Isobel Standen

About

Isobel Standen is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and a researcher from the Centre for Assuring Autonomy at the Institute for Safe Autonomy. Her PhD project is part of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems node in resilience.

Isobel's research focuses on eliciting insights from our current and emerging understanding of common sense to facilitate the development of socially responsible and trustworthy autonomous systems. This project is being supervised by Professor Alan Thomas and Professor Radu Calinescu.

Selected Publications

INSYTE: A Classification Framework for Traditional to Agentic AI Systems
Zoe Porter, Radu Calinescu, Ernest Lim, Victoria Hodge, Philippa Ryan, Simon Burton, Ibrahim Habli, Tom Lawton, John McDermid, John Molloy, Helen Monkhouse, Phillip Morgan, Paul Noordhof, Colin Paterson, Isobel Standen, and Jie Zou. Pre-print available on SSRN. 2025
(Paper).
Normative Requirements Operationalization with Large Language Models
Nick Feng, Lina Marsso, Sinem Getir Yaman, Isobel Standen, Yesugen Baatartogtokh, Reem Ayad, Victória Oldemburgo de Mello, Beverley Townsend, Hanne Bartels, Ana Cavalcanti, Radu Calinescu, and Marsha Chechik. Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering RE'2024 (Reykjavik, Iceland), 2024
(Paper, Tool, Slides).
Analyzing and Debugging Normative Requirements via Satisfiability Checking
Nick Feng, Lina Marsso, Sinem Getir Yaman, Beverley Townsend, Yesugen Baatartogtokh, Reem Ayad, Victória Oldemburgo de Mello, Isobel Standen, Ioannis Stefanakos, Calum Imrie, Genaina Rodrigues, Ana Cavalcanti, Radu Calinescu, and Marsha Chechik. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering ICSE'2024 (Lisboa, Portugal), 2024
(Paper, Tool, Case-studies, Slides).

Invited Talks and Presentations

*Title TBC*, The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2026.
‘Engineered Authenticity and the Capacity to Pretend’, Institute for Safe Autonomy, UK, 2026.
'Common Sense as a Path to Artificial Resilience', University of Toronto, Canada, 2024.
'On GOFAI as a Method for Approximating Common Sense', University of York, UK, 2023.
'Robot-Assisted Surgery: Can a machine be blameworthy?', York Science Conference, UK, 2022.
'Robot-Assisted Surgery: A Waste of Resources or The Future of Healthcare?', YorRobots, UK, 2021.

Selected Professional Activities

Workshop Organiser

Requirement Engineering for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence - RETRAI 2026
Co-chair, Collaboration with Hasso Plattner Institut, University of Potsdam, and Polytechnique Montréal. Workshop co-located with RE’26.
(Website)
Requirement Engineering for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence - RETRAI 2025
Co-chair, Collaboration with University of Hamburg and Polytechnique Montréal. Workshop co-located with RE’25.
(Website)

Competitions

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition
Finalist (2025), University of York
(Website, Video)