Prof. John McDermid
John McDermid became Professor of Software Engineering at the University of York in 1987. His research covers a broad range of issues in systems, software and safety engineering. He became Director of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation funded Assuring Autonomy International Programme in January 2018, focusing on safety of robotics and autonomous systems, including the role of Artificial Intelligence. He has acted as an advisor to government and industry, including FiveAI, the UK MoD and Rolls-Royce, and he will take up a post as non-executive director of the HSE in October 2019. He has been actively involved in standards development, including work on safety and software standards for civilian and defence applications. He is author or editor of six books and has published around 400 papers. He became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2002 and was awarded an OBE in 2010.
INVITED TALK: Towards a Framework for Safety Assurance of Autonomous Systems
Autonomous systems have the potential to provide great benefit to society. However, they also pose problems for safety assurance, whether fully autonomous or remotely operated (semi-autonomous). This talk addresses the challenges of safety assurance of autonomous systems and proposes a novel framework for safety assurance that, inter alia, uses machine learning to provide evidence for a system safety case and thus enables the safety case to be updated dynamically as system behaviour evolves.