or explanation of large and/or complex systems, such as the space shuttle, an operating system, the Internet, human intelligence, an ecosystem, evolution, living organisms, etc. The goal of this book is to explore the widest possible range of ideas and approaches that can potentially be relevant in understanding how to build selfinformation systems. We invited experts from different disciplines and asked them the same questions: