Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security Conference (STIDS) 2026
3351 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22201
Conference Overview
The Thirteenth International Conference on Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security (STIDS 2026) will be held May 27-28, 2026 at the George Mason University FUSE Center in Arlington, VA.
STIDS provides a forum for academia, government, and industry to share the latest applied research, development, and application of semantic technology for defense, intelligence, and security applications. Semantic technology is a fundamental enabler of greater flexibility, precision, timeliness, and automation of analysis and response to rapidly evolving threats.
National security increasingly hinges on our ability to integrate artificial intelligence with semantic technologies, knowledge graphs, and data fabrics. The STIDS 2026 theme centers on applying semantic technologies to support trustworthy and explainable reasoning across data ecosystems.
- Unclassified Session: May 27-28, 2026
- Classified Session: May 29, 2026
Featured Speakers
Explore selected STIDS presentations and the speakers contributing to them.
Introducing D3FEND-CCO
In this talk, the presenters introduce early work on robust semantic mappings between D3FEND and the Common Core Ontologies, showing how these mappings can improve interoperability and support data quality across cybersecurity workflows.
Giacomo De Colle
University at Buffalo
Giacomo is a PhD candidate at the University at Buffalo, where he is doing research on the ontology of sovereignty in cyberspace and its ramifications in the ontology of cybersecurity. He is currently developing mappings between D3FEND and CCO in order to foster interoperability between the two ecosystems.
Peter E. Kaloroumakis
MITRE Corporation
Peter Kaloroumakis is a Principal Applied Ontologist at MITRE Corporation where he leads the D3FEND Project, funded by the National Security Agency. He also supports various government sponsors on the development of their Defensive Cyber Operations capabilities.
Pangea CLP-PSL: Making Time Explicit in OWL-Centric Knowledge Graphs for Defense and Intelligence Applications
This talk presents an approach that combines constraint logic programming and probabilistic soft logic to make temporal information in operational knowledge graphs more explicit, checkable, and repairable.
Amanda E. Hicks
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Amanda Hicks has nearly two decades of experience in ontology research and development and leads ontology research initiatives at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Theresa Swift
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
Theresa Swift combines academic research with industry work and has more than 95 publications in logic programming and computational logic. She has been a core developer for XSB Prolog and the ErgoAI KRR system.
Edge Computing Ontology DevOps: Progressive Web Apps for Ontology Development Designed to Support Each Stage of Knowledge Engineering Workflows
This presentation describes a fully local, edge-first approach to ontology development tooling through browser-based progressive web apps designed to support each stage of the knowledge engineering lifecycle.
Jonathan M. Vajda
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Dr. Jonathan Vajda is an ontologist at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where he designs and maintains formal, machine-readable domain models aligned with Basic Formal Ontology and related standards.
Aaron A. Damiano
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Aaron Damiano is a semantic engineer, ontologist, and data scientist specializing in enterprise knowledge graphs and ontology-driven systems. He works at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where he helps lead efforts to normalize, integrate, and operationalize data using formal ontologies and graph technologies.
Interactive Tool for Ontology Building
This demo presents an interactive tool designed to help subject matter experts create ontologies aligned with BFO and CCO by guiding users through superclass and relation selection.
Roman Ilin
Air Force Research Laboratory
Dr. Roman Ilin is a Research Computer Scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory. His work focuses on sensor data processing and information fusion.
Ali Hasanzadeh
Arizona State University, LongShortWay Inc.
Ali is a Ph.D. student in Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. His research focuses on applied ontology for supply chain and manufacturing systems, with particular emphasis on developing a mereotopological framework for industrial ontologies.
SCRDF - Realizing the Semantics of Plans
This talk presents SCRDF, an RDF representation of a plan as a state machine using CCO for states and events and SHACL-AF for conditions and actions, bridging the gap between semantic models and software behavior.
Michael G. Norman
JP Morgan Chase
Michael G. Norman has spent the last 11 years at JP Morgan designing and building access management systems for strategic platforms, with a focus on semantic technologies for governance and control processes.
Lenny Blum
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
Lenny Blum has been at JP Morgan Chase for the past nine years leading the delivery of governance and helping pioneer the use of semantic technologies to define and govern access patterns.
Ontology for Attacks in Cyber Risk Assessment
This paper presents the Ontology for Attacks in Cyber Risk Assessment (OACRA), supporting cyber risk assessments through improved collaboration, structured attack modeling, and enhanced efficiency in cyber testing environments.
Brian A. Haugh
Institute for Defense Analyses
Dr. Brian A. Haugh has worked extensively on national security information modeling and reasoning at the Institute for Defense Analyses. His work spans ontology development across domains including cyber risk, emergency management, and psychological operations, and he is currently contributing to research on testing and evaluating agentic AI systems.
Steve Wartik
Institute for Defense Analyses
Steve Wartik studies the nature and structure of data and information as they relate to systems engineering, especially software-intensive systems. Over nearly three decades at the Institute for Defense Analyses, he has worked across domains including cybersecurity, C4ISR, generative AI, first responders, and interoperability.
