2026 IEEE CSR Workshop on CYber-Physical REsilience and Security Against Digital
Breakdowns (CYPRES)

 Call for Papers

Critical infrastructures (CIs), including energy, communications, banking, transportation, and public government services, have become indispensable pillars supporting industrialised economies. The seamless functioning of these infrastructures is crucial for citizens, businesses, and governments, as they rely on a complex network of interconnected physical and information systems to meet their needs and carry out daily operations. Simultaneously, these infrastructures are experiencing a growing level of interdependence, where the failure of one component can lead to cascading effects, resembling a domino effect. Noteworthy instances include the recent major power blackout across the Iberian Peninsula on 28 April 2025 affecting more than 50M people in Portugal and Spain. In parallel, the diverse and extensive causes of these events have prompted the adoption of all-hazard approaches to policy in many countries aiming to encompass both natural disasters and man-made attacks when formulating prevention and remediation measures against the risk of infrastructure failure. Recognizing the need for coordinated action, EU member states are not only encouraging R&D activities but also implementing policies for critical cyber-physical infrastructure protection.

In this context, the Workshop on Cyber-Physical Resilience and Security Against Digital Breakdowns (CYPRES) intends to promote both academic and industrial efforts on the Cyber-Physical Resilience and Security of critical infrastructure systems to fortify future smart cities against digital breakdown crises. Thus, the anticipated audience is not limited to security experts but also includes researchers and engineers that are interested in state-of-the-art research results and industrial innovation in these fields.

CYPRES is fully aligned with IEEE CSR conference and pertinent with the scope and topics of interest including cyber security, resilience, and cyber-physical systems. CYPRES adds value to the IEEE CSR conference by addressing the challenges in case of digital breakdown due to natural or man-made disasters and introducing additional topics of interest, including crisis communication, modelling of interdependencies and cascading effects in interconnected critical infrastructures, and simulation of digital breakdown effects among others. These topics are expected to expand the target audience of the main conference, attract high-quality scientific papers, stimulate fruitful discussions and networking opportunities during the workshop, and trigger new synergies and collaborations after the workshop.

In addition to the cyber-physical breakdown dimension contributed by SPARROW and NATWORK, the joint organisation with MedEWSa significantly broadens the scientific relevance of the workshop. MedEWSa brings a strong focus on extreme weather and climate-driven disruptions, multi-hazard forecasting, and early warning intelligence for critical infrastructures across Mediterranean, European, and African territories.

This integration complements the workshop’s digital breakdown theme by addressing the increasing role that natural hazards play in triggering cyber-physical failures and cascading effects. Extreme weather-driven blackouts, floods, storms, heatwaves, and coastal hazards can disrupt energy grids, water systems, telecommunications, healthcare, and transportation networks—creating both physical damage and secondary digital system failures. MedEWSa therefore strengthens the scientific focus of the workshop by introducing advanced concepts such as impact-based multi-hazard early warning systems and operational decision support for civil protection and emergency services, interoperability and cross-border coordination of early warning, crisis management and response systems, and last-mile warning communication, user-centred system design and trust in emergency information dissemination.

By embedding the multi-hazard early warning and climate-resilience dimension into the workshop, CYPRES becomes a unique scientific platform that connects cyber-physical security, smart-city breakdown resilience, and natural disaster preparedness. This joint SPARROW–MedEWSa positioning expands the range of stakeholders—bridging ICT security scientists, climate researchers, emergency authorities, infrastructure operators, urban planners, and risk managers—leading to a genuinely interdisciplinary and cross-sector knowledge exchange aligned with EU Disaster-Resilient Societies (DRS) ambitions.

The 2nd CYPRES workshop will build upon the success of the  1st CYPRES workshop co-located with 2025 IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Resilience at Chania, Crete, Greece, featuring 7 technical paper presentations and 1 keynote talk.

Topics of Interest

Prospective authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished contributions from a broad range of topics, which include but are not limited to the following:

› Emergency communication systems for first responders and citizens
› Interdependencies modelling and cascading effects analysis
› Cybersecurity anomaly and intrusion detection and mitigation
› Applications for citizen preparedness
› Use cases, pilot trials, and living labs for crisis and disaster management
› Policy recommendations for enhanced civil protection planning

› Crisis and disaster management across different critical sectors
› Frameworks for threat modelling and vulnerability assessment
› Methodologies for critical asset management during digital breakdowns
› Digital Twins, simulation engines, and scenario creation tools
› Risk estimation and impact assessment
› Ethical, Legal and Societal Aspects (ELSA) for resilience

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: April 13, 2026 May 13, 2026
Authors’ notification: May 4, 2026 June 4, 2026
Camera-ready submission: May 25, 2026 June 25, 2026
Registration deadline (authors): May 25, 2026 June 25, 2026
Workshop dates: August 4, 2026 (TBC)

Submission Guidelines

Submitted manuscripts should not exceed 6 pages (plus 2 extra pages, being subject to overlength page charges) and should be of sufficient detail to be evaluated by expert reviewers in the field. The workshop’s proceedings will be published by IEEE and will be included in IEEE Xplore subject to meeting IEEE Xplore’s scope and quality requirements.

