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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Posts

Future Blog Post

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This post will show up by default. To disable scheduling of future posts, edit config.yml and set future: false.

Blog Post number 4

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 3

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 2

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 1

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

portfolio

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

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.

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.