***Registration for this event is now closed. For questions, please contact Alan Skontra.***

The Archimedes Initiative is an international partnership of four prominent organizations rooted in systems engineering: the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Systems Engineering for Future Mobility, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO-ESI) Embedded Systems Innovation Center, and the Center for Trustworthy Edge Computing Systems and Applications (TECoSA) at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

This third annual workshop at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, on June 4-6 will gather representatives from all four organizations, as well as distinguished guests, to share insights on systems engineering and develop pathways for further collaboration.

Tuesday, June 4: Invited Talks on Trustworthy AI from Academia, Industry, and Government Speakers

The theme of this third annual workshop is Trusted AI and Autonomy. AI is changing how people work, communicate, learn and organize. As transformative AI becomes increasingly embedded in complex systems, engineers, policy makers and researchers must determine how to govern and evaluate this emerging technology while balancing its potential to transform society for good against the risks and harms that arise from novel use cases. There is a need to connect choices about data and design to strategies for the governance of AI systems and the data on which they are trained and deployed. 

This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines and application areas to discuss fundamental concepts of trust in AI and autonomy, and methods to ensure this trust in deployed systems. Specific topics of interest include: 

• Human aspects of trust and explainability 
• Systems Engineering for AI and autonomy 
• Management of trust/risk measures 
• Evaluation and certification of autonomous systems 
• Testbeds to evaluate socio-technical aspects of trust
  

Martin Stanley leads the research and development program for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA/DHS). Martin previously led the Cybersecurity Assurance Program at CISA and the Enterprise Cybersecurity Program at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Prior to his federal service Martin held executive leadership positions at Vonage and UUNET Technologies.  Martin recently co-authored “Digital Health”, an Oxford University Press Publication in 2021.  Martin is currently assigned to NIST to advance adoption of the NIST Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework.

Ron Keesing is the Senior Vice President for Technology Integration at Leidos, where he is responsible for the development and delivery of advanced technology aligned with Enterprise strategy in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), cybersecurity, software, and digital engineering.

Ron has been conducting and directing research and development and technology transition for over 25 years. He has done pioneering work on research programs addressing many of the nation’s toughest problems, from forecasting complex events like cyber threats and political instability from sparse data to discovering new potential cancer treatments by extracting and aligning knowledge embedded within massive datasets and research publications to creating the first generation of autonomous systems for spacecraft command and control. He has led the successful transition of many research technologies into operational programs within DoD and Intelligence Community. He is a Leidos Technical Fellow and author of papers and patents in diverse subfields of computer science and artificial intelligence. He serves in an advisory capacity for external organizations including the Center for New American Security, where he is a member of the AI Governance Forum. His current research is focused on methods to improve resilience, security, assurance, and user trust in AI, particularly with regard to emerging generative AI technologies.

Ron holds a B.S. and M.S. from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland.

Archimedes Partner Presentation 4:

Zoe Szajnfarber, SERC, Opportunities for Systems Engineering in the Trustworthy AI

The Archimedes Initiative was announced in a December 2022 special issue of INCOSE INSIGHT:

“Systems engineering is widely practiced and taught across corporations, institutes, and universities that deal with the successful conception, realization, use, and retirement of complex engineered systems. Many of the principles, practices, and methods in use today, date back to the 1940s and 1950s, have been around for decades, and were developed to deal with largely mechanical or electro-mechanical systems. These methods continue to be applied in a productive manner today. However, given the influence of technological developments over the past decade or more (such as ubiquitous software, distributed and networked systems, and workflows, increasingly complex control regimes, cloud/edge computing), the complexity of modern systems are exaggerating the limits of classical systems engineering methods and practices. Modern societies depend on such complex systems and system of systems for commerce, healthcare, urban living, and transportation – with increasing dependence on developments in computational technologies, AI/ML, and human-machine teaming. Therein lies the focus of the research centers featured in this special issue of INSIGHT – to conduct applied research to evolve the systems engineering and architecting toolkit to help the practicing engineers and scientists address the complexity, dynamic behavior and evolution, and the underlying uncertainty in modern systems and system-of-systems.”