Let's Bring System Dynamics Back to CS!

Note: Presentation times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Wednesday, 13 October, 2021 - 04:3005:00

Marianne Bellotti, Rebellion Defense

Abstract: 

System Dynamics is the process of modeling systems in feedback loops. Developed by computer scientists at MIT, System Dynamics as a technical approach eventually fell out of fashion in favor of formal verification. And yet as we build distributed applications and the environment of automation to support them we see more and more outages triggered by dysfunctional feedback loops. These problems are impossible to model in formal verification but can be reasoned about in System Dynamics. This talk will discuss the history of System Dynamics, what tooling is available for software engineers to build and run models, and how to represent various architectures using the abstractions of System Dynamics.

Marianne Bellotti, Rebellion Defense

Marianne Bellotti has worked as a software engineer for over 15 years. She built data infrastructure for the United Nations to help humanitarian organizations share crisis data and tackled some of the oldest and most complicated computer systems in the world as part of the United States Digital Service. At Auth0 she ran Platform Services, a portfolio that included shared services, untrusted code execution, and developer tools. Currently, she runs engineering teams at Rebellion Defense.

SREcon21 Open Access Sponsored by Indeed

BibTeX
@conference {276729,
author = {Marianne Bellotti},
title = {Let{\textquoteright}s Bring System Dynamics Back to {CS}!},
year = {2021},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video