DSN-2025: Workshops

The workshops at DSN'2025 aim to provide a forum where researchers can gather and engage in discussions about various aspects of dependability-related research and its practical applications. These workshops cover a wide range of topics, serving as incubators for specific scientific communities with shared research goals. They also offer a valuable opportunity for researchers to exchange and explore scientific ideas in their early stages, well before reaching the level of maturity required for conference or journal publication.

List of Accepted workshops

Workshop on Dependability Modeling and Digitalization (WDMD)

Website: TBD

Description:

WDMD is a workshop dedicated to dependability modeling and digitization, committed to advancing the state-of-the-art in model-based reliability technologies, with its content continuously updated and iterated in response to industrial focus points. Its current focus includes but not limited to the following topics:

Smart Safe Gateways Running Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS)

Website: TBD

Description:

The rise of IoT, edge computing, and Industry 4.0 has driven the demand for secure and real-time capable gateways that can ensure safe and efficient communication between embedded devices and cloud services. Smart Safe Gateways powered by Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) present a crucial intersection of safety, real-time performance, and robust security, serving as a backbone for mission-critical applications in sectors like automotive, healthcare, and industrial automation. With the upcoming European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), the focus will shift on strengthening cybersecurity requirements for digital products and connected devices. The CRA emphasizes the need for secure-by-design principles, continuous updates, and resilience against cyber threats. The workshop will delve into how these evolving regulations impact the design and deployment of RTOS-based smart gateways, aligning technical advancements with regulatory compliance. This workshop aims to explore the latest advancements, challenges, and research directions in the field of smart safe gateways running RTOS. It will serve as a platform for industry experts, researchers, and practitioners to discuss the integration of RTOS with secure gateway technologies, address the safety and security challenges, and propose innovative solutions for reliable data transmission and device management.

VERDI – 3rd Workshop on the Verification & Validation of Dependable Cyber-Physical Systems

Website: https://verdi-workshop.github.io/2025/

Description:

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are a class of engineering systems where computation and communication interact with physical processes, providing complex, situation-aware, and often safety-, security-, or mission-critical ecosystems and services. The fast increase and availability of communication bandwidth and computational power, as well as emerging computing paradigms such as Cloud Computing, Edge Computing, and Deep Learning, are pushing forward CPS research and development, and establishing them as promising engineering solutions to address challenges arising in areas as diverse as aerospace, automotive, energy, disaster response, health care, smart farming, manufacturing, city management, among others.
A key property that CPS are expected to exhibit is that of dependability, that is, the ability to provide services that can be trusted within well determined time-periods, and equally important, that those service guarantees hold even when the system is subject to faults and attacks. A key ingredient to ensure dependability is thus to successfully apply verification & validation (V&V) techniques and attest the desired levels of safety, security, and privacy. Here V&V refers to the process of determining whether the requirements for a system or component are complete and correct, the products of each development phase fulfil the requirements or conditions imposed by the previous phase, and the final system or component complies with the specified requirements.1 This is a challenging task that comes with significant time and cost implications for all the organizations involved in the build-up and evaluation of CPS. This challenge becomes even more demanding with the incorporation of more and more AI components (software and hardware) enabled by the notion of Compute Continuum into the operational capabilities of CPS for handling tasks that are increasingly complex.
The VERDI workshop aims at serving as a discussion forum focused on the area of V&V as a means to guarantee dependability of complex, potentially automated/autonomous CPS. We welcome submissions in IEEE two-column conference style in two formats: short papers (up to 4 pages) and full papers (up to 8 pages). The workshop covers all aspects related to the dependability evaluation (with special focus on safety and security) of safety-critical CPS using techniques such as fault/attack-injection, static and/or dynamic formal verification, semi-formal analysis, simulation, and testing.
Topics include, but are not limited to:

Safe and Sustainable AI-Aided Manufacturing – S2AIM

Website: https://sites.google.com/critiware.com/s2aim-dsn2025/home-page

Description:

Recent advances in manufacturing and automation enable novel production processes, where machines can be repurposed and re-used for diversified objectives over time, opening to a business model similar to cloud computing. Such reconfigurable manufacturing units pose unprecedented challenges related to the safety of the operators, usability, and eDiciency of the process, but they also introduce unique opportunities to devise more sustainable production processes, where the usage of machines can be effectively “consolidated”, as already done for virtual machines in cloud data centers. In this scenario, artificial intelligence can play a significant role to help bridge the gap between the industrial operator or designer, for a more effective and safe centering of the human in the production process, as introduced by the Industry 5.0 paradigm. The S2AIM workshop aims for the first time to reunite researchers and practitioners working in this wide and multidisciplinary research area, to produce the latest advances and challenges of AI-Aided Manufactoring systems. The main research topics include, but are not limted to, dependable and safe AI for industrial equipment, cybersecurity in robotic systems, advanced human-machine interaction and orchestration for increased safety and security.

