Towards Resilient Systems in an Increasingly Hostile World
Keynote by Dr Kathleen Fisher
Wednesday, 26 February 2025
08:30—09:30
Salt Typhoon. The CrowdStrike outage. NotPetya. These are all examples of complex systems that have failed in ways that caused enormous damage. We have built technological marvels that contain fundamental weaknesses that can be exploited by adversaries, and complex interdependencies that mean small faults can cause catastrophic failures.
In an increasingly hostile world, it is imperative that we develop technology to build systems that are more resilient, in the face of natural disasters, operator errors, and adversarial attacks. In this talk, I will motivate the problem, describe some initial results, and suggest future research directions.
Keynote Speaker: Dr Kathleen Fisher
Director, Information Innovation Office (I2O), US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Dr. Kathleen Fisher has served as the director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) since May 2022, leading efforts to develop technologies ensuring an information advantage for the U.S. and its allies. Previously, she was I2O’s deputy director (2021–2022) and a program manager (2011–2014), where she launched the High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) and Probabilistic Programming for Advancing Machine Learning (PPAML) programs.
Before DARPA, Fisher chaired Tufts University’s Computer Science Department (2016–2021) and was a principal technical staff member at AT&T Labs. An AAAS, ACM, and Hertz Foundation fellow, she has chaired ACM SIGPLAN and led marquee conferences like PLDI, OOPSLA, and ICFP. She co-founded SIGPLAN’s Programming Language Mentoring Workshop series, advancing diversity in computer science, and received the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award.
Fisher holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and has served on the Board of Trustees at Harvey Mudd College.
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