Related papers: Building on Quicksand
Maintaining stability in feedback systems, from aircraft and autonomous robots to biological and physiological systems, relies on monitoring their behavior and continuously adjusting their inputs. Incremental damage can make such control…
Existing approaches to tolerate Byzantine faults in geo-replicated environments require systems to execute complex agreement protocols over wide-area links and consequently are often associated with high response times. In this paper we…
Current contingency reserve criteria ignore the likelihood of individual contingencies and, thus, their impact on system reliability and risk. This paper develops an iterative approach, inspired by the current security-constrained unit…
Correct-by-construction synthesis is a cornerstone of the confluence of formal methods and control theory towards designing safety-critical systems. Instead of following the time-tested, albeit laborious (re)design-verify-validate loop,…
Persistent key value stores are an important component of many distributed data serving solutions with innovations targeted at taking advantage of growing flash speeds. Unfortunately their performance is hampered by the need to maintain and…
Given that machine learning algorithms are increasingly being deployed to aid in high stakes decision-making, uncertainty quantification methods that wrap around these black box models such as conformal prediction have received much…
Data storage systems serve as the foundation of digital society. The enormous data generated by people on a daily basis make the fault tolerance of data storage systems increasingly important. Unfortunately, modern storage systems consist…
Recent advances in secure hardware technologies, such as Intel SGX or ARM TrustZone, offer an opportunity to substantially reduce the costs of Byzantine fault-tolerance by placing the program code and state within a secure enclave known as…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) are being used in all the devices from embedded sensors to cloud servers and encompass a range of cost, power constraints, and security threat model choices. On the other hand, each of the current…
Over the past decade, the high performance computing community has become increasingly concerned that preserving the reliable, digital machine model will become too costly or infeasible. In this paper we discuss four approaches for…
The risk of a catastrophic or existential disaster for our civilization is increasing this century. A significant motivation for a near-term space settlement is the opportunity to safeguard civilization in the event of a planetary-scale…
In this paper we present attestable builds, a new paradigm to provide strong source-to-binary correspondence in software artifacts. We tackle the challenge of opaque build pipelines that disconnect the trust between source code, which can…
Machine learning can significantly improve performance for decision-making under uncertainty across a wide range of domains. However, ensuring robustness guarantees requires well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, which can be difficult to…
Design under uncertainty is a challenging problem, as a systems performance can be highly sensitive to variations in input parameters and model uncertainty. A conventional approach to addressing such problems is robust optimization, which…
Mechatronic systems have increasingly high performance requirements for motion control. The low-frequency contribution of the flexible dynamics, i.e. the compliance, should be compensated for by means of snap feedforward to achieve high…
Event sourced systems are increasing in popularity because they are reliable, flexible, and scalable. In this article, we point a microscope at a software architecture pattern that is rapidly gaining popularity in industry, but has not…
We study the stability of unitary quantum dynamics of composite systems (for example: central system + environment) with respect to weak interaction between the two parts. Unified theoretical formalism is applied to study different physical…
The accuracies for many pattern recognition tasks have increased rapidly year by year, achieving or even outperforming human performance. From the perspective of accuracy, pattern recognition seems to be a nearly-solved problem. However,…
This paper presents a computationally efficient robust model predictive control law for discrete linear time invariant systems subject to additive disturbances that may depend on the state and/or input norms. Despite the dependency being…
The problem of reliability of a large distributed system is analyzed via a new mathematical model. A typical framework is a system where a set of files are duplicated on several data servers. When one of these servers breaks down, all…