AxC’25 The 10th Workshop on Approximate Computing

Website: http://axc2025.ecaslab.org/

Description:

Modern computing systems are experiencing an unprecedented growth of data to be processed. On the one hand, these systems are increasingly used to interact with the physical world and, on the other hand, they process large amounts of data samples coming from all the various sensing sources. This leads to computing systems requiring a tremendous amount of energy every year, at an increasing rate. Power and energy have thus become crucial prerequisites in the design of computing systems, particularly in the realm of ubiquitous embedded and mobile electronic devices. Furthermore, computationally intensive tasks, such as machine learning, have found their way into these power-limited devices, increasing the need for efficient electronics. The design method is criticalto effectively enhance the performance of computing systems. From this perspective, the Approximate Computing (AxC) paradigm has emerged as a promising solution. It systematically leverages the inherent error resilience of applications to inaccuracies in their inner calculations to achieve a necessary compromise between efficiency, performance, power demand, and acceptable error of the returned results. Indeed, approximate results are hardly distinguishable from exact results for a vast plethora of applications, including audio, image, and video processing, data mining, information retrieval, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and even safety-critical applications. The AxC’25 workshop explores the opportunity to exploit the AxC in recent application domains in an effective, dependable, and secure manner. In addition, researchers are using new methods to look at systems as a whole, including hardware and software parts. This is helping more researchers become interested in the subject. Anyway, methodologies and automated tools are lacking for the design and manufacturing flow, while professionals are bound to deploy AxC solutions to real systems. Therefore, they all possess a genuine interest in the most recent advancements and experiences presented during the workshop. Furthermore, the quality of previous editions and the prestige of many researchers involved in research in this area will surely bring valuable contributions to the DSN conference through this workshop. As mentioned, AxC applicability has been broadening; hence, the potential areas of interest for AxC’25 include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

1st International Workshop on Digital Twins for Dependability, Resilience and Security (DT4DRS)

Website: https://dt4drs2025.dieti.unina.it/

Description:

Digital Twins (DTs) are rapidly gaining recognition as a transformative technology for improving the dependabil- ity, resilience, and security of complex, interconnected Cyber- Physical Systems (CPSs). Through the creation of dynamic virtual models of physical systems, DTs provide real-time capabilities for monitoring, simulation, optimization, and prediction, fostering significant advancements for ensuring the quality attributes of CPSs development. The 1st International Workshop on Digital Twins for Systems Dependability, Resilience, and Security (DT4DRS) seeks to bring together researchers, practitioners, and industry leaders to delve into the revolutionary potential of DTs in enhancing these critical quality attributes across diverse domains. The workshop will cover a range of topics, including but not limited to:

Through these focus areas, DT4DRS aims to advance research and innovation in DTs, fostering collaboration to address the growing challenges of modern Cyber-Physical Systems while enhancing their dependability, resilience, and security.

FORCE: Foundations Of Reliable Classical-quantum Engineering

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/force2025/home

Description:

Quantum computing and networking represent a transformative shift in computational systems, bringing unique challenges for ensuring system dependability. Current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices operate with significantly higher error rates than classical computers, requiring new approaches to error management. Beyond hardware concerns, quantum systems face distinct software dependability challenges, including the need for robust algorithms and novel verification methodologies that account for quantum measurement's probabilistic nature.
The integration of quantum devices with traditional infrastructure introduces additional complexity, particularly in coordinating multiple quantum devices across distributed locations. A key challenge is the lack of standardized high-level architectures for these heterogeneous systems incorporating CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs (Quantum Processing Units). Security considerations add another crucial dimension, as quantum systems must be protected against both traditional and quantum-specific vulnerabilities, including side-channel attacks and information leakage during measurement.
While progress has been made in understanding various noise sources, the field lacks comprehensive predictive models for quantum error propagation, especially as systems scale to larger qubit counts. The workshop aims to address these challenges by uniting quantum computing and dependability experts to establish rigorous methodologies for quantum dependability engineering. Key focus areas include developing fault models spanning quantum and classical domains, end-to-end system dependability assessment, and practical fault-tolerance schemes, while working toward new standards appropriate for quantum systems.
The workshop welcomes submissions addressing dependability aspects of quantum systems, including but not limited to:

