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 In-Person at: SEMI Headquarters, 673 S Milpitas Blvd, Milpitas, California, United States, 95035, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/551666