Co-located with EDCC 2026 (21st European Dependable Computing Conference)
7-10 April, 2026
https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/EDCC2026/

== Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly embedded in safety- and mission-critical domains such as healthcare, transportation, energy, and nuclear environments. However, the integration of AI brings new dimensions of risk, uncertainty, and adversarial vulnerability that challenge traditional safety and security assurance methods.

This workshop aims to bridge the dependability and AI research communities by addressing fundamental and practical challenges in AI safety, security, and trustworthiness. It will provide a platform for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, discuss methodologies, and explore standards and regulatory frameworks supporting safe and secure AI adoption in critical systems.

The theme of the Workshop is Towards Dependable and Trustworthy Intelligent Systems and the Workshop's goals include:
- To identify key research challenges and emerging methodologies for AI safety and security
- To facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration between AI, dependability, and cyber security experts
- To promote discussion on standardisation, certification, and governance for AI dependability, safety and security
- To encourage young researcher participation through short papers and panel sessions

== Best Paper Award and Best Student Paper Award

The Organising Committee of AI-SS 2026 will select one accepted paper to receive a Best Paper Award and a paper whose first author is a student to receive a Best Student Paper Award. Each award will come with a certificate and a cash prize sponsored by the Institute of Cyber Security for Society (iCSS), University of Kent, UK.

== Submission Instructions

Submissions should be made through the following paper submission system on the Microsoft CMT (Conference Management Toolkit) service:

https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/AISS2026/

All submissions must be written in English and adhere to the camera-ready two-column format of IEEE Computer Society. Submissions should have maximum 8 pages (everything included) and must be submitted as a single PDF file. Templates and guidelines from IEEE can be found at the following IEEE web page:

https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates

A paper submitted to AI-SS 2026 cannot be under review at any other venue - including conferences, workshops, journals and book chapters - during the entire period when the paper is being considered by this Workshop. Furthermore, after a paper is submitted to AI-SS 2026, the authors must await the result and only then resubmit elsewhere if the paper is rejected (or withdrawn at their request) from this Workshop. All papers submitted to AI-SS 2026 must present substantial new content not described in any prior publication that is formally published. If a submission overlaps with a prior publication, the submission must cite the prior publication and clearly explain the relationship between the two.

Publicly disclosed research in the form of preprints (e.g., on arXiv.org, the authors' own websites or their institutions' repositories) that have not been peer reviewed or published formally are permitted to submit to AI-SS 2026. Academic misconducts such as plagiarism including self-plagiarism are not permitted.

Submissions that violate any of the above rules, are off-topic, or are not formatted correctly will be desk rejected without review.

Submissions will undergo a single-blind review process. Authors are allowed to include their names and affiliations in the submitted manuscript. We aim to allocate three reviewers to each submitted manuscript and the reviewers will be mainly members of the technical program committee (TPC), but additional reviewers with relevant expertise may also be involved.

Accepted papers will be submitted for publication in a companion proceedings of EDCC 2026. It is anticipated that the conference proceedings will be managed by IEEE Computer Society's Conference Publishing Services (CPS) and be included in IEEE Xplore and IEEE CSDL (Computer Society Digital Library).

At least one author of each accepted paper must register via the EDCC 2026 conference website and present the paper at AI-SS 2026.

== Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Foundations of AI safety, reliability, and assurance
- Secure and resilient machine learning
- LLM safety, security and privacy
- Adversarial robustness and mitigation strategies
- AI-driven cyber security risk analysis
- Formal verification and validation of AI models
- Trustworthy AI in safety-critical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles, nuclear industry, healthcare and finance)
- Human–AI interaction safety and cognitive trust
- Legal and regulatory aspects of AI safety and security
- Ethical, fairness and transparency aspects of AI safety and security
- AI for dependability enhancement and system resilience
- Federated learning and privacy-preserving AI
- AI incident analysis and failure recovery mechanisms
- New datasets and benchmarks for AI safety and security
- Comparative studies of AI safety and security

== Organising Committee

Workshop Chair:

- Hongmei (Mary) He, University of Salford, UK

Workshop Co-Chair:

- Shujun Li, University of Kent, UK

Publicity Co-Chairs:

- Olayinka Adeboye, University of Salford, UK
- Çağrı Burak Aslan, Picus Security, US/Turkey

Publication Chair:

- Cheng Yin, Ulster University, UK

Web Chair:

- Haiyue Yuan, University of Kent, UK

Web Co-Chair:

- Adel (Samir) ElZemity, University of Kent, UK

== Technical Sponsors and Liaison Officers

ABCP (Association of British Chinese Professors) (mainly via its Specialty Committee on AI and Cyber Security)

- Shujun Li, University of Kent, UK

CRANE AI-Cyber SIG (Special Interest Group on AI and Cyber Security)

- Biju Issac, Northumbria University, UK

IEEE UK and Ireland Communications Chapter

- Nauman Aslam, Northumbria University, UK

IEEE UK and Ireland Computational Intelligence Chapter

- Hujun Yin, University of Manchester, UK

IEEE UK and Ireland Computer Society Chapter

- Caroline Ling Li, City St George's, University of London, UK

IEEE UK and Ireland Electronic Packaging and Reliability Joint Chapter

- Stoyan Stoyanov, University of Greenwich, UK

IEEE UK and Ireland Robotics & Autonomous Systems Chapter

- Hongmei (Mary) He, University of Salford, UK

IEEE UK and Ireland Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT) Chapter

- Ali Hessami, Vega Systems, UK

IEEE UK and Ireland Systems Man and Cybernetics Chapter

- Huiru Jane Zheng, Ulster University, UK