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 – (https://www.linkedin.com/in/francoispiednoel/)
– Sachin Athanikar – (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachin-athanikar-18ba5914/)
– Dong Wei (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dongweimba/)
🔹 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 – (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ding-zhao-01130730/)
🔹 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 – (https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaychalana/)
🔹 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.
Speaker(s): Francois, Wei , Sachin, Zhao, Akshay
SEMI, 673 S Milpitas Blvd, Milpitas, California, United States, 95035