AIMLOps 2026 Workshop at IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2026 a Great Success
The 1st IEEE/IFIP AIMLOps Workshop, co-located with IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium 2026 in Rome, was a full success and demonstrated the growing importance of AI-driven autonomous network and service management for future 6G, cloud, IoT, and critical infrastructure environments.
The workshop was co-organized by Marc-Oliver Pahl (Chaire Cyber CNI, IMT Atlantique), Hanan Lutfiyya (University of Waterloo), and Stuart Clayman (University College London). It brought together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss how Artificial Intelligence is transforming the management, operation, security, and interoperability of future communication systems.
Throughout the day, the workshop maintained strong engagement with 22 participants in the first session, 32 participants in the second session, 27 participants in the third session, and 25 participants in the fourth session. Most attendees stayed for the complete workshop, leading to lively exchanges and technically deep discussions across all sessions.
Scientific Topics and International Participation
The workshop covered a broad spectrum of cutting-edge scientific topics related to AI for network and service management, including:
- AI-driven cybersecurity and anomaly detection
- Explainable AI (XAI) for trustworthy network operations
- MLOps, AIOps, and LLMOps for AI lifecycle management
- Generative AI and foundation models for network troubleshooting
- Autonomous protocol translation for heterogeneous IoT systems
- Multimodal LLMs for network management
- AI assurance for distributed AI infrastructures
- Autonomous and zero-touch network operations
- Sovereign cloud and AI infrastructures
The international character of the workshop was particularly remarkable, with presenters and participants coming from institutions across France, Germany, Canada, Singapore, Hungary, Ireland, and the United States. Contributing institutions included IMT Atlantique, Technical University of Munich, Dalhousie University, Carleton University, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, National University of Singapore, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Juniper Networks, Huawei, STACKIT, and others.
Contributions from the Cyber CNI Chaire Ecosystem
The Cyber CNI Chaire ecosystem was strongly represented with two research contributions addressing central challenges for future autonomous and cyber-secure critical infrastructures.
Embedded Security and AIMLOps for Threat Hunting
A first contribution was presented by Mohammed Mezaouli (CNRS Lab-STICC, IMT Atlantique, Brest, France) together with Yehya Nasser, Samir Saoudi, and Marc-Oliver Pahl. Their paper, “Closing the Loop in Embedded Security: Evolution of an AIOps Framework for Threat Hunting,” explored how AIMLOps methodologies can be applied to embedded system security in the context of future 6G and IoT deployments.
The work focused on protecting resource-constrained embedded devices such as ARM Cortex-M4 systems against vulnerabilities including buffer overflows and memory corruption attacks. The authors proposed an integrated AI-driven security lifecycle approach combining:
- side-channel telemetry analysis,
- high-frequency execution trace analysis,
- automated feature engineering,
- continuous model adaptation,
- edge AI deployment, and
- lifecycle management for AI-based security systems.
The paper demonstrated how AI lifecycle management can evolve from static one-off training toward continuously managed and adaptive AI security pipelines capable of supporting robust zero-day vulnerability detection in embedded environments.
Autonomous Semantic Protocol Translation with LLMs
A second contribution from the Chaire ecosystem was presented by Marc-Oliver Pahl together with his PhD student Christian Lübben from the Technical University of Munich. Their paper, “Gateway-X: LLM-based Autonomous Adaptive Semantic and Syntactic Protocol Translation,” addressed one of the central challenges of heterogeneous IoT and cyber-physical systems: interoperability.
Modern IoT and industrial infrastructures are characterized by highly heterogeneous devices and communication protocols. While syntactic protocol translation is already manageable today, semantic interoperability remains extremely challenging because it requires domain-specific knowledge and introduces uncertainty through differences in data representation and accuracy.
The presented work proposed and evaluated a fully automated AI-driven gateway architecture capable of performing both syntactic and semantic protocol translation using Large Language Models. The approach explored how Generative AI and LLMs can automate what the authors described as “semantic vibe-translation” and “vibe-coding” for protocol gateways.
Scientifically, the work investigated:
- AI-driven semantic interoperability,
- automated protocol engineering,
- LLM prompting strategies for infrastructure automation,
- autonomous gateway generation,
- interoperability for heterogeneous IoT ecosystems, and
- zero-touch integration of cyber-physical systems.
The results demonstrated that AI-driven semantic translation is becoming technically feasible and may fundamentally change how interoperability is achieved in future autonomous infrastructures.
