The adjective resilient has been in use for decades in the field of dependable computing systems essentially as a synonym of fault-tolerant, thus generally ignoring the unexpected aspect of the phenomena the systems may have to face. These phenomena become of primary relevance when moving to systems like the future large, networked, evolving systems constituting complex information infrastructures — perhaps involving everything from super-computers and huge server "farms" to myriads of small mobile computers and tiny embedded devices, with humans being central part of the operation of such systems. Such systems are in fact the emergence of the ubiquitous systems that will support Ambient Intelligence.
From an educational point of view, very few Universities, if any, are offering a comprehensive and methodical curriculum that is able to provide students with a multi-disciplinary preparation that makes them able to cope with the challenges posed by the design of ubiquitous systems. Multi-disciplinarity spans over dependability, security, usability, human factors, legal issues and ethics. Thus, from the educational point of view there is the need to scale-up the spectrum of topics offered, to identify the best curricular structure to make successful both teaching and learning processes.
It is thus relevant to have an open worldwide forum in which the different educational approaches to teaching Resilient Computing are presented, compared and discussed to reach an agreed approach to this issue.
In addition it will be very valuable to collect together in a open and public database all available support material (as lecture’s slides, textbooks, relevant literature, links to useful sites, etc.) that covers the different facets of multi-disciplinarity.
A first attempt to offer to our community a proposal for an MSc curriculum in Resilient Computing and gather extended support material has been done very recently in the European Network of Excellence ReSIST – Resilience for Survivability in IST – run from January 2006 to March 2009. All information on the proposed MSc curriculum and related courseware is on-line at and can be used as a first step in the proposed SIG.
The primary aims of the proposed SIG are: