We are pleased to welcome Dr. Györffi as keynote.
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The FORECAST workshop is organised as part of the TechNexus Programme. This is an initiative to support developing a community focusing on technology integration for complex and critical systems and as you will know, this is a cross-disciplinary and challenging topic to address. There is a particular need to have such a community at present, given the acceleration of advances in specific technology domains and the highly interconnected nature we see arising.
FORECAST encourages participation from communities representing system functional properties including Computation, Sensing, Physical Actions, Energy Support and Coordinated Collaboration. Product-side and market influencers, such as from product-lines and policymaking, are also invited to participate. Topics should include bridging advances between these domains, or to system level domains, including supports via enabling technologies like IoT, Systems of Systems, AI, software and hardware.
All presentations will be made publicly available to a wide audience via HiPEAC. Furthermore, based on STEADINESS and FORECAST presentations and discussions, a white paper will be produced, which will be published openly to support research applications and recommendations to future research calls (last year’s white paper can be found here: https://zenodo.org/records/14920027). We plan to have a similar white paper this time.
Complex and critical systems relate to a large proportion of national infrastructure (transport, health, manufacturing, space, energy, etc) and the target for many of the new technologies emerging. However, without a dedicated focus on facilitating the integration and uptake of new technologies by the complex systems, such as in our national infrastructure – we limit to a large extent our capacity to use the new technologies. Additionally the high level of interconnectivity brings new risks, particularly relating to safety and security, without comprehensive approaches. On the other hand, by building an interaction point and supporting such research, we help industry to remain competitive by easier technology uptake, which also supports home grown technologies to be used nationally (sovereignty).
All parties of the dependable systems ecosystem are really needed to broach this challenge, the diverse technology contributors, production line managers, policy makers and end users. The Programme is currently coordinated by Charles Robinson (Thales).
At HiPEAC, the TechNexus Programme organises two workshops this year, bringing the the system engineering domains communities (STEADINESS, Monday, 26 January 2026) and the functional properties communities together (FORECAST, Tuesday, 27 January 2026).
ORGANIZERS
Session co-chaired by:
- Adam Mackay (QA Systems - UK)
- Octavian Fratu (Politehnica Bucharest - Romania)
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
We are honored to welcome Dr. Miklós Györffi, Senior EU Affairs Analyst at the Hungarian Research Network and former staff member at the EU Parliament, as our keynote speaker.
Keynote Presentation: The European Approach to AI
After more than one decade of relatively scattered policy drafting and implementation the EU adopted the AI Act in 2024. Following its entering into force due to the set-up of the AI Office and its activity, but also because of rapid developments at international level, we witnessed a more consistent, comprehensive and upscaled European policy development. This policy is based on the following main pillars:
- Enabling the development and uptake of AI in the EU
- Becoming the place where AI thrives from the lab to the market
- Ensuring that AI works for people and is a force for good in society
- Building strategic leadership in high-impact sectors
The session will tackle the main policy framework that is currently under implementation, although this is roughly grouped in regulation and support. On the regulatory side up to now we notice the development of policy measures intended to clarify and help implementation of the AI Act. Support side is represented by investments in infrastructure and R&D.
In each context, to the extent possible, foreseeable implications for safety critical systems will also be discussed.
WORKSHOP FOCUS & TOPICS OF INTEREST
Safety-relevant applications have been traditionally built upon the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) principle as a way to ensure the dependability of those systems, allowing to limit the costs of functional and dependability properties verification. However, the traditional safety assessment approach that relies on system’s simplicity is being challenged these days by the increase in complexity and functionality requirements of new applications for complex and critical systems like fully autonomous transportation systems. Emerging technologies like large language models are very tempting to use, but pose even higher challenges for functional dependability.
Fault-tolerant Computing systems
- Novel computing architectures with self-monitoring capabilities for safety and security
- Hardware and low-level software support for dependability
- Cost-effective protection mechanism for complex computing systems.
Wireless Communications
- Technologies supporting reliable and dependable last-mile and ad-hoc wireless connectivity between IoT devices and the edge or cloud.
- Methods for detecting and counteracting attacks on wireless links.
- Approaches for zero-touch wireless onboarding of IoT devices.
Physical action functionality for systems
- Connecting physics models of system dynamics with higher level digital twin integrations for dependability responses
- Actuator advances, such as connecting with AI communities for smart actuators.
Coupling of safety-security-performance between functional elements
- Harmonising modelling approaches to increase bridging capacities
- New embedded technology in functional elements facilitating wider integration
- Containing spread of dysfunctionality in interconnected critical systems
- Supports to mediation capabilities between standards\certification
Real-time Computing Systems
- Hardware support for timing isolation and timing enforcement mechanisms
- Performance monitoring strategies for shared resources contention handling
- Performance monitoring for security and safety
- Quality of service support in complex processors.
- Parallel-aware off-line and online analysis tools for dependability.
Battery operated systems and low-power computing
- Low-power and reliable computing devices
- In-sensor computing
- Power monitoring and verification
- Worst-case energy consumption estimation
Specialized Hardware Designs
- Advanced Sensing Technologies
- Ultra low-power systems
- Near threshold voltage computing
- Approximate computing
Innovative Functional Safety Certification approaches
- Methodologies and tools for certification and qualification of complex systems in the context of relevant functional safety standards (ISO 26262, IEC 61508,…) including AI-based testing approaches and automation.
- Challenges and solutions for certifying machine learning components in safety-critical applications
Bridging challenges in functional engineering, being supported by enabling technologies, could include for instance:
- AI Safety and Dependability
- Ensuring functional constraints
- Operational limits for AI models in CPS
- Trustworthiness and explainability of large-scale AI models (e.g., LLMs) in critical systems
This workshop has received support from the projects Arrowhead fPVN (fpvn.arrowhead.eu/fpvn-arrowhead/) grant agreement no. 101111977 & HiPEAC (https://www.hipeac.net) grant agreement no. 101069836.
These workshops are discussion based - a link provided here on the day to share notes.