The SERC would like to congratulate SERC Deputy Director Mr. Tom McDermott who was an editor and author of the newly released textbook Systems Engineering and Artificial Intelligence.
The textbook represents a set of collected papers from three symposia. In 2020, the SERC partnered with the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) to sponsor a symposium entitled “AI Welcomes Systems Engineering: Towards the Science of Interdependence for Autonomous Human-Machine Teams.” Two related virtual symposia were held in March and November 2020. A third AAAI virtual symposium, “Leveraging Systems Engineering to Realize Synergistic AI/Machine Learning Capabilities,” was conducted in March 2021.
McDermott specifically authored a chapter that includes the SERC roadmap on artificial intelligence (AI), which is intended to structure and guide research in AI and autonomy. The roadmap lays out the steps required to enable the transformation of SE practices that use AI and support a new wave of automated, adaptive, and learning systems. This is the meaning of “Systems Engineering for Artificial Intelligence” (SE4AI): the application of SE methods to learning-based systems’ design and operation to achieve outcomes such as improved safety, security, ethics, etc. AI4SE applies AI and machine learning techniques to improve human-driven engineering practices. This goal of “augmented intelligence” includes outcomes such as achieving scale in model construction and efficiency in design space exploration. The SE4AI and AI4SE labels have become metaphors for the anticipated rapid evolutionary phase in the systems engineering (SE) community.
Systems Engineering and Artificial Intelligence is currently available.
