Proceedings First Workshop on Causal Reasoning for Embedded and safety-critical Systems Technologies

TL;DR

This paper summarizes a workshop that explores recent advances in causal reasoning, fault localization, and explanation techniques across AI, formal methods, and concurrent systems, emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration.

Contribution

It brings together diverse research on causality analysis and fault localization, highlighting new methods and applications across multiple domains.

Findings

Diverse techniques for causality analysis presented

Applications include debugging, accountability, and hazard analysis

Interdisciplinary approaches fostered collaboration

Abstract

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, formal methods. Work on these topics has significantly gained speed during the last years. The goals of CREST are to bring together and foster exchange between researchers from the different communities, and to present and discuss recent advances and new ideas in the field. The workshop program consisted of a set of invited and contributed presentations that illustrate different techniques for, and applications of, causality analysis and fault localization. The program was anchored by two keynote talks. The keynote by Hana Chockler (King's College) provided a broad perspective on the application of causal reasoning based on Halpern and Pearl's definitions of actual causality to a variety of application domains ranging from formal verification to legal reasoning. The keynote by Chao Wang (Virginia Tech) concentrated on constraint-based analysis techniques for debugging and verifying concurrent programs. Workshop papers deal with compositional causality analysis and a wide spectrum of application for causal reasoning, such as debugging of probabilistic models, accountability and responsibility, hazard analysis in practice based on Lewis' counterfactuals, and fault localization and repair.