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IEEE Event Agenda – Tuesday May 12, 2026

🔹 5:00 PM – 5:30 PM

   Registration, Refreshments, Food & Networking (Meet & Greet)

Featured Speakers & Sessions

🔹 5:30 PM – 6:15 PM

Topic 1: Industry Talk – Standardizing Automotive Firmware for SDVs

Experts from Mercedes-Benz, Arm, and Athos Silicon will discuss the urgent need for a standardized, secure, and vendor-agnostic firmware foundation.

Key focus areas:

• Overcoming fragmented firmware ecosystems
• UEFI as a scalable automotive standard
• Enabling functional safety, cybersecurity, and interoperability
• Supporting chiplet-based and next-gen ADAS architectures

Speakers:

• François Piednoël – LinkedIn
• Sachin Athanikar – LinkedIn
• Dong Wei   – LinkedIn

🔹 6:15 PM – 6:45 PM

Topic 2: Academic Keynote – Safe Embodied AI: From Theory to Deployment

Prof. Ding Zhao (Carnegie Mellon University)

Topics include:

• Rare-event safety in autonomous systems
• Safe reinforcement and imitation learning
• Generalizable and adaptive AI safety
• Future of trustworthy embodied AI at scale

Speaker:

• Ding Zhao – LinkedIn

🔹 6:45 PM – 7:15 PM

 Topic 3: Industry Talk – Static Safety Is Dead: Continuous Risk & Compliance for SDVs

Akshay Chalana (CEO & Co-founder, Saphira AI)

Modern vehicles evolve continuously through software updates, AI-driven functionality, and increasing connectivity—yet safety and cybersecurity practices remain largely static.

This talk explores:

• What breaks when traditional safety assumptions no longer hold
• Real-world ADAS/autonomy failure propagation: dataset bias, requirement drift, and system boundary ambiguity
• Cross-domain challenges between safety and cybersecurity
• A new model for continuous, system-aware risk assessment and compliance
• Treating compliance artifacts as live infrastructure integrated into development pipelines

This session provides a practical path to maintaining certification-grade rigor while operating at software velocity.

Speaker:

• Akshay Chalana – LinkedIn

🔹 7:15 PM – 7:30 PM

 Q&A and open discussion – Aditi Ramadwar

     About This Technical Forum

This technical forum brings together OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, semiconductor leaders, researchers, and innovators to address the challenge of fragmentation and define a unified, future-ready mobility stack.

Who Should Attend:

• Automotive engineers and architects
• Safety and cybersecurity specialists
• Semiconductor and embedded systems professionals
• Researchers in autonomous vehicles and AI safety
• Technical decision-makers from OEMs and suppliers
• Students in Automotive, Compute, Mechanical & Electrical Engineering 

We would be delighted if you could join us and participate in shaping the future of intelligent transportation.