International DEFENCE EXCELLENCE and SECURITY SYMPOSIUM (IDEaS)
8 September 2025
EUROCONTROL headquarter, Brussels, Belgium
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The International Defence and Security (IDEaS) Symposium is an Annual Event. It brings together innovation ecosystem partners from Government, Industry, and Academia to exchange ideas and information and to foster connections and collaborations among Defence and Security decision-makers, Academic experts, and Industry capability developers. The 3rd IDEaS Symposium is associated with the NATO Joint Capability Group UAS Fall meetings in 2025. It aims to share, discuss, and demonstrate concepts and technologies of trustworthy teaming between human and artificial intelligence (AI) -enabled autonomy for effective command and control (C2) decision-making with the context of design, development, and deployment of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs). Topics include the new NATO Autonomy STANREC and new Autonomy Task Force, and Community of Interest in Autonomy.
Human-Autonomy Teaming for UAS Design, Development, and Deployment
With its ubiquitous application and transformative potential, AI holds the promise of delivering both incremental and profound changes in many aspects of our society including military operations. However, AI (or automation or machine intelligence more broadly) is not a silver bullet for eliminating human errors when information processing and timely decision-making demands exceed the capacity of human operators. Many AI-enabled systems such as UASs operate in environments that are not specifiable a priori. Further, there will always be environments (e.g., for missile and air defense operations) in which data come from multiple sources, including new or partially unreliable ones, and where the integrity of data sources and AI processes and outputs cannot be fully trusted. The problem of trustworthy AI and thus human-autonomy teaming (HAT) is complex and multidimensional and it is largely dependent on both effective human-machine interaction and robust, reliable AI systems. To achieve the full HAT potential for C2 operations, there is the need for mutual trust between human operators and AI-enabled decision aids in the context of wide area surveillance, advanced training systems, and after-action analysis, etc. With such trusted partnership, a persistent and reliable HAT decision support capability will help enable and ensure HAT capabilities and thus achieve information dominance and decision superiority.
Keynote and invited speakers
General Co-Chairs
- Saeid Nahavandi, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
- Dr. Ming Hou, Department of National Defence, Canada
- Edgar Reuber, Principal Advisor – Head of CMC/SBM, EUROCONTROL
- LCDR Joseph W Geeseman, United States Navy, USA
Program Co-Chairs
- Anneloes Maij, Manager Cerebro – Royal NLR – Netherlands Aerospace Centre
- Max Friedrich, German Aerospace Center
International Technical Committee
- Professor Rodney Roberts, Florida State University, USA
- Professor Abdollah Ebbie Homaifar, North Carolina A&T State University, USA
- Professor Henry Leung, University of Calgary, Canada
- Professor Anthony A. Maciejewski, Colorado State University, USA
- Professor Mehrdad Saif, University of Windsor, Canada
- Professor Stefan Wolfgang Pickl, University of the Bundeswehr Munich , Germany
- LCdr Adam Bradly, Medical Service Corps, United States Navy
- Jessie Chen, United states Army Research Laboratory, USA
- Maj David Dunwoody, Office of the Secretary to the Governor General, Canadian Armed Forces
- LCdr Joseph W Geeseman, Medical Service Corps, United States Navy
- Dr. Ming Hou, Defence Research and Development Canada
- A. Anneloes Maiji, Royal NLR – Netherlands Aerospace Centre, the Netherlands
- Professor Saeid Nahavandi, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
- LCol Edgar Reuber, EUROCONTROL and German Air Force
- Dale Richards, Thales, United Kingdom