SEI Convenes Tech Community Around Critical Software Topics

In late 2024 and 2025, the SEI advanced capable, trustworthy, and affordable software for national defense by convening industry, academic, and government researchers and practitioners around critical technology topics.

Advancing Software Security

The SEI’s CERT Division brought together software bill of materials (SBOM) generators and tool vendors to investigate how their tools output different SBOMs for the same software, a discrepancy that undermines confidence in software quality and security. The 2025 report on the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) Harmonization Plugfest recommends ways organizations can ensure greater SBOM uniformity and quality.

The CERT Division hosted members of the insider threat community at the 12th annual Insider Risk Management Symposium, which explored how new technologies are changing insider threats and how they can be used to strengthen insider risk management.

The SEI’s third annual Secure Software by Design conference aimed to enhance the holistic approach to secure development by convening thought leaders for presentations and discussions covering all aspects of secure software development.

Held in conjunction with Secure Software by Design, the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) in Practice conference brought together practitioners, researchers, and thought leaders to connect MBSE theory with real-world practice.

Innovating the Software Development Lifecycle

The SEI’s Software Solutions Division (SSD) organized the MBSynergy Workshop, which gave experts from major military and intelligence programs an opportunity to discuss strategies to get more value from MBSE and digital engineering (DE) techniques. The participants pinpointed five key challenges to MBSE implementation in Department of War (DoW) software system development and 19 strategies for overcoming them.

The second meeting of the SEI Assurance Evidence for Continuously Evolving Real-Time Systems (ASERT) Workshop centered around the modeling and analysis of safe failover behavior of commercial airliner flight management systems. Keynote speakers from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Pentagon’s Developmental Test, Evaluation, and Assessment and Director of Operational Test and Evaluation collaborated with ASERT to examine challenges faced by testing and evaluation during development and the operation phases, which the workgroup aims to address.

The SEI organized the 43rd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, also known as ER 2024. Focused on the semantics of software applications at high levels of abstraction, ER is the leading international forum for discourse on conceptual modeling’s state of the art, emerging problems, and future challenges. Topics spanned foundational theories, effective implementation techniques, and methods and tools for development.

In June 2025, the SEI hosted the International Workshop on Envisioning the AI-Augmented Software Development Life Cycle to develop use cases outlining how software development life cycle (SDLC) activities will change with the increased application of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools. This workshop aimed to capture the changing landscape of software development through emerging research results and position papers and identify key activities needed to make progress towards an AI-augmented SDLC.

Building Confidence in AI

The cybersecurity practice of red-teaming is becoming a common technique for evaluating the safety risks of generative AI. However, the practice lacks concrete definitions and protocols, reducing confidence in AI safety. To strengthen AI red-teaming, the SEI’s AI Division brought the AI and cybersecurity communities together at Probing the Limits: A Workshop on Red-Teaming AI Systems and produced the report What Can Generative AI Red-Teaming Learn from Cyber Red-Teaming?

Government, academia, and industry participants attended an AI Acquisition workshop hosted by the SEI as part of its year-long National AI Engineering Study. Several participants discussed the benefits they had gotten from AI integration, including generating code and triaging documents. But participants also reported both simple and complex challenges. The workshop highlighted the need to select trustworthy AI tools that merge with established operational systems and workflows.

Shaping Software’s Future

In 2026, the SEI will continue to build on its partnerships with experts across government, academia, and industry to strengthen the roles of software engineering, cybersecurity, and AI engineering as a strategic national advantage.