Notes on Complexity: In Life and Machines
This book is the introduction of 3 years of notes on the subjects of complexity, decision making under uncertainty, risk taking, learning from failure, human factors, and system safety
Posts by Collection
portfolio
publications
Practical data mining and analysis for system administration
Published in 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2015
Modern networks are both complex and important, requiring vigilant system administration. By implementing a practical data mining infrastructure, we are able to analyze device data and logs as part of general administrative tasks.
Recommended citation: Lund, T., & Panike, H., & Moses, S., & Rowe, D. C., & Ekstrom, J. J. (2015, June), Practical Data Mining and Analysis for System Administration Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.24570 https://peer.asee.org/practical-data-mining-and-analysis-for-system-administration
Automata Quest: NCAs as a Video Game Life Mechanic
Published in Alife for and from video games workshop at ALIFE2023, 2023
We investigate the viability of one popular form of automata, namely Neural Cellular Automata, as a way to more fully express life within video game settings and innovate new game mechanics or gameplay loops.
Recommended citation: Sato, H., & Lund, T., & Yoshida, T. (2023, August) Automata Quest: NCAs as a Video Game Life Mechanic. Presented at Alife for and from video games workshop at ALIFE2023. MIT Press. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14364
aRtificiaL death: learning from stories of failure
Published in ALIFE 2023: Ghost in the Machine: Proceedings of the 2023 Artificial Life Conference, 2023
Sharing stories, particularly about death, is an important part of many cultures. We explore this concept in artificial agents via Reinforcement Learning.
Recommended citation: Marcin Korecki, Cesare Carissimo, Tanner Lund; July 24–28, 2023. "aRtificiaL death: learning from stories of failure." Proceedings of the ALIFE 2023: Ghost in the Machine: Proceedings of the 2023 Artificial Life Conference. ALIFE 2023: Ghost in the Machine: Proceedings of the 2023 Artificial Life Conference. Online. (pp. 41). ASME. https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00633 https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/isal/35/41/116928
talks
ELK Stack
Published:
Modern networks are both complex and important, requiring excellent and vigilant system administration. By implementing a practical data mining infrastructure, administrators gain much more knowledge about and power over their systems, saving them resources and time in the long run.
Learning at Scale Is Hard! Outage Pattern Analysis and Dirty Data
Published:
An important part of site reliability is identifying and eliminating the causes of outages. Good problem management requires good problem definition and theme identification. Historically, this has been a largely inefficient human process, but problem management should never be driven solely by manual review of individual postmortems or a limited study of top-level metrics. If we want to scale, we must be systematic.
When Many Eyes Fail: Open Source Security and The Fall of The DAO
Published:
The DAO hack of 2016 shook the cryptocurrency world, lost many people a lot of money, and resulted in a major schism in the second most popular blockchain in history (Ethereum). The code, however, was Open Source.
A Tale of Two Postmortems: A Human Factors View
Published:
Many companies become frustrated with their postmortem and incident review process, feeling that it is a burden, or that it does not provide meaningful insights, or that the repairs and learnings generated do not help prevent repeats or other incidents. Fortunately, there is a better way to do things, backed by decades of scientific rigor and proven in industries where outages can mean a lot worse than lost revenue.
Ironies of Automation: A Comedy in Three Parts
Published:
As much as we often wish we could eliminate that “squishy humans” from the loop in order to maximize our system reliability, automation usually has unintended consequences. “The Ironies of Automation,” a seminal paper on the problems that automation, spelled these out quite clearly and still stands the test of time—over 30 years later.
Functional Dynamics of Sociotechnical Software Systems
Published:
Complex software systems grow ever increasingly integrated with our work and lives. Large, multi-component, dynamical software systems and their responsible teams form an ever-evolving, compelling object of study. Studies of incident command and facilitation in similar contexts has proven fruitful for understanding broader patterns and principles. We now turn to functional analysis of the systems themselves, building models thereof out of interviews, systems of record, transcripts of incident response and other artifacts. Findings illuminate the dynamics of such systems and inform operational strengths and weaknesses.
Functional Resonance Analysis in Sociotechnical Systems
Published:
The Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) is a method for studying complex systems, including sociotechnical systems. Outcome agnostic, it models these systems in terms of their functions, dependencies, and interactions - identifying variance in function outputs (which can be good too!) instead of a “success/failure” paradigm. This approach allows for a better understanding of how systems work and - importantly - how they interact.
Patterns, Not Categories: Learning Across Incidents
Published:
Outage pattern analysis is hard! There have been many attempts to learn across multiple incidents. Folks look for categories, tags, causes, etc. to identify what’s brittle or risky in their system, sometimes even using statistical models to help make sense of the data. However, their results often prove unsatisfying, non-actionable, or don’t tell you anything you didn’t already know from other sources.
Functional Resonance Analysis: Diagramming Your System
Published:
Nobody’s system works exactly the way they think it does. On top of that, systems of people and software are constantly changing, resulting in a regular need to update our limited understanding of how things actually work - where the sources of our success are, where our risks are, and how things behave.
teaching
Data Engineering
Undergraduate course, Brigham Young University, School of Technology, 2018
I designed and remotely taught a 500-level Data Engineering class for the IT department, open to Seniors and Grad Students with the appropriate IT/CS prerequisites (project-based). At the time, remote-taught, in-person attended classes were not known to this department. The curriculum, class structure, and instruction methods were invented whole cloth to meet the needs of the students. This included securing appropriate hardware for them for their class projects.