Friday July 10
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Location: Auditorium (Salón de Actos)
Keynote: Manufacturing today runs on software as much as on machinery. Factories are adopting connected equipment, cloud systems, and increasingly using artificial intelligence. This brings exposure to threats and obligations that did not exist a generation ago. Cybersecurity compliance has become increasingly important. For many firms, it now decides which contracts they win and which customers they keep. This keynote sets out to make the subject clear and practical rather than intimidating. It explains what cybersecurity compliance actually is, and why it has become central to operational risk. The talk walks through the frameworks now shaping industry — CMMC 2.0 for the U.S. defense supply chain, ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, and Europe's new Cyber Resilience Act(CRA) — and is specific about which are mandatory, for whom, and from when. A manufacturing region like Milwaukee is mostly tied to defense and global supply chains, these deadlines are near, and they fall hardest on the smaller suppliers least equipped to meet them. It also addresses a harder problem directly. The same AI making industry more productive is opening new security gaps faster than people can close them by hand. There are real penalties, measured in millions of dollars and lost contracts, which show what is at stake. Finally, the keynote introduces Ubicomply, a platform built from NIH-funded research. This platform maps more than 1,000 controls to the NIST framework and produces audit-ready evidence from an organization’s own code, systems, and policies. Ubicomply ensures that trust need no longer depend on fear and guesswork.
Bio: Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, PhD, is the Wehr Professor of Computer Science and Founding Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University, USA. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Arizona State University, specializing in mobile and pervasive computing. Dr. Ahamed is an internationally recognized researcher whose work spans artificial intelligence, digital health, ubiquitous computing, cybersecurity, privacy, and machine learning. He develops intelligent, non-intrusive technologies for healthcare applications, including stress, emotion, pain, hemoglobin level, and behavioral monitoring. His innovations have supported smoking cessation, cancer care, suicide prevention, autism support, palliative care, and high-risk behavior management. He founded and directs the Ubicomp Research Laboratory at Marquette University, where he has graduated more than 30 PhD and 50 MS students. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles and secured more than $10 million in research funding. His work has earned fourteen Best Paper and Best Poster awards, including the 2022 and 2023 Best Paper Awards from Elsevier’s Smart Health journal. In 2025, Stanford University recognized him among the world’s top 2% scientists in Artificial Intelligence, Image Processing, and Software Engineering. Dr. Ahamed serves as the Standing Committee Chair of IEEE COMPSAC and is the founder of UbiComply AI, an AI-driven compliance automation company.
