Homa Alemzadeh, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia, shared her expertise in resilient cyber-physical systems with members of the International Federation for Information Processing during the winter meeting of its Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance.Alemzadeh helped the working group publicly launch its project on Intelligent Vehicle Dependability and Security. This project seeks to realize highly dependable and secure operation of intelligent vehicles with respect to strict dependability, safety and security requirements, verified and validated by rigorous state-of-the-art methods.
Alemzadeh co-organized the project's inaugural workshop on intelligent vehicle safety with Jay Lala, Raytheon Technologies senior principal engineering fellow (workshop chair), University of Michigan Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Visiting Professor Carl Landwehr and Professor Emeritus John Meyer, and Charles Weinstock, principal researcher at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute.
“I was honored by the invitation to serve on the organizing committee. It was a great opportunity to learn from leaders in the dependable computing field and contribute to our research community,” Alemzadeh said. Alemzadeh is also an Assistant Professor by courtesy in UVA's Computer Science Department and a member of the Link Lab, a multi-disciplinary research center for Cyber-Physical Systems.
The by-invitation workshop was held virtually January 29 to February 1 and involved over 60 participants from the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. Attendees debated whether level 3 autonomous vehicles can be made acceptably safe with current technology and practices.
Featured speakers included Marjory Blumenthal, senior policy researcher at RAND; Missy Cummings, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University; Phil Koopman, Carnegie Mellon associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-founder of Edge Case Research; Paul Perrone, founder and CEO of Perrone Robotics; John Rushby, principal scientist in SRI International's Computer Science Laboratory; Nirmal Saxena, distinguished engineer at NVIDIA; Sanjit Seshia, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley; Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland distinguished university professor and professor emeritus of computer science; Wilfried Steiner, director of TTTech Labs; and Lorenzo Strigini, professor of systems engineering and director of Centre for Software Reliability at the City University of London.
“We are sharing the workshop presentations and discussions to increase awareness of the new challenges in widespread adoption of machine learning algorithms in safety-critical systems and the fault-tolerant design practices that can enhance these systems' intrusion tolerance and resilience.” Alemzadeh said.
See the presentations and session recordings at https://ivds2021.dependability.org.