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, and IoT infrastructures.
The workshop was co-organized by Marc-Oliver Pahl (Chaire Cyber CNI, IMT Atlantique, CNRS IRISA), Hanan Lutfiyya (University of Waterloo), and Stuart Clayman (University College London).
Throughout the day, the workshop attracted a highly engaged audience, with more than 100 participants overall distributed in the four sessions. Most attendees participated throughout the full workshop day, resulting in lively and technically deep discussions between researchers and practitioners from academia and industry.
Scientifically, the workshop covered a broad spectrum of cutting-edge topics related to AI for network and service management, including:
- AI-driven cybersecurity and anomaly detection
- Explainable AI (XAI) for trustworthy network operations
- MLOps, LLM-Ops, and lifecycle management of AI systems
- Generative AI and foundation models for network troubleshooting
- Autonomous protocol translation for heterogeneous IoT systems
- Multimodal LLMs for network management
- AI assurance for distributed LLM training and inference infrastructures
- Autonomous and zero-touch network operations
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.
A particularly important contribution from the Chaire ecosystem was presented by Mohammed Mezaouli (CNRS Lab-STICC, IMT Atlantique, Brest, France) together with Yehya Nasser, Samir Saoudi, and our chairholder 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 emerging 6G and IoT deployments.
The work focused on securing resource-constrained embedded devices such as ARM Cortex-M4 platforms against vulnerabilities including buffer overflows and memory corruption attacks. The authors presented an integrated AI-driven security lifecycle approach combining side-channel analysis, high-frequency telemetry, real-time execution traces, automated feature engineering, continuous model adaptation, and edge AI deployment. Their research demonstrated how modern MLOps concepts can evolve from static one-off model training toward continuously managed and adaptive AI security pipelines capable of supporting zero-day vulnerability detection in embedded systems.
The keynote presentations perfectly complemented the technical sessions and highlighted both the scientific and strategic dimensions of AI-driven infrastructures.
🎤 Deep Medhi (National Science Foundation, USA) delivered the keynote “When Networks Think for Themselves: Who Is in-charge?”. His talk explored the paradigm shift from managed networks toward autonomous systems capable of learning, adapting, and acting independently through Generative AI, foundation models, and reinforcement learning. The keynote raised fundamental questions about trust, explainability, transparency, and human oversight in future autonomous and zero-touch communication systems. Drawing on four decades of experience in network routing, operations, and management, Deep Medhi challenged the community to rethink the foundations of network and service management in an era where AI is becoming the operational core rather than merely an optimization layer.
🎤 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 speakers presented a compelling perspective on European digital sovereignty and discussed the technological, operational, and strategic challenges involved in building sovereign European cloud and AI infrastructures. Their presentation covered AI platforms, Kubernetes-based infrastructure, large-scale LLM serving, MLOps ecosystems, and the importance of resilient and independent European digital infrastructures.
This keynote was particularly relevant in the context of the Cyber CNI Chaire research activities on resilient and sovereign critical infrastructures. In April 2026, STACKIT was selected by the European Commission as one of the awarded providers for the new European Sovereign Cloud procurement framework. The initiative, worth up to EUR 180 million over six years, aims to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty by enabling EU institutions to procure cloud services that comply with strict sovereignty, resilience, and security requirements.
The European Commission’s new Sovereign Cloud Framework introduces measurable sovereignty criteria across legal, operational, technological, environmental, and supply-chain dimensions. STACKIT achieved the highly demanding SEAL-3 “Digital Resilience” level, demonstrating that its cloud services and operations are resilient against supply-chain disruption from non-EU third parties. This milestone highlights the increasing maturity of European cloud technologies and strongly aligns with current research challenges in cyber-secure, resilient, and sovereign critical infrastructures addressed by the Chaire.
Overall, AIMLOps 2026 clearly demonstrated that AI is rapidly becoming both the operational core and the management challenge of future communication systems — making AI lifecycle management, explainability, trustworthiness, sovereignty, resilience, and operational automation central research topics for the networking community.
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.
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