IEEE Computer Society Technical Meeting

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System Fragility: Are the Potential Societal Consequences Increasing (and What Can Be Done About It?)

The slides for this meeting can be found at http://sites.ieee.org/richmond/files/2017/03/RNCharette-IEEE-CS-Chapter-Presentation-Final-Rev-1-15-March-2015.pptx.

If you were one of the half million passengers who had their Delta and Southwest Airlines travel plans disrupted over the summer of 2016, you probably don’t need to be told about the fragility of computer and communications systems. The same holds true for the hundreds of thousands of customers of Telstra, Australia’s telecommunications giant, who suffered seven major outages last year affecting everything from their Internet to mobile services. It holds equally, too, for the over eighty-thousand―or one in four―federal Canadian government workers who have been paid too much, or too little, or not at all since a year ago February 23^rd after the introduction of a new payroll system. The 37 million Americans who were informed last year that their personal information had been compromised in nearly 1,100 confirmed data breaches probably don’t need reminding, either.

As information and communications technology (ICT) systems have grown in capability, they have also grown in complexity, as have their resultant risks—financial, social, and political as well as technological. For instance, as airline ICT troubles continue unabated, several members of Congress are demanding that airlines ensure that their “IT systems are both reliable and resilient,” implying that unpleasant legislation might follow if more outages occur.  Some technologists and scientists, such as Samuel Arbesman in his recently published book, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, even argue that advances in digitalization have reached a point that while simplifying our daily existence, they have also “made governing our lives incomprehensible, unpredictable, and overcomplicated.” If this is true today, what about tomorrow when “smart machines” able to perform the majority of today’s jobs, drive vehicles, fight wars, control the electrical and banking systems, etc., proliferate? What happens when they go wrong?

In this wide-ranging talk, Robert N. Charette, co-editor of IEEE Computer magazine’s new “Aftershock” column and a long-time award winning IEEE Spectrum magazine contributing editor and editor of its “Risk Factor” blog, will be discussing the increasing fragility of ICT systems, their potential impacts on society, and what might be able to be done to manage their risks while still reaping their rewards. During his talk, Charette will draw on the lessons learned from his study of a decade of global ICT failures and faults recently published at IEEE Spectrum Online, as well as his experiences from a forty-year career in international ICT development and management within the computing, aerospace & defense, government, pharmaceutical, telecommunication and utilities industries.

Background information for topics to be discussed:

“Why Software Fails,” IEEE Spectrum, September 2005.

 “Dying for Data,” IEEE Spectrum, September 2006.

“This Car Runs on Code,” IEEE Spectrum, February 2009.

 “The Rise of the Robot Warriors,” IEEE Spectrum, September 2009.

 “Automated to Death,” IEEE Spectrum, December 2009.

 “More Cyberattacks or Just More Media Attention?” IEEE Spectrum, July 2011.

 “Technological Unemployment: An Absurd Worry or Valid Concern?” Cutter IT Journal, July 2015.

 “Lessons from a Decade of IT Failures,” IEEE Spectrum, October 2015.

“Dragging Government Legacy Systems Out of the Shadows,” IEEE Computer, September 2016.

“IT’s Fatal Amnesia,” IEEE Computer, February 2017.

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6:30 pm - 7:00 pm - Social Time / Meals  (Details on meal choices can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ss3blfsek0k0er/Meal%20Selections%20for%20IEEE%20Computer%20Society%20Meeting.pdf?dl=0.)

7:00 pm - 8:00 pm - Speaker and Q&A

8:00 pm - 8:30 pm - Chapter Business and Future Plans

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