Individual and Collective Autonomous Development
  The increasing complexity and unpredictability of many ICT scenarios let us
envision that future systems will have to dynamically learn how to act and
adapt to face evolving situations with little or no a priori knowledge, both at
the level of individual components and at the collective level. In other words,
such systems should become able to autonomously develop models of themselves
and of their environment. Autonomous development includes: learning models of
own capabilities; learning how to act purposefully towards the achievement of
specific goals; and learning how to act collectively, i.e., accounting for the
presence of others. In this paper, we introduce the vision of autonomous
development in ICT systems, by framing its key concepts and by illustrating
suitable application domains. Then, we overview the many research areas that
are contributing or can potentially contribute to the realization of the
vision, and identify some key research challenges.
