Events Calendar

CS Colloq: Dr. K L. Bellman

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PMLocation: SSL 150Talk title: To be announced
Speaker: Dr. Kirstie L. Bellman, Principal Scientist, The Aerospace Corporation
Host: Prof. Ari RequichaAbstract:
The purpose of this talk is to stimulate a discussion about the architectural requirements for complex adaptive systems, as well as to broaden our definitions of "architecture."
Our ability to engineer large complex systems has been greatly impacted by the open, de facto information, computational, and device architectures that are springing up (e.g. Web, Internet, GIG, GRID computing, swarms of robots or UAVs, "internet of things" etc.) These architectures are characterized by a dynamic, constant insertion of new information sources and computational or device capabilities and by diverse users, stakeholders, viewpoints and goals. One implication of the above is that it may be infeasible to design and control large-scale complex adaptive systems in the top-down, heavy-handed, developer-driven style of yesterday. Complexity and scale are now forcing on system engineering, what has always been known in space systems because of distance and time lag: One cannot control quickly or accurately enough the complex system; it must help us to monitor, control, and manage itself. Recently Organic Computing in Europe and other movements have argued that the complexity requires the help of the system to co-design and indeed co-develop itself.
In our work, a key component of enabling such abilities has been "computational reflection" or the ability of a system to explicitly reason about its own goals, resources, activities, and relationship to its operational environment. In this talk, we will introduce several important concepts in engineering complex adaptive systems, define a reflective architecture, and briefly discuss our approach to implementing reflection, based on the wrappings approach.
We then discuss how all of the above changes the concept of ?architecture? as a compact description of a fixed configuration of components and relationships to "meta-architectures". That is, given such characteristics as the ability to insert new system components, system processes, and system configurations and dynamically determine context-sensitive relationships and configurations, one may well ask: what is invariant in an architecture? In the case of Wrappings applications, the invariant is the meta-architecture: The roles and purposes of the reflective processes and system level processes remain the same, regardless of application domain, domain resources, and the implementation of the reflective processes. As time permits we will discuss some early work to develop a reflective architecture for an Organic Computing chip design application with German colleagues.BIO:
Dr. Kirstie L. Bellman is a Principal Scientist in the Computer Systems Division and head of the Aerospace Integration Sciences Center (AISC), which she started upon returning to the Aerospace Corporation after four years at DARPA. The center serves as a research and development capability for a number of DoD and government agencies. AISC's focus is on the development of advanced system and model integration methods, new analytic techniques, and evaluation tools for assessing the impacts of new technologies. 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.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, Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. Among her awards, she recently received the 2008 Award in Technology from the Telluride Technology Festival. Other past awardees include Vint Cerf, Murray Gellman, Charles Townes, and Freeman Dyson.

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Front Desk