Resilience, Risk & Reward
April 27-28, 2006
Philadelphia, PA

DAVID REED previews the conference (MP3) | (PDF)

With Distinguished Guest
Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

members' workshop
Perspectives on China
April 26
8:30 am – 4:30 pm

HAL LEVIN previews the
WORKSHOP (MP3) | (PDF)

conference overview
Resilience in systems inherently subsumes the notions of continuous availability, trust, recovery from disaster, positive adaptation, persistence, long-term survival, and success. In general, we know how to build large-scale resilient systems from unreliable components. Initially, we made our systems as near perfect and safe as we could reasonably afford, and then continually upgraded and modified them in the face of advancing and changing threat scenarios.

While digital technology gives us new degrees of freedom in the form of bandwidth, storage, processing power, and connectivity, all at marginal cost, we often find that graceful degradation is a rarity; failures are mostly sudden and comprehensive. These added degrees of freedom, plus increased complexity and highly structured system designs, may conspire to raise the likelihood of unexpected failure. We might well ask: will future systems need a form of AI to rebound, respond, or become more adept since we can’t anticipate the myriad of ways in which they may fail?

As our technologies evolve, so do the emergent behaviors of the users and those seeking to cause disruption. The gap between perceived and real risk appears to be never-ending. Critical to success is the right kind of design, feedback, intelligence, and adaptation. Ultimately, systems may have to become self-evaluating, self-managing, self-aware, and perhaps self-destructing!

At this session, we’ll look at the direction of hierarchy and control, evolution and self-determination, and centralized and distributed design in the effective management of trade-offs required to weather the unexpected snafus of the future. We’ll explore how we can find reward in building infrastructures that are resilient and able to handle the increasing frequency of unforeseen shocks that organizations face every day.

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speakers
Mr. Art Botterell, Founder, Incident.com
Mr. Scott Burleigh, Senior Software Engineer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Dr. Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.
Mr. Bill Cheswick, Chief Scientist Lumeta Corporation
Mr. Peter Ciurea, CTO, Inovant
Mr. Paul Evans, Founder, Sharedband, Ltd.
Dr. Merrick Furst, Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean, Georgia Institute of Technology
Mr. Clark Gellings, Vice President, Innovation, Electric Power Research Institute
Mr. Richard Klomp, Behavioral Scientist, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Dr. Tom Leighton, Co-founder, Akamai Technologies
Mr. Barry Lynn, Senior Fellow, New America Foundation and Author, The End of the Line
Dr. Charles Perrow, Author, Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies
Dr. Yossi Sheffi, Author, The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage
Mr. Kurt Yeager, Advisor, Galvin Electricity Initiative

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workshop description
“Perspectives on China” will be moderated and led by Rebecca MacKinnon, Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society and former CNN Beijing Bureau Chief.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a wide-ranging view of China for those planning to attend our July 11–12, 2006 conference in Beijing, “China’s New Tech Era.” This also is a good session for those who may not be making the trip, but who want to expand their understanding of how China’s history, economics, politics, and culture affect her technology and economic development today and into the future.

This workshop will examine, from a number of perspectives, some of the bigger issues and directions that will affect China’s future. Distinct from our actual meeting in Beijing, there will not be a technology focus to this workshop. Instead, its intention is to provide background information on topics that will include:

• History: Does China have a Middle Kingdom complex? How has her history and the Cultural Revolution shaped her outlook today?
• Politics and government: How long will the Communist Party survive? Is democratization a necessity for economic growth?
• Economics: How capitalist is China? Can China sustain its economic growth and become a real world economic powerhouse without changing its political system?
• Business: What should we know about Chinese management models and the country’s regulatory, legal, and market structures?
• Culture and society: When will technological empowerment penetrate to most of the population? How will most people likely get their first Internet experience? What will be the effect of Internet filtering?

Workshop LEADERS
Dr. Yasheng Huang, Associate Professor, International Management, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Author, Selling China
Ms. Rebecca MacKinnon, Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet
Mr. James McGregor, Author, One Billion Customers: Lessons From the Front Lines of Doing Business in China
Dr. Adam Segal, Senior Fellow in China Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Dr. Daqing Yang, Associate Professor, History and International Affairs, The Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University

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