Award
2020 NSF CAREER Award Winner
Department
Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Awarded Project
Belief Formation in Verification Strategies and the Evaluation of Verification Evidence
According to Alejandro Salado, verification — the process of building confidence in the proper functioning of a system — is a key activity in engineering, but the fundamentals of how engineers utilize objective data to inform inherently subjective judgments about the system during verification is not well understood. With his five-year CAREER grant, Salado will examine this process, with a focus on modeling the information structures by which engineers build confidence in a system's performance. To him, the knowledge that may surface from such study could lead to improved verification strategies and more rigorous ways to evaluate verification data, effectively bringing about a potentially transformative paradigm for the practice of systems engineering.
What path did you take to get to this point in your career and research?
I started off as an electronics engineer developing equipment for space systems and quickly became a satellite systems engineer. It was during this time that I decided to pursue a Ph.D. part-time, while keeping my full-time job in industry. While busy, it was very rewarding. Then, unexpectedly, I missed research significantly after I finished my Ph.D. and decided on a radical career change. I moved from being a chief engineer in industry to become a junior professor.
Once I started at VT, I realized that there were many things I was not aware of in academics. I found it particularly difficult to understand what NSF wanted. I was fortunate to build good relationships within the NSF community, attend several workshops, and engage in vivid discussions that led to a successful NSF CAREER proposal.
What impact do you hope your research will have?
I hope that my research will help us do better when it comes to testing that engineered systems do what they are supposed to do. And by better, I mean that we can have better guarantees of proper performance while spending less money and time. If we are able to understand how engineers form subjective beliefs out of the objective data they collect, we may be able to scrap unnecessary work, actively mitigate personal biases, and identify critical points in system verification that should not be overlooked.
What do you find most interesting about your field of engineering?
My field of research is systems engineering. Systems engineering has been traditionally an on-the-job discipline, not really an academic one. It emerged and evolved as a necessary agent to accomplish large, multidisciplinary projects like Apollo and Manhattan. That has yielded a significant amount of wisdom, but we are in its infancy when it comes to scientific principles that we can leverage. There is a beautiful balance of art and science when it comes to doing systems engineering. As a researcher, it is very exciting to decode that art and discover underlying scientific foundations that can make us move from craft to engineering more and more.
If you had one piece of advice to give students that aspire to pursue research and are just starting their journey, what would you share with them?
Do what brings you joy.
What's a common myth or misconception about the subject of your research that you'd like to debunk?
Most people think of engineering as a rational, objective discipline. However, my research (and that of others) show that this conception is far from the truth. When it comes to engineering, engineers make emotional decisions, technical opinions are always subjective, and it is impossible to objectively demonstrate that an engineered system does what it is supposed to do. This appreciation is something we need our students to understand early, because it has significant implications when it comes to developing systems.