Workshop on Environment-System Symbiosis (EnvSys)

Website: TBD

Description:

A wide spectrum of computer systems, such as cyber-physical systems (CPS), datacenters, edge and cloud systems, autonomous systems, database systems machine learning-based systems, and real-time control systems, are playing critical roles in our society. This workshop advocates a drastically different perspective on designing, analyzing, and deploying computer systems – viewing these systems as an integral component of our environment. The focus of the workshop is on the study and investigation of the symbiotic (or complement) relationship between environment and computer systems. Many computer systems are becoming long-living, autonomous, and “organic,” and often interacting with the surrounding environments in a delicate and unexpected way. Thus, in order to trust a computer system will “do no harm” to society, it is necessary to study the interaction and relationship between the system and the environment in a scientific and systematic manner. EnvSys seeks to provide an international venue to discuss how the environment and computer systems interact or even coevolve together, and tackle the challenges of designing, implementing, deploying, and analyzing computer systems that will become an integral part of the environment. We envision the workshop to be a forum to encourage thought-provoking discussion between the DSN and system communities and the environmental engineering community and related communities such as agriculture, biology and civil engineering. On one hand, the DSN and system communities can learn from the environmental engineering community about sustainability issues and the impacts of natural disasters or extreme environments. On the other hand, the environmental engineering community can learn from the DSN and system communities about emerging use cases, design/development considerations, and modern computer systems. The workshop is designed to encourage interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration through lively and interactive activities such as ice-breaking session, poster session, hands-on tutorial and roundtable discussion. The terms “symbiosis” and “interaction” are broadly defined, as the goal of the workshop is to invite experts from different disciplines to identify open research challenges. In particular, EnvSys welcomes four types of papers:

In general, EnvSys welcomes four general directions:
  1. Study of the “externalities” of computer systems (both positive and negative)
  2. Computer systems designed for extreme and adversarial environment
  3. Computer systems for supporting sustainable environment
  4. Interaction and coevolving behaviors between computer systems and environment
Example topics addressed in the workshop include but are not limited to:

The Eighth Workshop on Dependable and Secure Machine Learning (DSN-DSML 2025)

Website: https://dependablesecureml.github.io/

Description:

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used in critical domains such as healthcare, criminal sentencing recommendations, commerce, transportation, entertainment, space technology, and communication. The design of ML systems has mainly focused on developing models, algorithms, and datasets on which they are trained to demonstrate high accuracy for specific tasks such as object recognition and classification. Recent advances, such as Generative AI, have expanded ML capabilities to include generating realistic content like text, images, and videos, enabling new applications in creative industries, education, and personalized healthcare. ML algorithms typically construct a model by training on a labeled training dataset, and their performance is assessed based on the accuracy in predicting labels for unseen (but often similar) testing data. This is based on the assumption that the training dataset is representative of the inputs that the system will face in deployment. However, in practice, there are many unexpected accidental and adversarially-crafted perturbations on the ML inputs that might lead to violations of this assumption. Generative AI, while powerful, introduces new risks, such as the generation of highly convincing adversarial inputs or misinformation, which can mislead the system decision during training or evaluation and undermine the overall reliability and safety. Moreover, ML algorithms are also often over-confident about their predictions when processing anomalous or unexpected inputs. This makes it difficult to deploy them in safety-critical settings where one needs to rely on ML predictions to make decisions or revert to a failsafe mode. Further, ML algorithms are often executed on special-purpose hardware accelerators, which could be subject to faults and attacks. Thus, there is a growing concern regarding the reliability, safety, security & privacy, and accountability of ML-assisted systems. The DSML workshop is an open forum for researchers, practitioners, and regulatory experts, to present and discuss innovative ideas and practical techniques and tools for producing dependable and secure ML systems. A major goal of the workshop is to draw the attention of the research community to the problem of establishing guarantees of reliability, security, safety, and robustness for systems that incorporate increasingly complex machine learning models, and to the challenge of determining whether such systems comply with the requirements set by regulations, and standards for safety-critical systems. A further goal is to build a research community at the intersection of ML systems and dependable and secure computing. Topics of Interest:

Workshop Chairs

Saurabh Bagchi, Purdue University, USA
Luigi Romano, Università degli Studi di Napoli "Parthenope", Italy

Contact

For further information please send an email to workshops@dsn.org

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