We begin by presenting a very short overview of past and current research carried out by the Safety Critical Avionics Brach (SCAB) at NASA's Langley Research Center (LaRC). We will then discuss several ongoing and new research projects being conducted in the SCAB. In particular, we will survey new research efforts in safety-critical fault-tolerant distributed avionics, verification of numerical software, and run-time verification as well as experiments involving unmanned aerial systems (UAS). We will discuss opportunities for internships in each of these projects as well as areas such as static analysis, safety cases, and global optimization. Although the research conducted in our branch spans a wide spectrum of approaches, the goal is almost always to develop tools and techniques to support a safety case and we will make connections to this year’s theme at Penn - Year of Proof.
Alwyn Goodloe is a Research Computer Engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center working in the formal methods group of the Safety Critical Avionics Branch. He has a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania performed under the direction of Carl A. Gunter, where he focused on formal foundations of network security. He was employed as a staff scientist at the National Institute of Aerospace for three years before joining NASA. Prior to going back to school to obtain his PhD at Penn, he worked for fourteen years in the software industry as a software engineer and IT consultant to various US government agencies.