Keynote Sessions: Autonomous Networks and European Sovereign AI Infrastructure
The keynote sessions perfectly complemented the technical program and highlighted both the scientific and strategic dimensions of AI-driven infrastructures.
When Networks Think for Themselves: Who Is in-charge?
Deep Medhi (National Science Foundation, USA) delivered the keynote “When Networks Think for Themselves: Who Is in-charge?”. His talk addressed the paradigm shift from managed communication networks toward autonomous systems capable of learning, adapting, and acting independently through Generative AI, foundation models, and reinforcement learning.
The keynote explored fundamental scientific and operational questions:
- What does it mean to operate networks that humans no longer fully understand?
- How can trust and explainability be maintained in autonomous systems?
- What are the operational risks of opaque AI-driven decision-making entities?
- How should network and service management evolve when AI becomes part of the operational control loop?
Drawing on four decades of experience in routing, network operations, and management, Deep Medhi challenged the community to rethink the foundations of network management in an era where AI is evolving from an optimization layer into the operational core of communication infrastructures.
A European Data & AI Strategy – A Cloud Provider’s View
The second keynote, “A European Data & AI Strategy – A Cloud Provider’s View,” was delivered by Hans Torben Löfflad and Manuel Hoffmann from STACKIT.
The keynote addressed:
- sovereign European cloud infrastructures,
- AI platform engineering,
- Kubernetes-based AI infrastructure,
- large-scale LLM serving,
- operational AI platforms,
- digital independence,
- sovereign AI ecosystems, and
- resilient cloud operations.
Hans Torben Löfflad discussed the strategic importance of European digital sovereignty and the need for independent European cloud and AI infrastructures. Manuel Hoffmann presented technical insights into large-scale AI model serving infrastructures and operational AI platform engineering for enterprise-grade environments.
The presentation was particularly relevant in the context of the Cyber CNI Chaire’s research on cyber-secure and resilient critical infrastructures.
European Sovereign Cloud Initiative and Relevance for Cyber CNI
The keynote gained additional significance as STACKIT was recently selected by the European Commission as one of the awarded providers within the new European Sovereign Cloud procurement initiative.
The European Commission initiative, worth up to EUR 180 million over six years, aims to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty by enabling EU institutions and agencies to procure sovereign cloud services that comply with strict European security, resilience, legal, and operational requirements.
The European Commission introduced a new Cloud Sovereignty Framework with measurable sovereignty criteria covering:
- legal sovereignty,
- operational sovereignty,
- technological sovereignty,
- supply-chain transparency,
- resilience,
- environmental considerations,
- security, and
- compliance with European laws and values.
STACKIT achieved the highly demanding SEAL-3 “Digital Resilience” level, demonstrating that its cloud services and operations are resilient against supply-chain disruptions from non-EU third parties.
This development represents an important milestone for sovereign European AI and cloud infrastructures and strongly aligns with current Cyber CNI research challenges around resilient, trustworthy, and sovereign critical infrastructures.
Outlook
Overall, AIMLOps 2026 demonstrated that AI is rapidly becoming both the operational core and the management challenge of future communication systems.
Topics such as:
- AI lifecycle management,
- operational trustworthiness,
- explainability,
- resilience,
- digital sovereignty,
- interoperability, and
- autonomous operations
are becoming defining research challenges for the future of networking, distributed systems, cloud computing, IoT, and cyber-secure critical infrastructures.
The workshop clearly showed that the networking and systems community is entering a new era in which AI is no longer simply optimizing networks — but increasingly designing, operating, securing, and managing them autonomously.
Marc-Oliver is an adjunct professor of Carleton University in Canada. Marc-Oliver’s research focus is on a holistic approach to cybersecurity. He is an experienced teacher and an eLearning pioneer, holding several teaching awards.
Marc-Oliver holds a Diploma from University of TĂĽbingen and a PhD from Technical University of Munich.
Marc-Oliver is Vice President of the German Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (https://germany.acm.org/). He heads the Future Education activities of the German-French Academy for the Industry of the Future (https://future-industry.org/).
Marc-Oliver’s research focus is on a holistic approach to cybersecurity. He works on security-by-design, anomaly detection, human-in-the-loop, and automation. His goal is making cybersecurity manageable, resulting in highly resilient and reliable systems. Marc-Oliver publishes regularly in the network and service management and security communities.
