Keynote

Speaker: Dr. Kirstie L Bellman, Topcy House Consulting

Title: Building Self-aware Systems for Continual Self-Testing and Development

Abstract

Software defined interfaces, data driven processing, broad network connectivity, model-based controllers, new scalability for formal methods, runtime models, and many more capabilities attest to our gains in building responsive, flexible, and verifiable systems. Unfortunately all of these gains are challenged by the rapid turnover in capabilities, users, and functions in real complex systems, as well as by the intentional cyber-attacks on all software and modeling processes, which we will show in examples in the first part of this talk.

One approach to meet these challenges is to build self-aware systems. For over thirty years, we have built “reflective architectures” that explicitly reason about their own resources for correct and adaptive application and integration of all their capabilities and components in order to accomplish different system goals. We will describe the roles of models in such self-aware systems and most promising, how a self-aware system can perform continual monitoring and testing of its models and other components. As an example, we describe the CARS robotic cars testbed that we use to study the development of self-aware systems that can partly develop and correct their own models.

The hope is that this talk will encourage the community to consider how they can use their current experimental modeling and V&V approaches to support such a self-aware framework.

Short Reference List

  1. Kounev, Samuel et al., Self-Aware Computing Systems, Springer, 2017

  2. Lewis, Peter et al., Self-Aware Computing Systems, An Engineering Approach, Springer 2016.

  3. Bellman, Kirstie. “Self-reflection and a Version of Structured “Playing” may be Critical for the Verification and Validation of Complex Systems of Systems.” Proc. 4thIntl. CSDM (Complex System Design and Mgmt, 2013 Paris France. Dec. 4-6. 2013. Keynote at CSDM ’13 (4th Intl Conf Complex Systems Design and Management), Wed Dec 4, 2013

  4. Bellman, Kirstie. Plenary talk “Closing the Gap between Cyber-security and Fault Management Systems in Cyber-Physical Systems”. Proc. 2012 MTEMS (Malware Technical Exchange Meeting), Los Angeles, California. August 14, 2012.

  5. Dr. Christopher Landauer, Dr. Kirstie L. Bellman, Dr. Phyllis R. Nelson, “Wrapping Tutorial: How to Build Self-Modeling Systems”, Proceedings of SASO 2012: The 6th IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, 10-14 October 2012, Lyon, France (2012)

  6. Bellman, Kirstie L. “Model-Based Design, Engineering, and Development: Advancements mean New Opportunities for Space Systems Development.” Proceedings of AIAA SPACE 2011, Long Beach, California. September, 2011.

  7. Bellman, K.L., C. Landauer, and P. Nelson. “Developing Methods for Determining Good Enough in SORT Systems”, Proc. SORT 2011, The Second IEEE Workshop on Self-Organizing Real Time Systems, Mar 2011. Newport Beach, California

  8. Bellman, Kirstie L., “Verification and Validation in Large Scale System of Systems.” Proceedings of AIAA INFOTECH 2010. Atlanta, Georgia.

  9. Bellman, K. L., Landauer, C. and Nelson, P. R. System Engineering for Organic Computing: The Challenge of Shared Design and Control between OC Systems and their Human Engineers, chap. 3, In R. Wuertz (ed.) Organic Computing. Understanding Complex Systems Series. Springer-Verlag, pp. 25–80. 2008

  10. Bellman, Kirstie L., Christopher Landauer (1995.)``Designing Testable, Heterogeneous Software Environments'', pp. 199-217 in Robert Plant (ed.), Special Issue: Software Quality in Knowledge-Based Systems, Journal of Systems and Software, 29 ( 3) (June)

About the speaker

Dr. Kirstie L. Bellman is a Principal Scientist in the Computer Systems Division at the not-for-profit FFRDC, The Aerospace Corporation, where she works on the development of advanced system and model integration methods, new analytic techniques, and evaluation tools for assessing the impacts of new technologies. All of these techniques and approaches are being applied to a variety of applications, ranging from cyber-security to medical informatics. Upon completion of her term at DARPA as a Program Manager for the Domain-Specific Software Architectures (DSSA) program, Prototech (rapid prototyping technology and formally-based specification languages), projects in the Formal Foundations program, the large Computer-Aided Education and Training Initiative (CAETI), and several Technology Readiness Projects (TRP), she received an award from the Office of the Secretary of Defense for excellence in her programs. During her years at DARPA, she had the honor of working with Dr. Anita Jones, then DDR&E at OSD, with the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, NATO, and a wide range of government agencies. She received the 2008 Award in Technology from the Telluride Technology Festival. Other past awardees include Vint Cerf, Murray Gellman, Charles Townes, and Freeman Dyson. Recently she was the Chief Scientist for the DARPA, META program which worked on new formal design methods for very large, complex cyber-physical systems.

Dr. Bellman has over thirty-five years of academic, industrial, and consulting experience in both laboratory research and the development of models and information architectures for large military and government programs. Her published research spans a wide range of topics in Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Computer Science. In addition to playing a leading role in the development of programs in the error analysis and evaluation of Artificial Intelligence programs, her group did internationally recognized research in conceptual design environments, software integration and architectures, and 'enterprise evaluation'. She started the VEHICLES project, an environment for the conceptual design of space systems that incorporates both conventional and artificial intelligence methods. With Dr. Landauer, she started the Wrappings approach to system integration. While at DARPA, she extended the then new concept of Virtual Worlds to education, business and research environments. With a number of academic partners, she is also developing new mathematical approaches to the analysis of Virtual Worlds containing collaborating humans, artificial agents, and heterogeneous representations, models and processing tools. Lastly she has been working on reflective architectures that use models to manage their own resources and to reason about appropriate behavior. Recently she is combining reflective architectures with European Organic Computing approaches that emphasize the self-organizational properties of biologically-inspired architectures and operating systems to develop new cyber-security approaches.