AI and Dependability in Computing Systems: Friend or Foe?

Abstract

We look at two sides of the coin with respect to AI’s effect on reliability and security of computing systems. With respect to AI and reliability, in some aspects, it is a foe, for example, by making it more challenging to reason about probabilistic programs. On some other aspects, it is a friend, for example, by enabling causal analysis for root cause diagnosis of failures. With respect to AI and security, in some aspects, it is a foe, for example, by enabling phishing and vishing attacks at scale. On some other aspects, it is a friend, for example, by automatically finding and patching vulnerabilities in OSS. We will conduct an interactive exercise at the talk to understand the views of the audience.

I then talk of some recent developments in our NSF Center, Chorus, which serve to highlight the role of AI as a friend in reliability and security. These are in the realm of running streaming ML processing on small devices with probabilistic accuracy guarantees and running decentralized ML algorithms securely and privately.

Bio

Saurabh Bagchi is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. His research interest is in dependable computing and distributed systems. He is the Director of the NSF CISE Center Chorus (2024-ongoing) and of the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Innovation Institute (A2I2) (2020-ongoing). He was selected to the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) (2020) and is a Fellow of the International Academy of Artificial Intelligence Sciences (AAIS) (2025) and of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) (2022). Saurabh is the Founder of a cloud computing startup, KeyByte.

Saurabh is proudest of the 27 PhD students and 50 Masters thesis students who have graduated from his research group and who are in various stages of building wonderful careers in industry or academia. In his group, he and his students have way too much fun building and breaking real systems. Along the way this has led to 13 best paper awards or runners-up awards at IEEE/ACM conferences and two Test of Time Awards. Saurabh received his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his BS degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, all in Computer Science.