Johnstown, PA November 18, 2025
Congratulations to Dave Saranchak, who earned the Best Paper Award at the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO) Research Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Security & Assurance for Military Systems (IST-210).
This prestigious event brought together experts from across NATO nations to explore how AI technologies can be securely and reliably integrated into defense applications.
The symposium was highly competitive:
• 60 abstracts were submitted
• 30 were accepted for paper or presentation
• 23 full papers were submitted
• Each paper underwent at least two independent technical reviews
Dave’s paper, titled “An Automated, Scalable Machine Learning Model Inversion Assessment Pipeline,” stood out among the submissions for its innovative approach and technical excellence. His presentation focused on a privacy risk tool that uses advanced techniques, including vision-language models, to assess and quantify the risk from model inversion attacks, improving scalability and effectiveness for analyzing data privacy loss in applications like military image classification.
This work was made possible with contributions from LTC Nathaniel Bastian, Deputy Director, Robotics Research Center, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Dept at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and CTC’s Tyler Shumaker and Jessica Carpenter.
This recognition underscores the depth of expertise and quality of research taking place at CTC. Dave and the team’s work not only represents CTC’s commitment to innovation and technical excellence but also contributes meaningfully to the advancement of AI assurance and security within defense systems.
