MEMS Seminar: "An Optimization Perspective on Trustworthiness and Trust in Autonomous Systems"

The application domain of the work described in this talk is the near-to-far-future airspace, where the projected density and heterogeneity of autonomous participants, including non-cooperative agents, combine to increase system complexity and uncertainty, with ensuing threats to safety. Given the increased complexity, control of airspace will have to transition to human-machine teams, with ever rising authority of autonomous systems (AS). The growing use of AS leads to a potential paradox: AS are meant to address system uncertainty; however, machine authority and human-machine interactions are themselves major sources of uncertainty in the system. Because trustworthiness and trust are connected to decision making, which, in turn is an optimization problem, subject to expressed and unexpressed constraints, in this presentation we examine the nature of the attendant optimization problems, discuss some approaches to solutions, as well as persistent gaps.

Dr. Natalia Alexandrov works at the NASA Langley Research Center. Her interests are in multidisciplinary methods for variable-fidelity modeling, problem synthesis, design optimization (MDO), and control of complex cyber-physical-human systems, including mechanical artifacts and heterogeneous adaptive systems, such as future transportation systems and biological systems.

Lunch will be served at 11:30 am.
Hosted by Dr. Wilkins Aquino and Dr. Michael Zavlanos