Reframing the Cyber Crisis: Patterns in Adaptive Systems and Design for Continuous Adaptability

As an adaptive system, the world of cybersecurity is stuck, slow and stale to recognize and respond to rapidly changing relationships and threats. To make progress, the cyber world needs to take advantage of discoveries on the laws that govern adaptive systems of all types and at all scales. These advances have powered new capabilities to build adaptive capacity in layered networks of technology that provide valued services to human stakeholders.

Dr. David Woods will reframe the cyber crisis in terms of how adaptive cycles spiral over time leading to the risk of adaptive system break down, and describe resilience engineering advances in critical digital services, and discuss whether these techniques for continuous adaptability can provide a model for tackling the current cyber crisis.

About David Woods
David Woods, a Department of Integrated Systems Engineering professor at The Ohio State University, has worked to improve systems safety in high-risk complex settings for 40 years. The results of his work on how complex human-machine systems succeed and sometimes fail has been cited over 35,000 times. He developed resilience engineering on the dangers of brittle systems and the need to invest in sustaining sources of resilience, developed the first comprehensive theory on how systems can build the potential for resilient performance despite complexity, recently started the SNAFU Catchers Consortium an industry-university partnership to build resilience in critical digital services. His long list of awards includes the Laurels Award from Aviation Week and Space Technology (1995), IBM Faculty Award, Google Faculty Award, Ely Best Paper Award and Kraft Innovator Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society, the Jimmy Doolittle Fellow Award from the Air Force Association (2012).

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