January 26, 2018, Austin Jones, MIT

Friday, January 26, 2018, 3pm-4pm
8 St. Mary’s Street, PHO 211
Refreshments at 2:45pm

Austin Jones
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Systems Engineering for National Security Challenges

Modern cyber-physical systems (CPSs) such as smart power grids and mobile autonomous robots, interleave computational tools with physical infrastructure to automatically effect physical changes in the “real world”.  As the designs of these systems become more complex, the problem of verifying and validating high-level, rich physical behaviors, e.g. “Survey sites of interest infinitely often, avoid collisions, maintain appropriate charge levels, avoid obstacles, and maintain periodic connectivity” , becomes too difficult to be accomplished with hand-coded heuristics and challenges the ability of traditional design techniques.  In this talk, I will present some recent work on approaches for iterative test case construction used to generate experimental test cases that adequately stress the performance of a system under test.  These techniques are especially useful in national security applications such as missile defense in which empirical validation opportunities are relatively limited.

Austin Jones is a technical staff member in the Ballistic Missile Defense Systems Integration Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.  Austin’s research interests include formal methods, robotics, machine learning, multi-agent systems, and differential privacy.  Austin obtained his B.S. and M.S. in systems science from Washington University in Saint Louis and his Ph.D. in systems engineering from Boston University.  Prior to joining Lincoln Laboratory, Austin was a post-doctoral research fellow in the departments of mechanical and electrical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Faculty Host: Calin Belta
Student Host: Rui Chen