NSF Workshop on State-of-the-Art and Challenges in Resilience

Society depends on the interconnection of systems including hardware and software. They make up the built environment and the infrastructure that we depend upon. Today’s systems are subject to an increasing number of hazards and disasters both natural or manmade often leading to failures that have major impact on society. We want to know how to design systems to avoid such failures and how to bounce back quickly if such failures occur.

The workshop will reflect on the current state-of-art and state-of-practice for the above two questions. It will then bring out the research and the translational challenges to make our infrastructures truly resilient. This workshop will be hosted in a hybrid mode, with both in-person and virtual participation.

The workshop will bring together external thought and action leaders in the area of resilient systems, drawn from universities, federal laboratories, and commercial organizations and providing multi-disciplinary and convergent perspectives. The workshop will be broad-based considering areas of resilient and adaptive cyberinfrastructures, resilient cyber-physical systems, and scientific foundations of resilient socio-technical systems.

The workshop will be hosted by Purdue’s Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems, and Processes and will address three broad technical themes. An objective is to develop technology for research concepts suitable for a near-term (1-5-year) and mid-term (5-10-years) considering theoretical and practical advancements in technology.

Overall goal is to answer: 1. How can autonomous systems be made more resilient? This will include discussion of human on/in-the-loop autonomy; 2.

How to build in probabilistic guarantees in our CPS operations? We want to provide such guarantees even when the systems are subject to perturbations, both anticipated and unanticipated; and 3. How can we make our systems resilient to black swan events?

As we are living through one such, we are fast accumulating a set of best principles and practices to make our computing systems and socio-technical systems resilient to such events. Our discussion will bring out principles that will aid societies to bounce back from such events. The workshop will unify these and lay out ideas for further development.

The workshop will provide significant societal benefits. The topic is timely and relevant to challenges to our systems through natural disasters and cyberattacks. Workshop results will be published online and open to the broad community of researchers.

Results will be disseminated through rich multimedia material in addition to the traditional method of scientific publications.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.