Software Engineering Institute

Grace A. Lewis

Principal Researcher

Grace A. Lewis is the lead for the SEI Tactical and AI-enabled Systems initiative and the principal investigator for the research project titled "Characterizing and Detecting Mismatch in ML-Enabled Systems. Integrating ML/AI components into applications is severely limited not only by the fragility of these components and their algorithms, but also because of mismatches between components of ML-enabled systems. For example, if an ML model is trained on data that is different from data in the operational environment, field performance of the ML component will be dramatically reduced. Separate from software engineering considerations, the expertise needed to field an ML/AI component within a system frequently comes from outside software engineering. As a result, assumptions and even descriptive language used by practitioners from these different disciplines can exacerbate other challenges to integrating ML/AI components into larger systems. We are investigating classes of mismatches in ML/AI systems integration, to identify the implicit assumptions made by practitioners in different fields (data scientists, software engineers, operations staff) and find ways to communicate the appropriate information explicitly. To enable ML/AI components to be fielded in a meaningful way, we will need to understand the mismatches that exist and develop practices to mitigate the impacts of these mismatches

She is also a member of the following research projects related to IoT Security:

High-Assurance Software-Defined IoT Security

is creating an IoT security platform that operates, with high assurance, in a resilient and trustworthy manner even in the presence of a powerful and realistic attacker who can compromise IoT devices, control nodes, and other intermediaries. The software-defined IoT security platform is composed of (i) a high-assurance control node that monitors security-relevant events and alters the "security postures" of IoT devices to enforce specific policies; (ii) trusted data nodes that execute these security postures for each IoT device using "micro-middleboxes."

Authentication and Authorization of IoT Devices in Tactical Environments

is evaluating, adapting, and implementing an IETF proposal for authentication and authorization in constrained environments (ACE) such that it is resilient to high-priority threats of tactical environments (e.g., node impersonation and capture) that are currently not addressed in ACE. The SEI-ACE implementation is available on GitHub.

Grace also led the work in Tactical Computing and Communications (TCC) that developed tactical cloudlets. The tactical cloudlet software is available as KD-Cloudlet on GitHub.

Grace's current areas of expertise and interest include software engineering for AI/ML systems, IoT security, edge computing, software architecture (in particular the development of software architecture practices for systems that integrate emerging technologies), and software engineering in society.