Major General Karsten Stoye
Head of Civil-Military Cooperation
Military Advisor to the Director General
EUROCONTROL Civil-Military Cooperation Division
Brussels, Belgium
Bio: Major General Karsten Stoye assumed his position as Head of Civil-Military Cooperation and Military Advisor to the Director General at Eurocontrol after his previous assignment as Chief of Staff at NATO’s Headquarters Allied Air Command at Ramstein Air Base, on 1 October 2021.
After studying economics and administrative science at the University of the German Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg, General Stoye has served in various operational and staff positions. As a senior operations officer and command pilot in the Tactical Reconnaissance Wing 51 ‘Immelmann’, he contributed from 1995 to 1996 to the United Nations and NATO missions during the conflict in the Former Yugoslavia. In 1998 he graduated from the Command and General Staff Officer Course at the Federal Armed Forces Command and Staff College in Hamburg.
Until 2000, General Stoye served as a Branch Chief at the NATO Combined Air Operations Centre 4 (CAOC 4) in Messstetten, Germany, where he was responsible for training and exercises. In 1999 he contributed to the NATO Operation in Kosovo as Chief Air Task Order Planner at the Balkan CAOC in Vicenza.
Dr. Ming Hou
Principal Advisor to NATO Chief Scientist Office,
Co-Chair NATO Human-Autonomy Teaming Specialist Team (HATST)
Principal Scientist, Defence Research and Development Canada, Department of National Defence, Canada
Challenges of Human-Autonomy Teaming
Bio: Dr. Hou is a Principal Scientist and Autonomy Program Manager within the Department of National Defence (DND), Canada. He is responsible for delivering cutting-edge technological solutions, science-based advice, and evidence-based policy recommendations on AI, Autonomy, and Robotics to senior decision makers within DND and their national and international partner organizations including the United Nations. He is a Principal Advisor to the NATO Chief Scientist Office and the Co-Chair of Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) Specialist Team.
His influential book: “Intelligent Adaptive Systems: An Interaction-centered Design Perspective" has been recognized internationally and its human-AI interaction design guidelines are instrumental to the development of NATO Human Systems Integration for UAS standards and the United Nations White Paper on “Human-Machine Interfaces in Autonomous Weapon Systems: Consideration for Human Control”.
Dr. Hou is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto and University of Calgary, Canada.
CDR Joseph Geeseman
Chair NATO Autonomy Task Force,
Co-Chair NATO HATST, S&T Portfolio Manager, NAVAIR, US Navy
NATO Autonomy Task Force Update
Bio: CDR Joseph Geeseman is an accomplished Aerospace Experimental Psychologist in the U.S. Navy continuously serving since his commissioning in 2012. His extensive experience includes serving as program manager during the highly visible development of a fully-autonomous MQ-9 system in an effort called “Smart Sensor” at the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) in Washington, D.C.
Currently, he holds the critical role of military deputy for the establishment of the Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) aviation training environment for the Naval Aviation Training Systems and Ranges Program Office (PMA-205) within NAVAIR. Additionally, CDR Geeseman contributes his expertise in two roles for NATO as the Co-Chair of the Human-Autonomy Teaming Specialist Team for the Joint Capability Group Unmanned Aircraft Systems (JCGUAS) and the Lead for the NATO Autonomy Task Force, shaping the future of human-autonomy teaming in aerial operations.
Dr. Giovanni Franzini
Team Lead, Mission Autonomy, Collins Aerospace
NATO STANREC Autonomy Guidelines
Bio: After his PhD at University of Pisa on orbital dynamics and guidance systems for relative motion in lunar orbits in collaboration with the European Space Agency, Giovanni Franzini joined UTC Research Center in March 2018 and delivered EU Clean Sky 2 projects working closely with Airbus on advanced controls systems and architectures for thermomechanical systems.
With the creation of Collins Aerospace, Giovanni went back to his first love working on guidance, navigation and control systems and mission autonomy. As Lead for the Mission Autonomy team, Giovanni leads as Principal Investigator the Collaborative Autonomy area contributing to the conceptualization, development and demonstration of solutions for multi-vehicle coordination and human-autonomy teaming, and coordinates the U-Space / UTM project portfolio activities. Giovanni was one of the main contributors for the development of the NATO Autonomy Guidelines for Practitioners. He is a member of the NATO Human-Autonomy Teaming Specialist Team and of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Aerospace Controls.
Francis Salama
UAS Principal Systems Engineer/Architect,
Collins Aerospace
NATO STANREC Autonomy Guidelines
Bio: Francis obtained his PhD in the field of “Multi-objective Optimal Control Allocation” applied to flight control optimization and failure reconfiguration of multiple UAVs from Cranfield University. During that time, he contributed to BAE’s FLAVIIR programme as a control systems and flight test engineer. As part of his academic voyage, he was awarded the “AIAA GNC Best Student Research Paper” and the “Coachmakers’ Eric Beverly Aerospace prize” for his findings and publications. He then pushed his academic pursuits as a Researcher at Bristol University, investigating the topics surrounding Bio-Inspired Avian Flight Control and their implementations to small UAS.
