2025 MIT STAMP Workshop
Next workshop:
- March 24-27, 2025 (in-person at MIT Campus)
- September 22-25, 2025 (virtual)
- Cost: Free to all
Quick links:
- What is the annual MIT STAMP Workshop?
- 2025 STAMP Workshop
- Program / Agenda (In-Person)
- Registration
- Video Tutorials on STAMP, STPA, and CAST
- FAQ
- Accomodations & logistics
General Workshop FAQ
Yes, we can provide an official letter after the workshop. Many attendees request these letters as evidence of the time they've invested towards their professional development and education. For the in-person workshop, we will check you in at the registration booth to confirm your attendance and send you the letter. For the virtual workshop, the attendance logs are used to send you a letter confirming that you participated.
Professional certification is also available for STPA and CAST. The certificate requires completing a small project and undergoing a formal evaluation based on established criteria. The workshop alone does not provide the in-depth training or evaluation needed to fulfill all of these criteria.
No, the workshop is free and open to all. You just need to register and have an interest. The workshop provides short tutorials to introduce all of the core concepts needed to follow the rest of the workshop.
Yes, the workshop is attended by a mix of people both new to the approach and experienced with it. The workshop begins with introductory presentations about STAMP, STPA, and CAST for those new to the approach. At the in-person workshop at MIT, we'll meet in a classroom on the first day for tutorials where you'll receive a basic introduction to the methods, have the opportunity to try these methods yourself, and ask questions of an instructor.
For the virtual workshop, the introductory tutorials were recorded at the first virtual workshop and posted online. If you are new to STAMP, you should watch the tutorials before the workshop starts. The tutorials will explain the steps of the process, introduce the terms and acronyms used, and show examples of each step. The content is designed to provide a basic familiarity and help you follow the presentations during the rest of the workshop.
For in-depth training, professional classes are available separately. These are designed to give you enough information to start using the methods on your own applications. There is also a professional certification option for those interested in the STPA Practitioner Certificate.
In-person workshop: About 35-40 hours of content total. The schedule will include about 20 industry presentations (each 20-30 minutes long) and about 18 hours of hands-on interactive content like tutorials. The schedule will include much more variety of content including industry presentations, interactive sessions, networking sessions, open discussions, and other slots. In-person attendees and presenters are typically much more open about the details of their work and past mistakes since it is not recorded.
Virtual workshop: About 8 hours of content total. The schedule will consist of about 10-15 industry presentations each 15-20 minutes long. The presentations are expected to be more formal with sensitive information scrubbed, such as potential mistakes or near misses that may be problematic or people to broadcast or admit openly. No virtual tutorials are planned because the previous virtual tutorials were recorded
Background: The 2023 MIT STAMP Workshop was hybrid (simultaneously in-person and virtual), but it was extremely hectic to manage with virtual hiccups causing in-person delays and vice versa. There are differences in the constraints and the design of a virtual vs. in-person workshop. The average attention spans differ between in-person and virtual events, which is important when determining the lengths of each time slot. In 2023 we made a compromise and used lengths that were in-between what the virtual and in-person audience wanted. In-person participants also tend to have no trouble engaging in up to 30-40 hours of content during the week, but we learned from previous years that it's not so practical to expect most people to engage virtually for 40 hours--whether it's during a single week or spread over several weeks. The in-person attendees generally requested longer, more extensive, and more in-depth content, while the virtual audience generally requested more concise and straight-to-the-point sessions that didn't require days or weeks of time commitment. A number of in-person presenters also requested not to be recorded or live streamed since they wanted to discuss sensitive safety challenges openly during their talk while pictures and video are prohibited. For some, significant content would have been scrubbed if they had to present to a virtual audience. These and other considerations led us to plan the 2024 workshop with separate in-person and virtual events.
The in-person workshop includes more sessions overall, more interactive content like tutorials, and longer-duration sessions. None of the in-person workshop will be broadcast in order to enable free and open discussions about potentially sensitive safety and security challenges as well as the solutions that were used. It can be difficult for some presenters to get approval to share or discuss details if the content is being broadcast to thousands of unknown participants and recorded for the world in perpetuity, so the style of presentation will be different than the virtual workshops. The in-person event also includes many more networking opportunities so that participants can meet more people with similar roles and challenges.
