David Woods, The Ohio State University
Format: AMA Session
Dr. David D. Woods is a cognitive psychologist and systems safety expert who has spent his career studying resilience in systems and how people and machines can best work together—topics deeply relevant to SRE. Dr Woods will host a wide-ranging discussion on how systems adapt in the face of disturbances, how complex systems break down, how the human perceptual system works with user interfaces, and more.
David is a pioneer of Resilience Engineering that looks at how people adapt to cope with complexity in dynamic risky human-cyber systems including accident investigations in critical digital services, critical care medicine, aviation, energy, disaster response, military operations, & space operations (advisor to the Columbia Space Shuttle Accident Investigation Board).
He has discovered the key ingredients that allow systems to build the potential for resilient performance and flourish despite complexity penalties that accompany growth (https://resiliencefoundations.github.io/video-1-introduction-pt-1-it's-all-about-viability.html). His books include Behind Human Error, Resilience Engineering (the 1st book in the field), Resilience Engineering in Practice, and Joint Cognitive Systems. He started the SNAFU Catchers Consortium, a software industry-university partnership, in 2015 to apply the new science to build resilience in critical digital services (see stella.report).
He is Past-President of the Resilience Engineering Association and Past-President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
author = {David Woods},
title = {{AMA} with David Woods},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}