The Intelligence of the Machine.. The Rigor of the Road!!
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.
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
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IEEE VTS Santa Clara Team -
- Starts 30 March 2026 04:08 PM UTC
- Ends 13 May 2026 04:10 PM UTC
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Speakers
Francois of Athos Silicon
Standardizing the Firmware Layer for Next-Gen Architectures
Biography:
François Piednoël is a semiconductor architect, inventor, and co-founder/CTO of Athos Silicon (2025), leading development of a safety-critical chiplet platform (mSoC™) for autonomy and aerospace. With 20 years at Intel as Lead Performance Architect and later work at Mercedes-Benz on autonomous SoCs, he holds numerous patents in fault-tolerant and high-performance computing.
Email:
Wei of Arm
Standardizing the Firmware Layer for Next-Gen Architectures
Biography:
Dong Wei is an Arm Fellow and Lead Standards Architect at Arm, driving industry-wide system standards across cloud, PC, and edge AI. He leads the Arm SystemReady program and plays key leadership roles across UEFI, PCI-SIG, CXL, UCIe, and Trusted Computing Group. With over 20 years at HPE shaping architectures from PA-RISC to Arm, he is a recognized leader in scalable, secure system design.
Email:
Sachin of Mercedes Benz
Standardizing the Firmware Layer for Next-Gen Architectures
Biography:
Sachin Athanikar is a technology leader with over 23 years of experience in automotive software systems and next-generation computing architectures. His expertise spans Bluetooth, SDR, Android platforms, and chiplet-based designs, with a track record of delivering production-scale solutions for global OEMs and Tier1 suppliers. He is a core contributor to UCIe automotive initiatives, actively shaping chiplet-based architectures through requirements definition and technical proposals.
Zhao of Carnegie Mellon University
Safe Embodied AI: From Theory to Large-Scale Deployment
Biography:
Ding Zhao is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the Safe AI Lab, advancing trustworthy AI for safety-critical systems. A leading voice in AI safety with 150+ publications, he has shaped autonomous vehicle safety standards and collaborated with top industry leaders. His work powers next-generation AI and self-driving technologies, earning him multiple global awards.
Akshay of Saphira AI
Industry Talk – Static Safety Is Dead: Continuous Risk & Compliance for SDVs
Biography:
Akshay Chalana is CEO and co-founder of Saphira AI, working at the forefront of software-defined vehicles, safety, and cybersecurity. He helps automotive teams operationalize standards like ISO 26262 and SOTIF, transforming compliance into a continuous, system-aware engineering process for AI-driven systems.