For the second year running, Acmena consultants have won the Best Paper Award at the Australian System Safety Conference.
Congratulations to Andy Gabler and Pravin Hiremath on winning the trophy with their paper, ‘Are Quantitative Safety Targets for Railways Useful for Disruptive Technologies?’, which explored whether traditional metrics including Tolerable Hazard Rates, Functional Failure Rates and Safety Integrity Levels can adequately demonstrate that safety targets have been achieved when applied to disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).
This is the second award for Andy Gabler, who took out the top prize in 2023 with Acmena Principal Human Factors Consultant, Keryn Pauley, with a joint paper titled, ‘Quantifying Human Reliability in Safety Analysis – How Useful is it?’
Featuring several renowned experts in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning and autonomous vehicles, Andy and Pravin’s paper had to beat some formidable competition to take home the trophy.
“We are thrilled to have won the Best Paper Award,” Pravin said. “The standard of presentations at the conference was very high, so to win the award is really exciting and a fantastic achievement.
“Our paper explores the potential applications of AI in a typical signalling system, covering various stages from development support to implementation in safety-critical systems.
“The conference presentations provided clear insights into the impact of disruptive technologies, particularly AI, on the transport industry. Keynote speakers specifically challenged the relevance of traditional safety engineering methods for disruptive technologies and redefined fundamental safety engineering concepts such as loss, risk, and safety cases to encompass these new technologies.
“A key theme highlighted at the conference was the concept of ‘unknown unknowns’. While one segment of the transport industry is actively adopting and deploying AI solutions, governments and regulators are striving to establish frameworks for managing AI deployment.
“Meanwhile, safety engineers are often left uncertain, facing unexpected failure modes in AI-based systems that represent these unknown unknowns. The next few years are going to present a considerable challenge to engineers as we attempt to gain a better understanding of how to ensure the safety of AI systems.”
