Webinar Link: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zyIBh_1gQLmKpMJG0GyLxw 

Abstract: Increasing tempo and complexity of missions for aircraft and space vehicles has driven the design of such systems to higher levels of autonomous operations. Consequently, the challenges of ensuring a safe and secure operational regime have been rapidly escalating. While a number of techniques, new and old, are available to address different facets of these challenges, what seems to be missing is some cohesive approach or framework that can support the total design lifecycle while lowering the cost and risk of a successful design and deployment of such cyber-physical systems.

This talk will focus on some of these challenges and where overlaps exist in the safety and security needs and in its eventual resolution within a software and hardware design. Some notable approaches and methodologies will be discussed briefly to highlight the potential of such convergence as well as some mention of current state-of-practice in software and hardware verification, validation, and accreditations (VV&A).

Biography: Dr. Prakash Sarathy is the Chief Engineer for common mission processing subsystem for Northrop Grumman Global Products center. He earned his doctoral degree in Aerospace Engineering from Syracuse University. He has held positions as post-doctoral fellow, research engineer and tenured engineering faculty in his prior career. He has over 30 years of experience in the area of software applied to aerospace engineering, providing technical and project/program management and oversight for advanced technology programs requiring accelerated risk burn down and rapid maturation. His technical expertise areas include cooperative distributed architectures for multi-agent systems, cooperative decision frameworks, agent architectures for mission management, aggregate control of distributed assets, user interface design for aggregate level situational awareness. Insertion of neural networks, evolutionary computing and emergent behavior to decision making paradigms. This software engineering expertise coupled with his in-depth experience in linear and nonlinear dynamics of vehicle systems, applied to guidance, navigation and control of aircraft, spacecraft, and robots as well as of real-time and embedded simulations, high fidelity modeling, implementation, VV&A, formal methods, and testing, provide an excellent framework for the challenges of next generation autonomous aircraft. He has spearheaded an effort to assemble a feasible set of methodologies to establish bounded behavior assurance for advanced autonomous missions under contested operating conditions.

Biography: Marlon Marquez is a Consulting Engineer at NG Space Systems. Mr. Marquez has prior experience designing with Intel, Power PC, and ARM microprocessor technologies. He has domain knowledge with state-of-the-art cyber security and anti-tamper infrastructures including TPMs, secure hypervisor technologies and multi-level security concepts. He has experience with Operating System technologies, Pub/Sub application development, and Kernel development. He is an FPGA subject matter expert and has extensive experience with FPGA and Processor interfaces. He holds two USPTO patents and presented ASIC technology at IEEE. He has a BSEE from UCLA, was an MS candidate at Cal State Northridge in Electrical and Computing Engineering and has an MBA from Pepperdine University.

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Host: Pierluigi Nuzzo

Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things (CCI) http://cci.usc.edu

Center for Autonomy and AI (AAI) https://aai.usc.edu