From 2016, Francis joined and helped guide UAV research and development team at Blue Bear Systems Research. During those years he proudly filled the roles of Flight Control Lead and Vehicle Owner for the development and deployments of their VTOL programme and UAV fleet. More recently in 2022, Francis took on the position of Principal UAS Architect at Collins Aerospace in the UK, where he currently carries on his relentless pursuit to further the evolution, integration and acceptance of ever more intelligent autonomous systems at all levels of our society.
Since 2023 Francis has been an active member of the NATO Human-Autonomy Teaming Specialist Team supporting their standardisation efforts under the NATO Joint Capability Group UAS (JCGUAS), where he continues to develop and further improve the new the NATO Autonomy Guidelines STANREC as one of its original contributors.”
Dr. Joao Caetano
Project Officer UAS Programs, European Defence Agency
State-of-the-art Report on Guidelines for Autonomous Systems
Bio: Dr. João Caetano joined the Portuguese Air Force Academy at 18. He served at the Portuguese Air Force for 20 years. He holds a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Delft University of Technology. His career focused on research and operations of Unmanned Aircraft Systems at the Portuguese Air Force Research Center, where he was also an assistant professor.
He was head of UAS operations for the Portuguese Air Force, and UAS Remote Pilot instructor. As a NATO appointee, he oversaw UAS research and chaired the Strategic Committee of the Applied Vehicle Technologies Panel at NATO’s Science and Technology Organization. Currently, he is honored and humbled to serve the EU Members States at the European Defence Agency as a Project Officer on UAS Programmes, supporting defence research, technology development, and the integration of UAS in airspace. He supports EDA’s roles, while supporting the development of defence capabilities and military cooperation among the Member States in the UAS domain.
Liisa Jassens
TU Delft, The Netherlands, NATO HATST
How Trust and the System Law are Complementary in Deploying AI in Military Operations
Bio: Liisa Janssens LLM MA has 10+ years’ experience in the (research) field of law and new technologies.
For the past 8 years she worked as a scientist at TNO (The Netherlands Organisation for applied scientific research, founded by law in 1932 to enable business and government to apply knowledge) and the last 6 years she was the lead scientist of an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the department Military Operations, at the unit Defence, Safety & Security where she combined theoretical and applied scientific research on the nexus of law, philosophy and AI technology (applied mathematics). In different engineering teams, she was the lead for formulating new questions on how to responsibly navigate AI development processes. In operational projects, for example, her role was to lead the scientific team in finding new (technical) requirements and to build (operational) strategies, (AI) taxonomies and (technical) databases, all informed by laws, policies, ethics and the Rule of Law. This interdisciplinary research is the foundation of her PhD research at Technical University Delft where she is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty Technology, Policy and Management.
Prof. Dr. Stefan Wolfgang Pickl
Chair for Operations Research, Department of Computer Science, Universität der Bundeswehr München
Resilience in Complex Infrastructures – The Different Roles of OR and AI in Military Executive Decision Making
Bio: Professor Stefan Pickl is a founding member of the SENS Research Center, Professor of Operations Research and a member of the COMTESSA Research Group. The COMTESSA Research Group (Core Competence Center for Operations Research, Management Tenacity Experiments, Safety & Security ALLIANCE) around Professor Stefan Pickl focuses on safety and security as well as awareness. In the context of IT-based process optimization, the members have spent 15 years developing and researching ways to handle comprehensive sensor data and how to best use sensors in various security-relevant areas and experimental environments. This work focuses primarily on critical infrastructure as well as on conceptual designs and optimization of integrated early warning systems.
Professor Pickl is the deputy chairman of the executive board of the German Committee for Disaster Reduction (DKKV) and head of the advisory board of the German Society for Operations Research (GOR). He works closely with the EU’s Joint Research Center (JRC) and is a member of the task force on energy security at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey. In this context, he is involved in CENETIX, the Center for Network Innovation and Experimentation at NPS. Since 2008, his group has been involved in live experiments in the Bay Area of San Francisco, at Camp Roberts, in Souda Bay as well as in central critical infrastructures in Germany. Members of the group have carried out more than 50 national and international projects. Professor Pickl is involved in an ongoing EU project aimed at characterizing and analyzing hybrid threats, which cooperates closely with the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats to study and develop new data-based optimization procedures.
Professor Pickl is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, where he oversaw the establishment of an analytics center as part of IT-based decision- making support and process optimization.
