Program

Date: Tuesday May 6th, 2025

Location: UC Invine, Student Ctr, 311 W Peltason Dr a, Irvine, CA 92697
Room: Woods Cove A

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Dr. Kim Wasson

JOBY AVIATION

Dr. Kim Wasson is a Staff Development Assurance Engineer and the Autonomy Certification Lead at Joby Aviation, having joined in 2020 to translate a history of applied research and development into practice. At Joby and in collaboration with the FAA, NASA, and others, she is establishing design and operational assurance strategies and certification pathways for systems that integrate autonomous and other emerging capabilities. She has over 20 years of experience investigating, developing, and executing technical policy and practice for the safety assurance, certification, and operation of complex engineered systems. She now focuses on emerging means and methods to assure emerging capabilities, and on the technology transfer needed to bring the most compelling of these from research into technical, regulatory, and investigative practice. Working with the engineers, regulators, researchers, and other stakeholders who are party to the associated systems, she builds the integrated and substantiated arguments that allow us to field and operate them with justified confidence. Prior to joining Joby in 2020, Dr. Wasson founded and led Federated Safety, LLC, providing strategic and technical leadership in safety and certification to industry, agency, and defense organizations, and for applications ranging from collision avoidance systems to drug infusion pumps. She has over 30 publications and is active in several advisory groups and standards development efforts concerning safety, autonomy, data, human factors, and AI. She also co-led the FAA-sponsored Overarching Properties Working Group (OPWG) and co-authored its foundation papers. Dr. Wasson earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2006.

Arguing at the Compliance Interface: Dispatches from Industrial Experience

Aircraft certification is based on behavioral predictability consistent with the safety intent of applicable regulations. To establish and agree that requisite predictability, applicants show, and approvers find, compliance with recognized standards and additional negotiated means and methods. Thus, compliance is the context in which a safety assertion, and its often implicit supporting argument, is framed and evaluated in practice. Where an emerging assurance method, or an emerging capability, is not accounted for in the existing compliance context, new arguments must be brought forth, and their integration into the compliance context must be worked out, raising numerous technical, regulatory, and practical considerations. This talk offers observations collected from industrial experience in creating and negotiating these arguments that enable both the assurance of new capabilities, and the use of new methods of compliance in associated approvals.

Panel: Challenges and Opportunities of Automated Formal Assurance

Kim Wasson

Autonomy Certification Lead at Joby Aviation

Ronald Koontz

Executive Technical Fellow
Avionics Software and Infrastructure

The Boeing Company

Jonathan Preston

Senior Technical Fellow

Lockheed Martin Corporation

Oleg Sokolski

Research Professor
University of Pennsylvania

PROGRAM

09:00 AM - 09:30 AM Introduction to the Assurance Evidence For Continuously-Evolving Real-Time Systems Workgroup. Dionisio de Niz

09:30 AM - 10:30 AM Keynote Speaker. Dr. Kim Wasson, Joby Aviation

10:30 AM - 11:00 AM Coffee Break

11:00 AM - 11:20 AM The Importance of Starting in a Good Place. Bjorn Andersson (Carnegie Mellon University)

11:20 AM - 11:40 AM Towards Compositional Assurance of Large CPS. Gabriel Moreno, Mark Klein, Shambwaditya Saha (Carnegie Mellon University), Farzaneh Derakhshan (Illinois Institute of Technology), and Limin Jia (Carnegie Mellon University)

11:40 AM - 12:00 PM Assurance Cost Reuction Through Architectural Design. Eunsuk Khan (Carnegie Mellon University)

12:00 PM - 12:20 PM Advanced Certification Methods: Needs and Motivations. Jonathan Preston (Lockheed Martin Corporation)

12:30 PM - 02:00 PM Lunch

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM Challenges and Opportunities of Automated Formal Assurance Panel

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