The Dependability of Complex Socio-Technical Systems

Since the invention of agriculture, we humans been organising large systems - early examples being the Roman army and the Chinese civil service. But the large systems of today are turning into something qualitatively different, thanks to the interaction of many people with complex software and global scale. 

Even a system owned by one company, such as Facebook, may have users from countries that are at war with each other; and many systems, from Europe's electricity grid to the international payments network and the Internet itself, are not under the control of any single company or even government. Our civilisation depends on this infrastructure, and there's been nothing like it before. The recent hiccups in the international credit system might prompt us to ask what we know about the dependability of complex socio-technical systems, and how this understanding might be improved.

Ross Anderson is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge. He is one of the founders of a vigorously-growing new academic discipline, the economics of information security.  Ross was also a seminal contributor to peer-to-peer systems, hardware tamper-resistance, emission security, copyright marking, and the robustness of application programming interfaces. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the IET and the IMA. He also wrote the standard textbook "Security Engineering - a Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems".