10.10.2024

DFG: Resilience in Connected Worlds – Mastering Failures, Overload, Attacks, and the Unexpected (Resilient Worlds)

Deadline: 31 January 2025

In April 2021, the Senate of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) established the Priority Programme “Resilience in Connected Worlds – Mastering Failures, Overload, Attacks, and the Unexpected (Resilient Worlds)” (SPP 2378). The programme is designed to run for six years in two phases. The present call invites proposals for the second three-year funding period.

The goal of the Priority Programme is to disrupt fundamental limits of connected worlds by adding resilience as a core building block. Resilience describes the ability of a system to either absorb shocks/crises, cope with them by recovering in a timely and efficient manner, or cope with them by attaining comparable or new basic functionality by means of system adaptation, and to sustainably improve by learning from the shock/crisis. Shocks and crises include failures, overload, attacks or completely unexpected events and situations. Machine learning (ML) based solutions help making our complex network infrastructures more resilient, but at the cost of reduced controllability – and with reduced abilities of experts to help in critical situations. Thus, we are faced with even more challenges in terms of resilience in critical network infrastructures.

Resilience, as an emerging research field, is strongly required as a core property of the network infrastructure, from the global internet to the internet of things (IoT), from connected cars to complex cyber-physical systems (CPS); resilience will be a primary research objective for the coming years. Resilient Worlds will provide resilience throughout the complete protocol stack, from the hardware layer to wireless communications to networking to applications. We expect that in modern communication networks, unknown and unforeseen events could be handled both from the network as well as the utilising external capabilities to prevent a collapse of this critical infrastructure. This requires a holistic approach to resilience, leading to appropriate, understandable and easily applicable solutions.

In Resilient Worlds, the focus will be on the investigation of a resilience-by-design approach, which is already very challenging; however, adding resilience to (legacy) systems that were not designed for it can be even more demanding. It is therefore the goal of the Priority Programme to address resilience from a new, multi-disciplinary perspective focusing on communications and networking with links to systems, wireless communications, security and machine learning.

The Resilient Worlds approach foresees projects following the “Resilience meets ...” concept. In particular, we see resilience at the core of next generation networked systems, thus requiring an integrative domain-oriented research approach. In addition, we solicit research on fundamental properties of resilience such as metrics, anticipation, understanding own state properties, etc. Projects are also expected to clearly address the above definition of resilience. In the following, we outline a number of such meeting points, where current state-of-the-art solutions have to be revisited and extended to focus on resilience as a core property.

Resilience meets Systems:

• Operating systems and intermittent computing
• IoT networks including resilient sensing and service management
• Cooperative cyber-physical systems
• Synergetic and holistic methods for addressing reliability and security of hardware systems

Resilience meets Wireless Communications:

• Resilient coded communication and computation
• Novel information theory approaches like “Post Shannon” / “identification channels” / “guess work”
• Adaptability / support for heterogeneity / scalability in case of dynamic unexpected changes

Resilience meets Machine Learning:

• Federated / distributed learning strategies for connected systems
• Explainable and controllable AI for connected systems
• AI for networking / networking for AI

Resilience meets Security:

• Agile security solutions for networking
• Scalable and sustainable security concepts for softwarised networks
• Distributed threat detection and response, decentralised security for networks

Proposals seeking funding are required to follow an interdisciplinary “Resilience meets ...” approach and must clearly demonstrate the necessary capabilities and novelties that will enable the Resilient Worlds programme strategies and visions described above. Projects pursuing research for the sake of understanding networking only, without connection to one or multiple of the above-mentioned research fields, or seeking only incremental improvement to their existing state-of-the-art, are not in the focus of this Priority Programme.

Proposals must be written in English and submitted to the DFG by 31 January 2025. Please note that proposals can only be submitted via elan, the DFG’s electronic proposal processing system. Applicants must be registered in elan prior to submitting a proposal to the DFG. If you have not yet registered, please note that you must do so by 24 January 2025 to submit a proposal under this call. You will normally receive confirmation of your registration by the next working day.

With the submission of a proposal within this programme, the applicants agree that the DFG shares all necessary information with the coordinator of the Priority Programme after the call deadline.

Funding decisions are expected to be completed in September 2025.

The DFG strongly welcomes proposals from researchers of all genders and sexual identities, from different ethnic, cultural, religious, ideological or social backgrounds, from different career stages, types of universities and research institutions, and with disabilities or chronic illness. With regard to the subject-specific focus of this call, the DFG encourages female researchers in particular to submit proposals.

Further information: 
https://www.dfg.de/de/aktuelles/neuigkeiten-themen/info-wissenschaft/2024/ifw-24-86