IWASS 2026 participants: Please find logistics information and updates below
Please contact us should you have any questions.
IWASS is free to attend, and no papers or presentations are required—our focus is on impactful discussions and insights. It will be held in person on June 13th and 14th, 2026 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal. The workshop will kick off at 12:30 p.m. on June 13th and finish at 6:00 p.m. on the 14th, ensuring we will have time packed with insightful discussions, right in time for the ESREL 2026 reception!
Confirmed Speakers
We are happy to share our list of fantastic confirmed speakers! Join us in Braga to hear from:
Silvia Vock, The Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Germany) (Linkedin)
Andrew Allamby, Zoox (LinkedIn)
Stephan Marwedel, Airbus (LinkedIn)
Thor Myklebust, SINTEF (The Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research) (LinkedIn)
Gesa Praetorius, Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (Linkedin)
Keynote Presentations
Silvia Vock, The Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
“Safety-Critical AI in Industrial Applications: Between Regulatory Ambition and Open Research Questions”
As a trained materials scientist with a PhD in the field of magnetic imaging, she combines her scientific background with experience in applied research and development at Fraunhofer, including early work on machine learning in additive manufacturing. Since 2019, she has been working at the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and has led an AI research team since 2022. The team’s work focuses on machine learning in safety-critical industrial applications, with a specialization in robustness evaluation and robust training methods. Her team works with real-world datasets collected in collaboration with partners from industry, including construction machinery, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in intralogistics, robotics applications, and machine tools. The work spans computer vision as well as time-series-based anomaly detection. The team collaborates closely with industrial partners, academic institutions, research institutes, certification bodies, and regulatory authorities
Abstract: Safety-critical applications of AI in industrial machines and autonomous systems are on the horizon. The regulatory frameworks meant to govern them are being finalized now. The EU AI Act and the new Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 are both in force but not yet fully applicable. Most high-risk AI provisions take effect in 2026, with AI embedded in regulated machinery products following in 2027. Meanwhile, the harmonized technical standards needed to operationalize conformity assessment for these systems are still under development and already running behind schedule. This creates the fundamental challenge that requirements must be defined before sufficient operational experience exists, and before the research community has established validated methods for specifying and testing AI properties such as robustness, behavioral consistency in open environments, or explainability. This talk reflects on this situation from the perspective of applied research and policy advice at a federal institute for occupational safety and health. It asks what formalizable and independently validatable requirements for safety-critical AI could realistically look like, where the open research questions lie, and what responsibilities fall to standardization bodies, researchers, and regulators.
Andrew Allamby, Zoox Inc.
“AV Operational Safety: Looking back to better predict the future”
Andrew Allamby currently works at Zoox Inc., as a Technical Lead Manager (TLM) in the Safety Strategy and Operations organization, where his team focuses on Reactive Operational Safety. In this role Andrew focuses on building operational safety processes, and optimizing safety frameworks for fleet scaling. Prior to joining Zoox, he started his work in the AV industry at Cruise Automation as a Strategic Operations lead, where he was responsible for large-scale, high-priority programs. In this role, he delivered key initiatives including high-speed enablement, validation tool building, and new market launches, while also managing the planning and execution for the Safety & Systems organization. Before transitioning to autonomous vehicles, Andrew spent over 15 years in biotech, specializing on OEM R&D for complex robotic systems as a Principal Systems Engineer at Roche Molecular Systems, and program manager Abbott Diabetes Care. Andrew has been in industry for over 20 years, holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Santa Clara University, and currenlty lives in San Francisco, California.
Abstract: Coming Soon!
Thor Myklebust, SINTEF
“Who’s in Control: You or the car?”
Thor Myklebust is a Cand. Scient. Physics and, in addition, he attended two and a half years courses at university level in Economy, Innovation, Psychology, Statistics, and Artificial intelligence. He has experience in certification of products and systems since 1987. Myklebust has participated in several international committees since 1988. Member of safety (IEC 65), IEC 61508 committee, and railway (CENELEC/TC 9). He was Vice-chairman and Chairman of NB-rail October 2013-October 2015. Myklebust is involved in large industry-oriented research and development projects addressing the implementation and effect of agile methods for developing safety systems that will undergo certification according to functional safety standards (IEC61508, EN5012X, ISO 26262, UL4600) and relevant security standards (IEC 62443, ISO/SAE 21434, ETSI 303 645, EN TS 50701). He is co-founder of SafeScrum. In addition, he has co-authored three Springer books.
Abstract: Coming Soon!
Stephan Marwedel, Technical Expert at Airbus
“Safety and security vistas: Looking at dependability and resilience from a room with two windows”
Abstract: Any engineering system that exhibits failure conditions with catastrophic or hazardous impacts is subject to stringent assurance activities covering both the initial design, development and test phases as well as the operational and maintenance phases. In such systems, safety is one of the most important contributors of design constraints, as unsafe states of the system are not acceptable and have to be avoided by all means. However, safety has a specific view, (= vista), on a system, i.e. only random technical failures of system components contributing to hazardous failure ocnditions are considered in a safety assessment. The outcome of the safety assessment is an important source of additional requirements of the system under design. Validatation of all system requirements and verification of their implementation together with additional assurance activities result in certification of the system. Users trust that the certified system can be regarded as sufficiently safe for daily operation. In contrast to safety, security has a different vista. It looks at human actors trying to deliberately compromise a system by unauthorized electronic interactions with the intent to cause loss of integrity or availability, ultimately resulting in failure conditions which are potentially harmful to the users of a system or to its environment. A security risk assessment is performed to identify the major risks and to define adquate protections to prevent successful attacks. Evidence is then collected in from of requirements validation and security refutation tests to demonstrate the effectiveness of the protections which forms the basis for the security certification of the system support trust on behalf of the users that the system is adequately protected against attacks. Modern systems include an increasing number of communication, connectivity and dat processing functions that were not present in previous designs. Apart from the additional intented functionality, these functions do contribute to a much enlarged attack surface leading to increased effort for security architecture design and certification. This is exacerbated even more when considering autonomous systems, as human operators are not available as a fallback safety measure. Such systems typically include functions which were not safety-relevant in conventional systems do become relevant for safety, e.g. digital communication links or AI-enabled processing functions. In this talk, we present a third vista, i.e. a joint view on modern systems design and development trying to reconcile the different viewpoints of the safety and the security vistas with the aim to produce a single coherent set of system requirements that will cover both the safety and the security perspectives. We will discuss the necessary trade-offs between safety and security that may need to be made in modern system designs in order to justify trust in both the safety and the security properties of a system.
IWASS Location & Accommodation Information
IWASS Tentative Program
As in previous years, IWASS focuses on discussing challenges and proposing solutions concerning autonomous systems' safety, reliability, and security. After a short opening session, the participants will be split into breakout discussion groups with dedicated topics.
More Information Coming Soon!
