ACSOS In Practice
ACSOS in Practice brings together perspectives from industry and applied research to discuss how autonomic and self-organising systems move from concepts and prototypes into real-world use.
The session features Francesco Collini, Founder and CEO of FlashStart, and Melanie Schranz, Senior Researcher at Lakeside Labs GmbH. Drawing on their experience in cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, swarm intelligence, and resilient autonomous technologies, the panel will explore opportunities and challenges in translating research advances into scalable, dependable, and effective solutions.
Francesco Collini
Founder and CEO @ FlashStart
Francesco Collini is the Founder and CEO of FlashStart. With over two decades of experience in digital technology and cybersecurity, he has been driven by a clear conviction: Internet protection must be advanced and effective, yet simple to use and accessible to organizations of any size.
Guided by this vision, Francesco founded FlashStart and grew it into an international company specializing in DNS-based web filtering and threat protection. Today, FlashStart develops solutions powered by cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and continuous threat analysis, protecting users across 161 countries and supporting businesses, schools, public administrations, telecom operators, and service providers worldwide.
As CEO, Francesco drives the company’s growth and innovation, working daily to stay ahead of evolving cyber threats and to make cybersecurity faster, more reliable, and effortless to manage.
Melanie Schranz
Senior Researcher @ Lakeside Labs GmbH
Dr. Dipl.-Ing. Melanie Schranz is a Senior Researcher at Lakeside Labs in Klagenfurt, Austria, where she leads scientific and administrative project management for national and international research initiatives.
Her research focuses on engineering swarm intelligence for cyber-physical systems (CPS)—from drone swarms in search-and-rescue missions to autonomous vehicles and smart production scheduling. Drawing inspiration from natural systems, she explores how simple, local agent behaviors can give rise to collective intelligence that is robust, scalable, and adaptable to dynamic real-world environments.
Her work bridges algorithmic foundations with practical CPS applications, addressing the complexity of interconnected devices through nature-inspired solutions. Dr. Schranz holds a PhD in Technical Sciences from the University of Klagenfurt. Prior to her current role, she worked as Innovation Manager at UPPERCUT group GmbH, managing grant applications and fostering internal innovation culture. She has secured funding at the KWF, FFG, and EU levels, and continues to advance swarm-based approaches that make autonomous systems more intelligent and resilient.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Wed 9 SepDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
09:00 - 10:00 | Keynote: Bridging Centralized and Decentralized Control in Robot Swarms through Self-Organizing HierarchiesMain Track at Aula Magna "Carmen Tura" Speaker: Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles) In this talk, I present the Self-Organizing Nervous System for Robot Swarms (SoNS), a middleware framework that enables robots to dynamically form adaptive hierarchical structures. SoNS bridges centralized and decentralized paradigms by supporting functionally centralized coordination of sensing, actuation, and decision-making, while preserving the scalability, flexibility, and fault tolerance of self-organizing systems. | ||
13:00 - 14:00 | |||
16:30 - 17:30 | When Systems Decide: Can We Trust Autonomy in Production?ACSOS In Practice at Aula Magna "Carmen Tura" As technical systems increasingly observe, decide, adapt, and act with minimal human oversight, the question of trust becomes critical. This panel brings together practitioners to explore what autonomy truly means in real-world production environments, going beyond conceptual models. Through concrete system examples, panelists will examine the gap between theory and practice, discuss where to draw the line between automation and human control, and share evidence-based approaches for verifying correct behavior. They will also candidly address failure modes, uncomfortable trade-offs, and hard-earned lessons that the ACSOS research community should not overlook. Join us for an honest conversation about what makes autonomous systems worthy of our trust—and what keeps practitioners up at night. | ||
18:00 - 19:00 | |||
19:00 - 23:00 | |||
19:00 - 20:00 | |||