Helix: A Secure, Provenance-Based, Distributed Ledger System for Storing and Querying Ontology-Driven Knowledge Graphs
Helix is a first-of-its-kind software for storing and querying ontology-driven knowledge graphs on a distributed ledger. This presentation presents Helix and demonstrates its basic functionality.
Alec Sculley
Summit Knowledge Solutions
Alec Sculley is a knowledge engineer at Summit Knowledge Solutions specializing in ontology engineering. He has contributed to projects aligning W3C ontologies such as PROV-O and SSN/SOSA with the Basic Formal Ontology ecosystem and currently chairs IEEE Working Group P3195.1.1 on a cyber ontology standard.
Daniel Chapple
Beskar
Daniel Chapple is the Chief Executive Officer of Beskar, a cybersecurity and full-stack technology company founded by former government technology and security leaders. He has authored U.S. and international patents on post-quantum encrypted distributed systems and artificial intelligence and previously held senior security and counterintelligence roles in government.
Individual Presentations
These presentations feature individual speakers contributing to this year’s STIDS program.
BFO-Aligned Ontologies as the Semantic Backbone of Tool-Agnostic MBSE
This presentation explores how BFO-aligned ontologies can serve as a semantic backbone for MBSE by connecting heterogeneous engineering artifacts through a shared, machine-interpretable vocabulary, improving validation, interoperability, and traceability.
Gideon Zufan
WTI Solutions (supporting the U.S. Air Force)
Gideon Zufan is a Knowledge Model Developer at WTI Solutions supporting the U.S. Air Force, where he develops ontologies and knowledge models to structure complex domain knowledge and enable semantic interoperability across defense data systems.
My Ontologist: Evaluating BFO-Based AI for Definition Support
This talk evaluates whether GPT-based systems can reliably support BFO-conformant ontology development, examining their performance in generating definitions, respecting ontology hierarchies, and producing valid OWL and Turtle content.
Carter-Beau Benson
CUBRC Inc.
Carter-Beau Benson is an ontologist at CUBRC Inc. and a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo. His research spans applied ontology, knowledge representation, and domain modeling, with a dissertation developing an ontology of soccer.
Ontology-Driven Test Strategy Optimization
This presentation introduces an ontology-driven pipeline for test strategy generation and optimization, integrating semantic web technologies with digital engineering tools to reduce cost and improve traceability across test environments.
Joe Gregory
University of Arizona
Dr. Joe Gregory is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on digital engineering and the use of semantic technologies to improve engineering decision-making and lifecycle integration.
Authoring Mission Threads with Semantic Technologies
This talk shows how semantic technologies can turn mission threads from narrative artifacts into executable, explainable knowledge using ontology, SHACL validation, provenance-linked graphs, and reusable authoring patterns.
David Kamien
Mind-Alliance Systems, LLC
David Kamien is the CEO and Founder of Mind-Alliance Systems, LLC, and an innovation strategist with more than 25 years of experience spanning consulting, law, and national security. His work focuses on AI-powered solutions, knowledge graphs, retrieval-augmented generation, and decision-support systems for government, corporate, and legal contexts.
Additional Featured Speakers
These speakers are part of the developing STIDS program. Additional presentation details will be added as they are confirmed.
Amy Morris
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
Amy Morris is a professionally licensed geotechnical engineer with more than 20 years of experience in consulting and federal service. Her work has focused extensively on levee infrastructure, risk assessment, and specialized analyses, and she is now engaged in research aimed at improving infrastructure documentation and detection.
More Speakers to Be Announced
Additional speakers and presentations will be announced as the program is finalized. Please check back for updates as we continue to expand this year’s STIDS lineup.
Call for Papers
Thirteenth International Conference on Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security (STIDS) 2026
Submission Guidelines
We invite submissions of original, unpublished research and application papers that address innovative solutions, architectures, and methodologies integrating semantic technologies with advanced computing in support of national security objectives. We particularly welcome papers that advance the state of the art in semantic interoperability and machine reasoning for data-intensive systems, supporting enhanced situational awareness, predictive analytics, and decision-making capabilities in complex, distributed environments.
- Extended abstracts must be no more than 3 pages
- Short papers must be between 5-9 pages
- Long papers must be between 10-14 pages
- Must follow CEUR-WS conference proceedings format
- Papers must be original and not under review elsewhere
- At least one author must register and present at the conference
Topics of Interest
We invite submissions addressing the following topics and related areas in semantic technology, intelligence, defense, and security
Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline
Sept 8, 2025
Notification of Acceptance
October 19, 2025
Camera-Ready Submission Deadline
November 16, 2025
Conference Dates
May 27-28, 2026
Registration
Select the registration type that best fits your profile
- Full conference access
- Conference materials
- Networking events
- Lunch and refreshments
- Access to presentations
- Full conference access
- Conference materials
- Networking events
- Lunch and refreshments
- Access to presentations
- Full conference access
- Conference materials
- Networking events
- Lunch and refreshments
- Access to presentations
- Full conference access
- Conference materials
- Networking events
- Lunch and refreshments
- Access to presentations
Contact Us
Have questions about STIDS 2026? We're here to help.
Location:
Fuse at Mason Square (George Mason University)
3351 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22201