SERC TALKS Celebrates 5 Years: A Look Back
The fifth year of SERC Talks begins on August 18, 2021, focused on the theme Test and Evaluation with “What Does Test & Evaluation Mean in a Digital Engineering Enabled World?” presented by Darryl Ahner, Director of Scientific Test and Analysis Techniques in Test & Evaluation Center of Excellence and Interim Dean for Research at U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology. The webinar marks the first of three that will focus on Test and Evaluation throughout the remainder of 2021. The SERC Talks research webinar series was launched on June 1, 2016 to stimulate ongoing and collaborative dialogue between academia, government and industry sectors, and has featured thought leaders from our Systems Engineering community, who share their insights on various questions relevant to the field. Each year SERC Talks focuses on two themes and delivers three webinars per theme annually. Series speakers have included Mr. Grady Booch, IBM Almaden Research Laboratory, presenting “What is the Self?” in the Cyber-Physical Learning Systems series; Dr. Barry Boehm, SERC Chief Scientist Emeritus, presenting “How to Query, Qualify and Quantify the Qualities Quagmire?”, as well as Dr. William Donaldson from Christopher Newport University, presenting “What Does Digital Transformation Look Like from the C-Suite?”.
The series has developed a healthy international live viewing as well as a growing asynchronous viewing via its video archive, which currently holds 30 archived talks (available on the SERC YouTube channel and the SERC website), making the series a valuable long-term resource for classroom and other uses.
Since 2016, SERC Talks has been viewed live by more than 38 countries and has nearly 10,000 cumulative YouTube views. SERC Talks live viewership spans sectors, with 28% representing academia, 13% FFRDC, 17% government, and 42% industry.
The following list of SERC Talks illustrates the breadth of topics covered since 2016 and serves as a reference of what is available for viewing and use. The complete inventory of SERC Talk videos can be accessed via the SERC YouTube channel.
Digital Transformation
- June 2021: How Are Digitalization and AI Driving Improvements in Healthcare Delivery?
Dave Zion, Head, Systems Engineering Center of Excellence and Strategic Program Leader, Philips Healthcare - April 2021: How Can a Systems Approach Help Critical Civil Infrastructure Become Smarter, More Sustainable and Resilient?
Michael Salvato, Vice President, Infrastructure Advisory Practices, Mott MacDonald - February 2021: What Does Digital Transformation Look Like from the C-Suite?
Dr. William Donaldson, Assistant Professor, Biotechnology and Management Programs, and Director of the Business Institute at Christopher Newport University
Mission Engineering
- December 2020: The Practice of Mission Integration: How to Focus and Synchronize Department of Defense Activities Towards Critical Warfighter Missions?
Elmer Roman, Director, Mission Integration, OUSD (R&E) AC / Engineering - August 2020: Mission Engineering: Systems of Systems Engineering in Context
Dr. Judith Dahmann, Technical Fellow, The MITRE Corporation
Autonomy & Trust
- June 2020: How Do We Make Sure Future Cyber-Physical Systems Are Human Centered and Trustworthy?
Martin Törngren, Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology - April 2020: Can We Assure Resilience of Cyber-Physical Systems Using Model-Based Systems Engineering?
Mike McDermott, SERC Deputy Director and CTO, Stevens Institute of Technology and Dr. Peter A. Beling, Professor of Systems Engineering, University of Virginia
- February 2020: How Can We Systems Engineer Trust into Increasingly Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems?
Dr. Joseph Mitola III, Fellow of the IEEE, Chief Technologist, ENSCO Aerospace Sciences and Engineering Division (ASE)
Distributed Autonomy
- December 2019: How Can System Architecture and Cost Models Be Integrated for UAS Tradespace Analysis?
Dr. Raymond J. Madachy, Professor of Systems Engineering, Naval Postgraduate School - October 2019: What Is the Role of a Reference Architecture in R&D of Autnomous/Cooperative Systems?
Dr. David R. Jacques, Lt.-Col. (USAF-Ret.), Professor of Systems Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology - August 2019: What’s Really Distributed in Distributed Technology?
