CCC Council Members David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Brian LaMacchia (Farcaster Consulting Group, LLC), Ufuk Topcu (University of Texas Austin), and Pamela Wisniewski (Vanderbilt University), wrote a white paper titled “Algorithmic Robustness,” that has just been published on the CCC Website. The group was part of the Socio-technical Resilience Task Force in 2022-23.

Computational systems are pervasive throughout every sector of society, and the authors emphasize the need for such systems to be robust. Robustness is the “sustained performance of a computational system in the face of change in the nature of the environment in which that system operates or in the task that the system is meant to perform.”  Robustness is an important enabler of other goals that are frequently cited in the context of public policy decisions about computational systems, including trustworthiness, accountability, fairness, and safety.

The paper also describes a set of NSF and DARPA programs that are at the forefront of research in algorithmic robustness.

Read the white paper in its entirety here.