Teaching in Resilient Cognitive Systems

It's not all about trust, but without trust it's all nothing

Consider this: Every day, millions of us step into our cars without a second thought about software failures. Yet the software in your car could literally kill you. We experience software crashes in our everyday applications - from office software to smartphone apps - but car software doesn't fail catastrophically. Why? The answer lies in safety engineering, a field that has become almost invisible due to its own success.

As safety engineers, we've achieved something remarkable: systems so reliable that people trust their lives to them without hesitation. They don't know our profession exists, and paradoxically, that's our greatest achievement. If people were worried about safety, it would mean we'd failed at our job - and in safety-critical systems, failure often means loss of life.

But this success has created an unexpected challenge. How do we convey the critical importance of our work to decision-makers - from managers to politicians - when they don't even realize we exist? If we speak up, they just see us as naysayers. We've become victims of our own excellence. While people worry about data breaches and cybersecurity, hardly anyone has experienced lethal safety failures - precisely because we've prevented them. We face tremendous challenges ahead, yet our voice often goes unheard because we've done our job too well at keeping people alive.

Safety isn't a barrier to innovation - it's what makes innovation possible. Would anyone trust vehicles if car software regularly killed people? Would hospitals adopt medical devices that could fatally malfunction? Would our automated factories function if worker safety wasn't guaranteed? All of these are essential elements of our prosperity, our health, and our lives that would not exist without safety. Safety engineering isn't about saying "no" to progress; it's about making progress trustworthy enough to put your life on the line.

With systems that have to work in an unpredictable world, we have to go even one step further - they must dynamically adapt to their context to optimize their utility whilst preserving safety. In orther words: they must be resilient!

Without resilience, there can be no trust. Without trust, even the most innovative technology becomes just useless - or even deadly.

That's why resilience and safety are major differentiators and enablers of innovation. Therefore, our teaching focuses on engineering resilient cognitive systems