Technological and Educational Challenges of Resilient Computing

The adjective resilient has been used in dependable computing essentially as a synonym of fault-tolerant, thus ignoring the unexpected aspect of the phenomena the systems may have to face. These phenomena are very relevant when moving to systems like the future large, networked, evolving systems constituting complex information infrastructures that are the emergence of the ubiquitous systems that will support Ambient Intelligence. From an educational point of view, very few Universities offer a comprehensive track that is able to prepare students able to cope with the challenges posed by the design of ubiquitous systems. To fill both gaps, a European Network of Excellence, ReSIST – Resilience for Survivability in IST was run from January 2006 to March 2009 (see http://www.resist-noe.org/). In this article the technological challenges, the related educational issues and a proposed MSc curriculum in Resilient Computing that arise from the results of ReSIST are presented and discussed.