Category My Presentations
Systems Architecture with the Functional Safety-Security emphasis
I was asked to give a talk on the unification of Functional Safety (FuSa) and Security for which I replied that two disciplines cannot be viewed separately from Systems Engineering. Instead of talking about safety/security interop, I explained how to build complex systems and how these systems fail. Only when you understand that we do […]
How to be Resilient
Eric Barker wrote a good article about resilience, very needed at this difficult for all time. The summary from the article: This is how to be resilient: Positive self-talk: When you talk to you make sure you are nice to you. Physical fitness: Stress your body a little bit every day and it will handle […]
Space Shuttle Main Engines
This is a lecture 7 of the Systems Engineering curriculum from MIT and edX, Engineering the Space Shuttle. Links to the lectures: Origins of the Space Shuttle or The Making of a new Program Development of the Space Shuttle Bureaucratic Space War Political History of the Space Shuttle Space Shuttle Orbiter Subsystems Orbiter Structures & […]
If you were to design a brain, where would you start?
Purdue University created a new research initiative called the Center for Brain-inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence, or C-BRIC with the mission to deliver key advances in cognitive computing, with the goal of enabling a new generation of autonomous intelligent systems such as self-flying drones and interactive personal robots. The center intends to develop the next […]
Think about trust, not threats
A conversation arose today about threat analysis and I responded that I am against this practice of doing threat analysis. I thought that others will benefit from reminding them about design goals and how security fits in them. Threat – countermeasure is easy to explain to a novice but produces very ugly and inefficient systems. […]
Security Architecture for Cyber Physical Systems
Slides I presented at the Automotive Cybersecurity conference at Detroit on Friday. The main message is captured in the last bullet in the Summary: We do not know how to build 100% reliable systems, we only know how to manage risk – your system will fail and you have to build for failure. This was […]
On Life, Natural Selection, Evolution, Creation, and other topics
After reading a book by Erwin Schrodinger ‘What Is Life? Mind and Matter’ I made and shared several intentionally controversial comments, one in particular was about Darwin’s Natural Selection which I called nonsense. Result of that was a conversation with someone who argued in favor of it and of God. See for yourself. But first, […]
Problems of Consciousness
Current models of conciseness are incorrectly top-down treating a human as a monolithic unit with clearly defined subsystems and putting brain as the source of consciousness. Most theories of consciousness are based on philosophy and place consciousness outside of the structure of the universe as if mind is made of something else, call it ‘dark […]
Quantum everything, scientific dogma, laws of the universe
Rediscovered a talk by Ross Anderson dismissing quantum mechanics and hence quantum computing. His very first words are: I was invited here to provide a dissenting view. He is basically saying that quantum mechanics are not different from classical physics. That’s what Bohm/De Broglie pilot wave theory argues but it has been dismissed many times […]
How I find and why I share information
The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant. ‒ Maximilien Robespierre Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. ‒ Samuel Johnson I have been asked by many to share the secret of […]
Alan Tatourian 