Join global experts at the 32nd BCS Annual Online Conference on Software Quality Management with the theme "Ethics in AI Human Conduct".
Speakers
Tom Gilb HonFBCS (Norway)
Professor Joseph Kasser (Australia)
Pyrros Radimissis (Australia)
Pamela Agbahor (UK)
Dr Larry Kennedy (USA)
Dr Barclay Brown (USA)
Agenda
9:00am - Final Technical Tests for Speakers
9:15am - Registration - Opening Address, Margaret Ross and Raid AlQaisi
9:30am - Keynote: AI Ethics Planning, Tom Gilb HonFBCS
10:30am - Break
10:45am - AI: experiences, anecdotes, and hallucinations, Joseph Kasser
11:45am - Lunch
12:15pm - Personable AI in the Pursuit of Quality, Barclay Brown
1:15pm - Break
1:30pm - Quality Assurance as a Cybernetic Process, Pyrros Radimissis
2:30pm - Break
2:45pm - Building Ethical systems, Not monsters: What three iconic films teach us about, Pamela Agbahor
3:45pm - Break
4:00pm - Closing Keynote: Ethical Dependability: The Cornerstone of AI Safety, Dr Larry Kennedy
5:00pm - Closing Remarks, Raid AlQaisi and Margaret Ross
Event synopsis
This year's conference's general theme is "Ethics in AI Human Conduct".
Join global experts at the 32nd BCS Annual Online International Conference on Software Quality Management (SQM), where industry pioneers, academics, and practitioners address the most pressing ethical challenges in AI-driven systems.
This year's focus responds to urgent industry needs identified in the BCS Ethics Survey 2023: 82% of IT professionals demand organisational ethical policies for AI, while 88% advocate for government leadership in shaping global ethical standards, in AI and other high-stakes technologies (BCS, 2024).
Talk synopses
AI: experiences, anecdotes, and hallucinations - Dr Joseph Kasser
The talk shares experiences using AI as a smart search engine, how it can provide new insights when writing papers and reports, as well as using AI to create and debug software.
The talk discusses the dialog and iterative active listening needed for effective communication. It warns that the AI is a great sycophant, apologizes very well, and tends to hallucinate, so that we need to ‘trust but verify’ Al the information it produces.
The talk concludes that AI is a very useful tool, but has to be treated as an apprentice who has access to a lot of information but needs to be guided and constantly checked.
Quality Assurance as a Cybernetic Process - Pyrros Radimissis
"Quality Assurance as a Cybernetic Process” frames QA as a feedback-and-control function designed with ethics embedded for complex, AI-enabled systems and the people who run them.
Using the lens of cybernetics and Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, it lays out four layers of quality assurance; engineering, project/program, governance, and meta‑QA.
Presenting how to design for quality, test what matters, govern responsibly, and continuously “audit the auditors.”
The session translates this into practice for human–AI teaming, opaque decision chains, and training‑data risks, arguing that ethics can’t be outsourced to automation but must be embedded in the regulatory design.
Attendees will leave with a clear architecture and actionable methods to keep intelligent systems and their overseers honest, aligning compliance with conscience.
Building Ethical systems, Not monsters: What three iconic films teach us about bias in ai and responsibility - Pamela Agbahor BA MSc MBCS
This presentation explores the challenges of bias in artificial intelligence, using three iconic films as powerful storytelling tools. Each film reveals a distinct form of bias: individual and social prejudice, structural injustice, and institutional exclusion. These mirror real-world issues in AI systems.
Blending narrative, ethical reflection, and quality management principles, the session highlights the societal risks of unchecked AI bias. It encourages the audience to consider how bias shapes the systems we design and how we can build fairer, more inclusive, and more responsible and ethical technologies.
Ethical Dependability: The Cornerstone of AI Safety - Dr Larry Kennedy, PhD
The personal value of ethical dependability will guide the decisions of how to design, develop, train, deploy, and market AI to the public. It will influence the enterprise-level to individual purchases, prompting, and finally the shaping and application of the product of AI. With what we already know about the international workforces' ethical standards, what could possibly go wrong?
Personable AI in the Pursuit of Quality - Barclay Brown
Large language models are a new kind of presence at work: systems with extraordinary language ability and zero inner life. That mismatch is not a flaw—it’s an opening for quality. This talk shows how to treat AI not as a junior human or a dumb tool, but as a personable, programmable professional. By assigning clear roles—auditor, skeptic, tutor, regulator—and enforcing evidence, checklists, and formats, teams can harness eight practical traits: responsiveness, persona malleability, eagerness to serve, constructive reticence, receptiveness to challenge, debate competence, patience, and broad knowledge. The result is sharper requirements, tougher design reviews, clearer documents, and faster learning loops—without ceding judgment. We address the risk of anthropomorphic over-trust, insist on human verification, and demonstrate prompt patterns that elicit dissent, surface edge cases, and improve traceability. Attendees leave with a compact playbook to make AI a disciplined partner in the pursuit of quality: personable on purpose, rigorous by design.
