What Should We Learn From? The Cognitive Dynamic System for Risk Control

In today’s world, the environment is unavoidably prone to the unexpected occurrence of unpredictable events. Whatever the kinds of unexpected occurrences are, be they threats to safety or security breach, in the final analysis they are all known to be uncertainties, which in turn, bring us to think in terms of risk.

The idea of cognitive dynamic system (CDS) was first described in a Point of View article published ten years ago. As simple as it was then, it is remarkable how far that early work on the CDS has progressed to make a big difference to engineering. The objective of the article The Cognitive Dynamic System for Risk Control by Simon Haykin published in Proceedings of the IEEE August, 2017, is to highlight the recently pioneered elements of the CDS for how to bring risk under control for physical systems in the presence of uncertainties.

In the article, Dr. Haykin begins the discussion with two definitions. 1) Uncertainty is a situation that involves information pertaining to a physical system, for which the information is unknown and therefore difficult to deal with. 2) Whenever a physical system experiences uncertainty, it is a must that we deal with unexpected adverse events, which are collectively called risk; hence, we bring into play cognitive risk control as the solution for tackling the presence of uncertainties.

With cognitive risk control being the challenging topic of this article, henceforth it will be assumed that the physical system is functioning under the presence of uncertainties.