Human-Centered Autonomy for Resilient Space Systems – Greg Falco

Computer Science Seminar Series
February 16, 2021

“Human-Centered Autonomy for Resilient Space Systems”
Greg Falco, Johns Hopkins University

Sustained space habitation is no longer a next-generation challenge. With NASA’s Artemis Plan, the advent of the United States Space Force, and the “new space” sector’s scrappy enthusiasm, there is serious momentum to bring humans to space for extended periods in the coming decade. We can’t do this alone. We’ll need to adapt the highly automated systems we’ve been designing for everyday purposes to help us survive. However, if we build space-faring AI systems anything like how we have been building smart cities, we are going to have some problems. AI systems that have been designed for civil society are not built for digital or physical resilience. Largely, they have lacked human-centricity, which has been a major contributor to this challenge. In this talk, we’ll discuss and raise questions about the calls for autonomous space systems. If we do not have a track record for building safe and secure human-centric AI systems on Earth, how can we build them for space? The stakes are higher there.

Gregory Falco is the first faculty hire at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy (IAA), where he will be an assistant professor jointly between the IAA and the Civil and Systems Engineering Department starting in the fall of 2021. Falco has been at the forefront of smart city and space system security and safety in both industry and academia for the past decade. His research, "Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems," was highly influential in the recent Space Policy Directive-5 of the same name. Falco has worked closely with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to help advance space asset security capabilities using AI. Falco led the inaugural university cohort research team for the United States Space Force’s Hyperspace Challenge. He has been listed in Forbes' 30 Under 30 for his inventions and contributions to critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Falco has also been published in Science for his work on cyber risk. Falco is a cyber research fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL), and a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Falco completed his PhD at MIT CSAIL, his master’s degree at Columbia University, and his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University.