Dr. Azad Madni, Executive Director, Systems Architecting and Engineering Program, Director, Distributed Autonomy and Intelligent Systems (DAIS) Laboratory, Professor of Astronautical Engineering, University of Southern California
Applying DevOps to Complex Multi-Organizations Systems
- June 2019: Can DevOps Practices Be Applied to Cyber-Physical Systems Development?
Dr. Steve Mayner, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant, Scaled Agile - April 2019: What did I do wrong? An episode on Agile Anti-Patterns
Dr. Supannika “Sue” K. Mobasser, Associate Director in the Software Systems and Acquisition Department, The Aerospace Corporation - February 2019: How Does the Transition from Agile to DevOps Impact Software Cost Estimation?
David P. Seaver, Senior Technical Advisor Business Intelligence Organization, National Security Agency
Systems and Software Qualities Tradespace Analysis
- December 2018: Why Are Ontologies and Languages for Software Quality Increasingly Important?
Prof. Xavier Franch Full Professor, Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona Tech) - October 2018: How Can We Advance Structural Quality Analysis with Standards and Machine Learning?
Dr. Bill Curtis, Senior VP & Chief Scientist, CAST Software; Head of CAST Research Labs, Executive Director, Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) - August 2018: How to Query, Qualify and Quantify the Qualities Quagmire?
Dr. Barry Boehm, Research Council Chair, SERC; TRW Professor of Software Engineering and Director, Center for Software Engineering, University of Southern California
Successfully Applying Agile Methods for High-Criticality Systems
- June 2018: How Do You Use Agile Methods on Highly-Critical Systems that Require Earned Value Management?
Phyllis R. Marbach, INCOSE
- April 2018: How do Agile Methods Reduce Risk Exposure and Improve Security on Highly-Critical Systems?
Robin Yeman, Lockheed Martin - February 2018: Speed, Data and Ecosystems: How to Excel in a Software-Driven World?
Dr. Jan Bosch, Chalmers University of Technology
Cybersecurity
- November 2017: The Dilemmas of Cybersecurity – Why is Everything Broken?
Dr. William L. Scherlis, Carnegie Mellon University - October 2017: What are the Top Ten Software Security Flaws?
Gary McGraw, Synopsys
- August 2017: How Do We Prepare the People Who Will Need to Manage the Real-time Responses to Cyber Attacks on Physical Systems?
Dr. Barry Horowitz, and Dr. Inki Kim, University of Virginia
Cyber-Physical Learning Systems
- August 2017: What Are Cyber-Social Learning Systems and How Will We Form Them?
Dr. Kevin Sullivan, University of Virginia - April 2017: Can Graphical Models Provide a Sufficient Basis for General Intelligence?
Paul Rosenbloom, University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies - February 2017: What is the Self?
Mr. Grady Booch, IBM Almaden Research Laboratory
Model-Centric Systems Engineering
- December 2016: Why is Human-Model Interactivity Important to the Future of Model-Centric Systems Engineering?
Dr. Donna Rhodes and Dr. Adam Ross, Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri), Massachusetts Institute of Technology - October 2016: What Lives at the Intersection of MOSA (Modular Open System Architecture) and Set-Based Design?
Dr. Gary Witus, Associate Director for Student Programs, Anderson Institute; Associate Professor (Research), Industrial and Systems Engineering, College of Engineering, Wayne State University - August 2016: What Were the Top Issues and Opportunities from the SERC Model‐Centric Design and Acquisition Forum?
Dr. Mark Blackburn and Ms. Megan Clifford on behalf of Dr. Dinesh Verma, Stevens Institute of Technology - June 2016: We Need a New Design Perspective for Socio-technical Systems. Can Complex Network Perspective Be a Viable Candidate?
Dr. Babak Heydari, Assistant Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology
SERC Talks is an open forum featuring leaders in our community sharing their insights on topics relevant to Systems Engineering (SE) and its evolution. We encourage you to join and provide input and insights during these online interactive discussions as we strive to create an ongoing and more collaborative dialogue between academia, government, and industry sectors of the SE community.