Resilience Engineering Association - past president

Human Factors and Ergonomics Society - past president

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One of the largest universities in the United States, The Ohio State University is a leading research university and the model for the state of Ohio's public higher education institutes.  Founded in 1870 as a land-grant university, it was ranked in 2006 as one of the top 20 public universities in the United States.  The main campus is located in Columbus, and regional campuses are located in Lima, Mansfield, Marion, Newark and Wooster.

The Ohio State University

David Woods has worked to improve systems safety in high risk, complex settings for over 38 years. These include studies of human coordination with automated and intelligent systems and accident investigations in aviation, nuclear power, critical care medicine, crisis response, military operations, outages of critical digital services, and space operations (he was an advisor to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board).  His studies have focused on human-computer systems in time pressured situations. He designs new systems to help people find meaning in large data fields when they are under pressure to diagnose anomalies and re-plan activities. The results of his work on how complex systems succeed and sometimes fail can be found in the book Behind Human Error (1994; 2nd Edition 2010).

He began developing Resilience Engineering in 2000-2003 as part of the response to several NASA accidents and is Past-President of the Resilience Engineering Association. His results on resilience in action and the dangers of brittle systems can be found in the books Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts (2006), Resilience Engineering in Practice (2011) and over 20 publications on resilience in socio-technical systems. His research publications on people, safety, and complexity have been cited over 25,000 times (H-index=80). 

He  has received many awards such as a Laurels Award from Aviation Week and Space Technology (1995), the Jimmy Doolittle Fellow Award from the  Air Force Association, and served on many national advisory committees such as National Research Council committees on Dependable Software (2006), and on Autonomy in Civil Aviation (2014), the FAA Human Factors and Cockpit Automation Team (1996; and its reprise in 2013), the Defense Science Board Task Force on Autonomy (2012).  He is also Past-President of the Human Factors an Ergonomics Society.

Intelligent Decision Support & Visualizations

Patient Safety

Control Room Design

Emergency Response

Intelligence Analysis

Accident Investigations

Business - Critical Digital Infrastructure

Integrated Systems Engineering

 Cognitive Systems Engineering 

Aviation Safety, Cockpit Automation and UAVs

Space Operations

Military Command and Control

Nuclear Power Safety

Human Centered Autonomy

Critical Care Medicine

ResearchGate Citations

Faculty Profile

Google Scholar Citations

Professor, Integrated Systems Engineering | College of Engineering

From the 2014 Velocity Conference in New York City, the Ohio State University professor expands on his keynote about sustained adaptability.

Click to watch David Woods's keynote address: http://goo.gl/l5tB8a

About David Woods (Professor, Ohio State University):
David Woods is currently the Lead, Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social and Engineered Systems, at the Ohio State University and Past-President of the Resilience Engineering Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society.

Watch more from the 2014 Velocity New York Conference: http://goo.gl/kmrqJF
Find out more about Velocity: http://velocityconf.com/

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David Woods (Ohio State University) Interview - Velocity NY 2014

Keynote on autonomy and people, part 1

Keynote, part 2

Keynote, part 3

From the 2014 Velocity Conference in New York City.

Click to watch our interview with David Woods: http://goo.gl/bm9iRi

As technologies change and people adapt to take advantage of those technologies, we can contrast successful and unsuccessful cases of managing the complexity that results—whether the system is human, biological, or engineered. In the successful cases multiple interacting and interdependent groups continuously readjust to each other as they cope with, and as they exploit, changing capabilities, demands, contexts, and constraints. These systems exist in layered networks with extensive and sometimes hidden interdependencies, yet they are able to adapt in the face of variation. But much more importantly, they are able to sustain adaptability as those forms and sources of variation change. In shorthand, these are complex adaptive networks which demonstrate sustained adaptability. Sustained adaptability refers to the ability to continue to adapt to changing environments, stakeholders, demands, contexts, and constraints (in effect, to adapt how the system in question adapts).

On the other hand, much less successful complex adaptive networks are more common: initially successful adaptations unwind over time and suffer sudden performance collapses—tactics become stale, groups work at cross purposes, actions seem unable to keep pace with change and cascades from surprising events. The failures to sustain adaptability are vivid when we witness an ecosystem degrade in a tragedy of the commons, a market unravel, or a dramatic failure occur in safety-critical operations.

Resilience Engineering asks three questions about this contrast:

1. What governance or architectural characteristics explain the difference between networks that produce sustained adaptability and those that fail to sustain adaptability?
2. What design principles and techniques would allow one engineer a network that can produce sustained adaptability?
3. How would one know if one succeeded (how can one confidently assess whether a system has the ability to sustain adaptability over time)?

Web services exemplify the above contrast as periods of rapid florescence occur but eventually stall, leading some organizations to the edge of collapse while others experience new periods of florescence. The participants in these experiences oscillate between extreme confidence about future decisions and a sense of precariousness and vulnerability to unanticipated surprises. Can the experiences of the organizations delivering or dependent on web services provide the insights to answer these three questions? Can the provisional answers to these questions help network web services learn how to sustain adaptability even as their past successes produce new upheavals?

About David Woods (Ohio State University):
David Woods is currently the Lead, Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social and Engineered Systems, at the Ohio State University and Past-President of the Resilience Engineering Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society.

Watch more from the 2014 Velocity New York Conference: http://goo.gl/kmrqJF
Find out more about Velocity: http://velocityconf.com/

Don't miss an upload! Subscribe! http://goo.gl/szEauh
Stay Connected to O'Reilly Media by Email - http://goo.gl/YZSWbO

Follow O'Reilly Media:
http://plus.google.com/+oreillymedia
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https://twitter.com/OReillyMedia

David Woods Velocity NY 2014 Keynote: "The Mystery of Sustained Adaptability"

Reaching Resilience by David Woods.  Lead, Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social & Engineered Systems,The Ohio State University

David Woods: 2015 EMERGING ISSUES FORUM INNOVATION RECONSTRUCTED

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