Security Engineering for Lifelong Evolvable Systems

Deep Blue

Deep Blue is a research and consultancy company created by a group of senior researchers from major Italian Universities and Research Centres. It has a multidisciplinary team of specialists in Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology, Interaction Design, and Safety. The area of activity of the company is the analysis, and dependability evaluation of interactive systems, with particular focus on the interaction, integration and allocation of functions between the human, procedural and equipment components. Most of the company's work is for European and international organizations, on a number of specific topics including:

  • evaluation and validation of air traffic concepts and systems;
  • evaluation of dependability of interactive systems;
  • safety analysis of air traffic concepts and systems;
  • design and development of multimedia training material;

Deep Blue is or has been involved in several international collaborative projects in the Aeronautic and Air Traffic Management domain, that are relevant for the SecureChange initiative, including:

  • System Engineering for Security and Dependability (Serenity) where the role of Deep Blue was the evaluation and tentative application of security patterns in the dependability domain, with specific reference to safety critical systems.
  • Mediterranean Free Flight (MFF) where the Deep Blue staff was in charge of the safety assessment of applications suitable for a future Mediterranean ATM scenario, including the introduction of ADS-B operations.
  • Cooperative Approach to ATS (CAATS II), aiming at the coordination of processes and methodologies across the European ATM projects, in relation to Safety, Human Factors and Validation domains.
  • Airborne Integrated Systems for Safety Improvement, Flight Hazard Protection and All Weather Operations (FlySafe) aiming at improving safety during all the phases of the flight with a "gate to gate" approach.

Key personnel:

Alberto Pasquini is a senior researcher with a full University degree in Electronic Engineering, and more than 20 years of experience in the safety domain in several industrial areas including nuclear and transportation. His research interests are on dependability of interactive systems, software and human reliability; in these areas he has been involved as partner or coordinator in several international collaborative projects. He has more than 60 publications in International journals, books, and Conference proceedings. He is or has recently been member of the Program Committee of several international Conferences. He is Italian mother tongue, and fluent in English, French and Spanish

Alessandra Tedeschi graduated in 2001 in Mathematics at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza'. Since 2006 she holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of L'Aquila and Rome 'La Sapienza'. She has been working with Deep Blue since 2007, where she has been involved in projects such as MACRO (2007-2008), SERENITY (2006-2008) and the ReSIST NoE (2006-2008). She had a grant from the Italian National Research Centre (CNR) (2003-2007) where she was involved in several Italian and international collaborative research projects.