Distinguished Professor
Saeid Nahavandi
Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research & Chief of Defence Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology,
Australia
Autonomous Vehicles and Mobile Command and Control Centres
Bio: Distinguished Professor Saeid Nahavandi is Swinburne University of Technology’s inaugural Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Chief of Defence Innovation. Professor Nahavandi is an internationally recognised expert in intelligent robotic and haptic systems, motion platforms and simulators, autonomous vehicles, as well as modelling and simulation technologies with a specific focus on innovation and training pertaining to defence and security domains. He has published over 1300 scientific papers in various international journals and conferences, as well as commercialised his translational research and technology innovation through start-up companies.
Professor Nahavandi is IEEE SMCS, Co-Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Systems Journal, Senior Editor: IEEE Access, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics and IEEE Press Editorial Board member. He is also an elected Fellow of the IEEE (FIEEE), Fellow of Engineers Australia (FIEAust), Fellow of the IET (FIET), and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (FTSE).
Daniel Lafond
AI Metacognitive Skills for Trustworthy Autonomous Systems in Collaborative Situation Assessment
Abstract: In contexts involving high information load such as continental surveillance, one key prospect to help augment situation assessment capabilities and ensure timely threat detection is to complement existing human assets with intelligent agents. AI-agents may come with different strengths and weaknesses that are complementary to their human counterparts. Effective human-AI teaming is an important requirement for successfully implementing the digital transformation envisioned for NORAD modernization. Yet while teamwork comes with benefits such as capacity augmentation and workload balancing, it also incurs costs in terms of communication and coordination overheads. To help manage those tradeoffs, intelligent agents need to selectively determine when to appropriately require/offer support. Specifically, it is necessary to build on the respective strengths of human and AI agents while ensuring reliability through self-diagnostics and mutual monitoring/support processes.
Here, we introduce a new method for augmenting AI-Agents with a set of metacognitive skills aimed at assessing their own contextual reliability. Trustworthiness is viewed as a context-dependent attribute. Human experts need to develop calibrated trust to avoid overreliance or underreliance on the AI-agent. Real-time self-diagnostics are proposed as actionable metrics that can be used to adjust autonomy levels and as indicators of reliability for consideration by the user. We present those new capabilities in a collaborative situation assessment scenario involving threat evaluation for NORAD C2 operations. An intelligent agent is trained to approximate human expert judgments, allowing for the implementation of different levels of automation. The combined human and AI capabilities result in more robust decision making through a process called judgmental bootstrapping. Three complementary metacognition skills were implemented to enable 1) real-time performance degradation detection; 2) contextual reliability modeling using a meta-model; and 3) introspective confidence analysis. Future work will involve human-in-the-loop experiments aimed at testing the impacts of augmenting AI-Agents with such metacognitive skills, with a focus on human factors and adjustable human-autonomy teaming.
Bio: Daniel Lafond is a human factors and cognitive engineering expert at Thales with over 20 years of experience in basic and applied research in cognitive science. His main R&D areas of expertise include decision support systems, team cognition, human-AI interaction and computer-supported learning, applied in varied domains including defence, security, aviation and space. He was previously a visiting fellow at Defence R&D Canada – Valcartier (2008-2012) working on training and decision support tools for operational and strategic decision making. He holds a PhD in experimental psychology from Laval University (2007) where he received the gold medal of the Governor General of Canada and the Best Doctoral Thesis award of the Faculty.
Renée Pelchen Medwed
Aviation Safety Risk Manager & Project Manager: Human Factors for AI, European Union Aviation Safety Agency
Human-AI Teaming
Bio: Renee is an Austrian national, has over 20 years of professional experience in aviation. She holds a degree in Psychology from Graz, Austria, and began her career at Eurocontrol in 2003. Currently seconded to EASA, Renée serves in two key roles. As Project Manager for Human Factors in Artificial Intelligence within the EASA AI Programme, she has contributed to the development of the Concept Paper: Guidance for Level 1 and 2 machine learning applications and actively participates in the associated Rulemaking Task. In parallel, she works as Aviation Safety Risk Manager for the ATM/ANS domain, supporting EASA’s mission to enhance safety across the European aviation system
Francois Triboulet
Project Lead: AI Assurance Project, EASA AI Programme. Eurocontrol.
Brussels, Belguim
Bio: Francois Triboulet joined EUROCONTROL in 2009 and has been seconded to EASA since July 2020. He had the opportunity to engage into the AI innovation network, contributing the first issue of the
EASA AI Concept Paper. He is now the Project Leader for the ‘AI Assurance Project’ embedded into the ‘EASA AI Programme’. Based on his ATM and ATFM background, he represents the ATM/ANS
domain in the programme.
Before being seconded to EASA, Francois was in charge of the development of the software systems for the Network Manager. Since 2018, he has been enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and has been at the origin of the ‘NM Lab’ that has successfully delivered innovative solutions for the Network Manager.
Francois contributes to the joint EUROCAE WG-114 / SAE G-34 working group on artificial intelligence, more specifically to SG23 currently in charge of the ‘Machine Learning Development
Lifecycle’.
Before joining EUROCONTROL, Francois worked for more than 20 years for the telecommunication industry.