Last month, members of the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS) Security, Privacy, and Resilience for Trusted AI (SPARTA) Lab partnered with the Texas A&M Global Cyber Research Institute (GCRI) to lead the first workshop on AI compositional trust at the 56th annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2026) in Charlotte, North Carolina. GCRI leads collaborative efforts on cybersecurity at Texas A&M University and houses state-of-the-art infrastructure for advanced cyber-physical systems (CPS) security testing. DSN is one of the most prestigious international conferences where academic and industry leaders exchange research and present advancements in the design and maintenance of robust and secure computing systems.
Dr. Eman Hammad, director of SPARTA and chair of CRAI, said, “In critical infrastructures like energy, manufacturing, and transportation, agentic and autonomous AI offer powerful opportunities to expand trust and security. The inaugural 2026 CRAI workshop brought academia and industry together to spark vital conversations about engineering greater resilience directly into systems by design.”
Dr. Hammad and GCRI Research Scientist Dr. Jaewon Kim led CRAI 2026: The 1st International Workshop on Composable Resilience for Agentic AI, which focused on critical challenges in cyber resilience and compositional trust within agentic AI systems. The workshop provided participants with a systems-oriented compositional approach to building dependable and secure agentic AI systems by breaking complex workflows into analyzable modules.
“Hosting the inaugural CRAI workshop at DSN 2026 was a remarkable milestone. As agentic AI systems become deeply integrated into critical infrastructures, ensuring their cyber resilience and compositional trust is important. This workshop provided a vital platform for global experts to address these challenges, and we are excited to foster the research collaborations initiated here,” said Kim.
The workshop included two keynotes by Dr. P.R.Kumar (Texas A&M University) and Dr. Ehsan Aghaei (Cisco), in addition to presentations by Dr. Hammad’s graduate students in the Innovations in Systems Trust and Resilience (iSTAR) Lab, which investigates challenges at the intersection of cyber-physical systems, connected and autonomous intelligence, human-AI interactions, cybersecurity, and resilience.
The success of CRAI 2026 marks just the beginning of this collaborative journey as this team looks forward to deepening these discussions and building on the work they initiated at DSN. As the AI landscape continues to evolve, the partnership among SPARTA, GCRI, and iSTAR will be vital to addressing complex security challenges and ensuring Texas A&M remains a leader in innovation and research. Find more information about these labs and other work by Drs. Hammad and Kim by connecting with the SPARTA Lab and GCRI on LinkedIn.