Special Session on "Simplification through Change of Perspective"
Tiziana Margaria, Bernhard Steffen · 2011
Leading goal for the EU-project ITSy is to explore the power of simplicity for achieving robustness, flexibility and trust. A number of scenarios have been investigated in this direction, comprising looking at different notions of complexity, in particular distinguishing the actual complexity, the objective notion of complexity associated with a task as such, from the felt complexity, the subjective notion of complexity associated with the difficulty for some person satisfy his personal task. Division of labor is the typical way of decomposing the actual complexity in manageable or small piece of felt complexity. Or in other words, standing on the shoulder of giants we may reach impressive goals. A completely different way to achieve simplicity is to change the rules of the game. A good example here is the change from object tracking via image recognition to RFID-based object tracking. Whereas the former is intrinsically difficult, the latter, much simpler solution much better serves the purpose. In this session we consider three scenarios which propose such a change of perspective.