🚀 AI is rapidly transforming from a support tool into the operational core of future communication systems — and this was exactly the focus of the 1st AIMLOps Workshop at IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2026 in Rome.
Co-organized by Marc-Oliver Pahl (IMT Atlantique / Chaire Cyber CNI), Hanan Lutfiyya (University of Waterloo), and Stuart Clayman (University College London), the workshop brought together researchers and practitioners from across Europe, North America, and Asia to discuss the future of autonomous and AI-driven network and service management.
The workshop saw strong engagement throughout the entire day:
📌 22 participants in Session 1
📌 32 participants in Session 2
📌 27 participants in Session 3
📌 25 participants in Session 4
What stood out most was the exceptional quality of the papers and the depth of the discussions. Topics ranged from:
🔹 AI-driven cybersecurity and anomaly detection
🔹 Explainable AI (XAI) for trustworthy operations
🔹 MLOps and LLMOps for AI lifecycle management
🔹 Multimodal LLMs for troubleshooting and network management
🔹 Autonomous protocol translation for IoT interoperability
🔹 AI assurance for distributed AI infrastructures
🔹 Sovereign European cloud and AI infrastructures
The Cyber CNI Chaire ecosystem was strongly represented with two research contributions addressing key challenges for future autonomous critical infrastructures.
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 secure resource-constrained embedded systems in future 6G and IoT environments through adaptive AI pipelines, side-channel telemetry analysis, continuous model adaptation, and zero-day vulnerability detection. The work demonstrated how AI lifecycle management can become a core building block for embedded cybersecurity operations.
A second Chaire-related contribution 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 industrial environments: interoperability. The work proposed a fully automated AI-driven gateway architecture capable of performing both syntactic and semantic protocol translation using Large Language Models. The research explored how Generative AI can automate “semantic interoperability” between heterogeneous systems and protocols, opening new perspectives for autonomous IoT integration, intelligent gateways, and zero-touch operations in future cyber-physical infrastructures.
The keynote sessions perfectly complemented the technical program.
🎤 Deep Medhi (National Science Foundation, USA) delivered the keynote *“When Networks Think for Themselves: Who Is in-charge?”* and challenged the community to rethink trust, explainability, and control in future autonomous and zero-touch networks where AI systems increasingly make operational decisions themselves.
🎤 Hans Torben Löfflad and Manuel Hoffmann from STACKIT presented *“A European Data & AI Strategy – A Cloud Provider’s View.”* Their keynote addressed sovereign European cloud infrastructures, large-scale AI model serving, Kubernetes-based AI platforms, and Europe’s path toward digital sovereignty.
This discussion was particularly timely as STACKIT was recently selected by the European Commission as one of the providers for the EU Sovereign Cloud procurement initiative — a major milestone for resilient and sovereign European digital infrastructures and highly relevant for research on cyber-secure critical infrastructures.
A huge thank you to all authors, keynote speakers, participants, and organizers for making AIMLOps 2026 such an engaging and inspiring event. The workshop clearly demonstrated that AI lifecycle management, operational trustworthiness, resilience, sovereignty, and interoperability are becoming defining challenges for the future of networking and distributed systems.
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