The guidelines for authors, manuscript preparation guidelines, and policies of the IEEE CSR conference are applicable to CYPRES workshop. Please visit the authors’ instructions page for more details. When submitting your manuscript via the conference management system, please make sure that the workshop’s track 2T6 CYPRES is selected in the Topic Areas drop down list.

Workshop Committees

Workshop Chairs

Contact Us

panteli.mathaios@ucy.ac.cy
juerg.luterbacher@geogr.uni-giessen.de
lalas@iti.gr

Organizing Committee

Georg Aumayr, Johanniter (AT)
Jiri Bouchal, Digital Resilience Institute (CZ)
Steve Gadsdon, First Response Solutions (UK)
Eva Jaho, EXUS.AI Labs (GR)
Christina Michailidou, Catalink (CY)
Bamba Niang, EFUS (FR)
Nikos Papadakis, Space Hellas (GR)
Martina Surynková, SITMP (CZ)
Balaji Venkateswaran, University of Cyprus (CY)
Monique Kuglitsch, Fraunhofer HHI (DE)
Nikolaos Bartsotas, National Observation of Athens (GR)
Enrico Scoccimarro, CMCC (IT)

Program Chairs

Christos Laoudias, University of Cyprus (CY)
Elena Xoplaki, CMCC (IT)
Dimitrios Vamvatsikos, National Technical University of Athens (GR)

Technical Program Committee

Konstantinos Avgerinakis, Catalink (CY)
Anastasios Drosou, CERTH/ITI (GR)
Georgios Gardikis, Space Hellas (GR)
Nikos Hatziargyriou, National Technical University of Athens (GR)
Aris Lalos, ISI/ATHENA (GR)
Lukas Sigrist, Universidad Pontificia Comillas (ES)
Goran Strbac, Imperial College London (UK)
Nadine Sturm, Johanniter (AT)
Konstantinos Votis, CERTH/ITI (GR)
Angela Dimitriou, ITML (GR)
Jackie Ma, Fraunhofer HHI (DE)
Dimitrios Vamvatsikos, National Technical University of Athens (GR)

Publicity Chairs

Marios Stavrou, SupportCY-Bank of Cyprus (CY)
Christiana Koutsoulli, University of Cyprus (CY)

Keynote Talk

Screenshot

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Prof. José Palma-Oliveira

Senior Industry Expert at Equator Company
Professor at the University of Lisbon

All Disasters Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others: Rethinking the Empirical Foundations of Community Resilience

Predicting the resilience of a system in the face of a disaster, or a High Impact Low Probability (HILP) event, is inherently difficult. Complex adaptive systems tend to self-organise without intent, and resilience emerges as one of their key emergent properties. Resilience is often estimated indirectly through vulnerability, which is essentially static (risk = hazard × vulnerability × consequence), whereas resilience is inherently dynamic and seeks to capture adaptive processes over time. This presentation will briefly introduce several methodologies commonly used to measure resilience and vulnerability (e.g. BRIC, CDRI, RCI, SoVI, SVI), while highlighting their lack of a shared theoretical foundation. This absence of a common conceptual basis limits systematic validation and meaningful comparison across approaches. When applied to communities and individuals, resilience assessment must incorporate not only the structural resources and properties of the system, but also the social dimensions of different groups and actors. Such an approach can help overcome both the overly loose definition of “system” often used in resilience studies and the broader lack of theoretical consistency in the field. Further complicating the development of common resilience metrics is the fact that different types of disasters display a striking consistency in their psychological and behavioural consequences, particularly in terms of post-traumatic stress, regardless of their physical or economic impacts. The presentation will conclude by outlining a set of proposals aimed at addressing some of these conceptual and methodological challenges.

Biography

Prof. José Palma-Oliveira is a Senior Industry Expert at Equator Company and Professor at the University of Lisbon, with a longstanding research and professional interest in the interaction between human societies and the environment, particularly from a risk-based perspective. He is a past President of SRA-Europe, a Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) since 2012, and the recipient of the Society’s Presidential Merit Award (2016) (sra.org). He is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia, Department of Systems and Information Engineering, and a member of the Scientific Council of ASAE, the Portuguese authority for food and economic safety and regulation. Prof. Palma-Oliveira previously served as Chairman of Quercus, at the time the most active environmental NGO in Southern Europe, and as a member of the Portuguese National Water Council. He was also a Board Member of the European Federation for Transport and Environment (Brussels), where he contributed to EU policy development on air quality and environmental noise directives. During this period, he developed a modal transport shift model and applied industrial safety frameworks grounded in behavioural safety and risk perception. He continues to contribute actively to resilience and disaster research and practice across multiple geographical contexts, bridging academic research, policy development, and applied risk management.

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