The SCSC publishes a range of documents:
The club publishes its newsletter Safety Systems three times a year in February, June and October. The newsletter is distributed to paid-up members and can be made available in electronic form for inclusion on corporate members' intranet sites.
The proceedings of the annual symposium, held each February since 1993, are published in book form. Since 2013 copies can be purchased from Amazon.
The club publishes the Safety-critical Systems eJournal (ISSN 2754-1118) containing high-quality, peer-reviewed articles on the subject of systems safety.
If you are interested in being an author or a reviewer please see the Call for Papers.
All publications are available to download free by current SCSC members (please log in first), recent books are available as 'print on demand' from Amazon at reasonable cost.
Our lives continue to be dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic and there seems little prospect of any immediate relief from its grip. Its impacts still remain far-reaching, and it is now unfortunately starting to affect the SCSC itself, with all future SCSC seminars and the annual symposium in February 2021 now being hosted online for the first time in its history.
On a positive note however, these events are now free to SCSC members so I would encourage you to renew your membership if you haven’t done so already, and perhaps encourage friends and colleagues to also take advantage of these excellent events. Further savings can also be made through corporate membership arrangements, student discounts and the new feature of multiyear subscriptions, please click here for more information.
In the many months since the initial nationwide lockdown, one would have thought that our understanding and handling of the situation would have improved and it seems incredible to see critical data handling issues still arising, such as the loss of 16,000 Track and Trace records. There also seems to be confusion on how data is captured and its meaning – is the record of a death “from” Covid-19 or “with” Covid-19, and how is the data being extrapolated from the location, demographic and motivation of those that are tested to say something about the population as a whole? These issues are very much at the heart of our first article from Prof. David Hand on “Dark Data” where he discusses the perils of the data we don’t have, which can be just as important, if not more important than the data we do have. In the subsequent article, Mike Parsons continues this Dark Data theme and provides outline guidance on how to manage Dark Data risk a safety perspective.
In our third article, Peter Ladkin takes a rigorous approach to assessing the guidance for musicians gathering in bands and orchestras. He looks at the practicalities of the droplet-focussed guidelines and analyses the risks and mitigations for aerosol-based infection, which undoubtedly raises important considerations for any indoor gatherings.
John Spriggs continues the theme of mistakes and misconceptions in our fourth article, with a discussion on the common pitfalls in constructing assurance cases, and he asks whether lessons are being learnt when things go wrong.
We conclude with an article from the SCSC Safety of Autonomous Systems Working Group and the progress they have made in developing practical guidance for assuring systems involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) – areas that are rife with the issues of Dark Data we encountered in the first two articles.
Our 60 second interview is with Prof. John McDermid.
Paul Hampton SCSC Newsletter Editor
paul.hampton@scsc.uk
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