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TRR 248:  Foundations of Perspicuous Software Systems - Enabling Comprehension in a Cyber-Physical World

Subject Area Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering
Humanities
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term since 2019
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389792660
 
From autonomous vehicles to smart assisted living – increasingly, computer programs participate in actions and decisions that affect humans. However, the explosion of opportunities for software-driven innovations comes with an implosion of human opportunities to understand and control these innovations. The root of the problem is that contemporary IT- and AI-based systems do not have any built-in concepts to explicate their behaviour. They generate and propagate outcomes of computations, but are not meant to provide explications, justifications, or plausibilisations of the outcomes. They are not perspicuous. The Center for Perspicuous Computing, CPEC, takes up this challenge in a transregional collaborative research initiative. CPEC lays the scientific foundations for designing, analysing and interacting with computerised systems that explicate their functioning. We call them perspicuous systems, and our mission is to conduct foundational research on the seamless support for perspicuity across the entire system lifecycle, spanning design-time, run-time, and, in case of a malfunctioning or an optimisation effort, inspection-time. Our scientific approach puts a distinguished focus on formal design and analysis methods producing the necessary structures, in particular mathematical explications, to make systems understandable; on human-computer interaction, visualisation, and natural language processing methods required for humans to process these structures, in particular turning explications into human-understandable explanations; and on the deep integration across these areas, which is necessary to realise a holistic view of perspicuity, especially important for minimising risk associated with systems enhanced by artificial intelligence. With the development of a science of perspicuous computing the CPEC researchers are spearheading a movement towards building and reasoning about software-based systems that are understandable and predictable. As a result, CPEC is gradually enlarging its scope with regard to three interrelated research facets: 1) Deepening investigation of feedback loops within the system lifecycle, required to feed system analysis insights back into the design-time engineering, 2) Emphasising human-centred and psychological research regarding the human-in-the-loop, reflecting the need to investigate the interaction of perspicuous systems with various groups of human stakeholders, and 3) Interfacing to the societal dimension of perspicuity – society-in-the-loop – echoing the increasing number of regulatory requirements regarding perspicuity. CPEC research serves our society in its need to stay in well-informed control over the computerised systems we all interact with – it enables comprehension and control in a cyber-physical world.
DFG Programme CRC/Transregios

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Applicant Institution Universität des Saarlandes
Co-Applicant Institution Technische Universität Dresden
Participating University Technische Universität Wien
 
 

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