The virtual workshop consists of about 2 hours of short talks each day, spread over 3-4 days. Each year, a few thousand people sign up for the virtual workshop, surpassing the capacity limits of familiar platforms used for daily meetings. It is not possible to support individual camera and audio feeds from each participant. Features like breakout rooms are also unsupported, making it challenging to replicate the experience of an in-person workshop. However, the virtual workshop uses interactive features such as chat, Q&A submissions, and the option to raise your hand, which we will utilize to the best of our ability. Each day of the virtual workshop concludes with an open Q&A session, which has been lively in the past and is often cited by participants as one of the most beneficial parts of the experience.
If you have any ideas or suggestions about the format for next year, feel free to submit a comment when you register!
In-person FAQ
Business Casual is the preferred attire. A few presenters sometimes choose Business Formal, but it is not required. The majority of presenters and nearly all attendees dress in Business Casual.
The in-person event will not be recorded. To understand why, please see the earlier question about differences between the virtual and in-person workshops.
Yes. Check your registration confirmation email for a link to the Attendee Portal. You can request an invitation letter in the portal.
Virtual FAQ
We'll use the Zoom Webinar platform, which is a special version of Zoom that enables large sizes. A few weeks before the virtual workshop begins, all registered participants will receive an email with instructions on how to attend virtually.
We’re aware that some groups are unable to use Zoom due to a firewall or other reasons. Here are the options we're aware of:
- Some have told us that they can participate in Zoom events by using a home computer or by turning off the VPN, as long as they will not be sharing any work-related, secret, or proprietary information.
- Some have told us that they can use Zoom in a web browser (which requires different permissions) but not the standalone Zoom client. Both of those options will be available to you.
- Zoomgov.com is another alternative. It is hosted in the U.S. with stricter security requirements and was designed to allow U.S. government, military, and defense employees to attend Zoom meetings. When you receive the email with your personal zoom link, scroll towards the bottom of that email and find the Webinar ID. Go to Zoomgov.com and enter that Webinar ID. We have run tests and confirmed that it works with a handful of military/defense attendees that are behind firewalls that block regular Zoom. Your situation may vary.
- We will set up an alternative stream outside of Zoom. A few weeks before the workshop begins, registered participants will receive an email with instructions for an alternative stream.
When you register, you'll receive instructions on how to access an alternative stream.
The alternative stream will allow a 24-hour delayed rebroadcast to accommodate distant timezones. When you register, you'll receive instructions on how to access the alternative stream.
Due to the size of the audience, cameras and audio will be disabled unless you are a presenter. You will not see any buttons to mute/unmute audio or to start your camera because these are disabled.
You will not see the chat history from before you rejoined. You will see the Q&A history from before you joined.
We cannot easily copy & paste them online due to privacy and legal concerns. Meanwhile, many participants have said the detailed chat discussions and written Q&A answers from presenters were a highlight of the virtual workshop. It may be possible to one day post a scrubbed/edited version, but it is difficult to find time as there is no funding for it.
The virtual event will have some talks that are recorded and some that are not. There are two issues:
1) Permission. We need permission from speakers to post recordings. Many agree to live stream their talks but decline to have the videos posted afterward. Many talks feature safety-critical and security-critical findings from real projects, and a common theme is showing how new approaches have caught major flaws that were previously missed. We are fortunate that they agreed to present sensitive results publicly at all. Obtaining approval to speak in person is often easier than securing permission for a recording to be posted indefinitely. Additionally, there is uncertainty regarding approvals: some talks that are expected to be approved are not, approval can be delayed until after the talk, some denials receive last-minute approval, and sometimes permission is revoked after the workshop upon review of what was actually said. As a result, it's difficult to confirm whether the video we will be posted or not.
2) Legality. MIT was sued for posting free videos that did not adhere to specific requirements. As a result, we cannot easily or immediately post videos because there is a process to follow. This process incurs costs, but there is no funding to support it since the workshop is free. It relies on volunteers working in their free time, which significantly delays the video editing and posting.
Our intent is to eventually post videos of the sessions that are broadcast virtually once the process has been followed. Videos will not be posted for the in-person-only sessions. We expect that slides for most talks will be posted, pending approval by authors.