Altreonic speaker at Smart Systems Industry Summit

Date and place: 17th October 2017, Mechelen, Belgium

Title: Autonomous systems: surviving the nanosecond blue screen

by Eric Verhulst, CEO/CTO - Altreonic

Abstract: Smart systems are a hot topic these days. Enabled by continuously shrinking electronics, we can now add software to almost anything, from thermostats to autonomously driving cars and self-regulating energy networks. But is a smart system also trustworthy? Will it ever be smart enough to be trustworthy? Self driving cars for example use artificial intelligence to mimic the behaviour of an experienced driver. Clearly, this is a hypothetical driver as human drivers make mistakes all the time. And how would you feel when your car updates its driving software while driving? How smart is a self-driving software that keeps on speeding after it detected six times in a row that the driver was not paying attention to its warnings? How smart is it to have a dishwasher talk to the internet so that it doesn't work when you have no connection? Of course, this type of smartness was introduced by smart people. The issue is complexity, made worse by legacy developed at a time when trustworthiness was a second thought. In the real world the complexity is immense and the law of Murphy is king. The question is how can we make things simultaneously smart and trustworthy? Another question is whether such a smart system should mimic a human brain? Trustworthy means predictable, safe and secure; all aspects for which humans have a very bad reputation. The road to salvation is a systematic one whereby unavoidable errors and faults are taking into account at every step of the development. Fault tolerance and resilience are key.

Full program here.

Download the presentation in attachment.