cyber-cyber digital twins: Facebook’s Web-enabled simulation
Mark Harman
Meta Platforms
A cyber-cyber digital twin is a deployed software model that executes in tandem with the system it simulates, contributing to, and drawing from, that system’s behaviour. This talk outlines Facebook’s cyber-cyber digital twin, WW, a twin of Facebook’s WWW platform, built using Web-Enabled Simulation. The talk will focus on research challenges and opportunities in software testing techniques for cyber cyber digital twins. This is joint work with Nadia Alshahwan, John Ahlgren, Johannes Bader, Maria Eugenia Berezin, Kinga Bojarczuk, Satish Chandra, Andrea Cinacone, Rafael Lopez Diez, Sophia Drossopoulou, Inna Dvortsova, Xinbo Gao, Johann George, Natalija Gucevska, Yue Jia, Michal Krolikowski, Will Lewis, Maria Lomeli, Simon Lucas, Ke Mao, Alexandru Marginean, Alexander Mols, Killian Murphy, Steve Omohundro, Erik Meijer, Rubmary Rojas, Silvia Sapora, Dave Soria Para, Andrew Scott, Federica Sarro, Teijin Tei, and Jie Zhang.
Speaker bio:Mark Harman is a full-time Software Engineer in the Testing and Verification team at Meta Platforms, working on Simulation-Based Testing using Meta’s cyber cyber digital twin, WW. Simulation-based testing is helping to tackle challenging technical problems in software safety and privacy, helping keep users safe online when using Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Mark is also a part-time professor at UCL, and was previously the manager of the Facebook Sapienz team, which grew out of Majicke, a start up he co-founded that was acquired by Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2017. Since then, Sapienz has been fully deployed as part of Meta’s overall continuous integration and is a key part of its app deployment process. The Sapienz team continues to develop and extend it. Sapienz has found and helped to fix thousands of bugs before they hit production, on systems of tens of millions of lines of code, daily relied upon by over 1.93 billion people. Prior to working at Facebook, Mark was head of Software Engineering at UCL and director of its CREST centre. In his more purely scientific work, Mark co-founded the field Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) in 2001, now the subject of active research in over 40 countries worldwide. He received the IEEE Harlan Mills Award and the ACM Outstanding Research Award in 2019 for his work, and was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2020.