About the speakers
Tom Gilb was born in California 1940, lived in the UK 1956-58, Norway 1958 to present. Joined IBM 1958.
Consulted for a very wide variety of organisations, and managed to influence some of them in interesting and well documented ways. See ‘PPPP’ below.
Tom is an Honorary Fellow of BCS. See Gilb.com for more details. Tom is the author of thirteen paper books, dozens of E-books, and hundreds of papers on a wide variety of subjects. His book ‘Competitive Engineering’ is a substantial definition of systems engineering ideas. His works are at Researchgate All free, and https://leanpub.com/u/tomgilb (free samples)
Many BCS and other videos by Tom are at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tom+gilb, and at the BCS SPA video site https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBhokJ0qd3_wlvr0j85YhmNfNj8ZJ8M-
Tom has guest lectured at universities all over UK, Europe, China, India, USA, Korea – and has been a keynote speaker at dozens of technical conferences internationally.
There are very many organisations and individuals who use some or all of Gilb methods. IBM and HP were two early corporate adopters. Over the recent 20 years, 20,000 engineers at Intel have adopted his ‘Planguage’ requirements and design methods. Some case studies of the use of his methods are in ‘Powerful Ploys for Problems, using Planguage’, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384054757_PPPP_Powerful_Ploys_for_Problems/, which includes an updated references section with free publications, up to 2024.
Tom is 84, retired, living in Norway. He follows up electronically daily, and his highest wish is to spread useful ideas to the next generation.
Dr Joseph Kasser is now a mentor and coach after having been a successful practicing systems engineer and project manager for almost 50 years and an academic for 20 years.
Joseph helps system engineers and project managers facing complex problems that are eating up their spare time and destroying their family relationships to successfully tackle those problems, restore their family relationships and create spare time in as little as 10 weeks.
Joseph is a recipient of NASA’s Manned Space Flight Awareness Award (Silver Snoopy) for performing and directing systems engineering, and many other awards and commendations.
The author of seven published books on systems engineering and more than 50 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications.
Pyrros Radimissis is an experienced Test & Evaluation (T&E) Manager and specialist consultant with a strong foundation in systems thinking and assurance. He holds certifications as a Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP), Systems Engineering Quality Manager (SEQM), and Certified Practising Project Director (CPPD). With extensive experience supporting complex defence and government programs, he brings disciplined oversight to system performance, verification, and stakeholder alignment.
Pamela Agbahor holds a BA (Hons) in Foreign Languages and Literature with a major in French but has built a 15-year career in IT. After working at a commercial bank, she taught herself database development and expanded into software and data systems. Pamela also has experience in data management, IT training, Business Intelligence, along with auditing, administrative, and other support roles in diverse sectors but primarily in the education sector.
She earned an MSc in Computing (Software Engineering) from the Open University, with a dissertation that uncovered major barriers to environmental sustainability data collection in the Film and TV industry through interviews with key stakeholders. She is also a certified IT quality manager.
Pamela enjoys tackling an organisation’s most critical problems. Drawing on her expertise in quality management, she helps control costs that escalate from unclear goals, poor planning, or overlooked risks. She focuses on improving stakeholder value that benefit both organisations and their customers.
Based in the UK, Pamela is an active member of several BCS specialist groups, including Quality Management, Data Management, Green IT, and Artificial Intelligence.
Dr. Larry Kennedy, is a skilled and experienced management professional with an inter-disciplinary history in engineering, business, and nonprofit development.
He has trained small business and nonprofit leaders for over thirty years and his emphasis on developing leadership skills dramatically increases the knowledge that learners apply to the workplace. He is the author and instructor of the Quality Manager Courses and has written two books on QM.
Larry has created online individual and cohort learning with Professional Certifications in Systems Engineering, Clinical Research, and Business and Nonprofit Leadership along with enterprise-level Quality Accelerator Programs.
QMI’s “Eight Attributes” have been adopted as “both a standard for performance and a standard for training that creates a positive quality management work culture” by the Site Accreditation and Standards Institute’s global standard for the Accrediting of Clinical Research Sites.
The Eight Attributes are also referenced in the International Council of Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Official Handbook sections for Quality Management.
Barclay R. Brown 
is Senior Technical Fellow for AI Research at Collins Aerospace, a division of RTX. Before joining Collins, he was an engineering fellow in Raytheon Missiles and Defense, focusing on MBSE, and prior to that he was the Global Solution Executive for the Aerospace and Defense Industry at IBM. Dr. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, two master’s degrees in psychology and business and a PhD in industrial and systems engineering. He is author of Engineering Intelligent Systems, published by Wiley, and is a certified Expert Systems Engineering Professional (ESEP) and certified Systems Engineering Quality Manager.
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This event is brought to you by: Quality specialist group
Supported by: Dorset branch and Hampshire branch
