This research was carried out alongside Wiam Belouard and Sara El Kardi, as part of the 4th-year AI Research Clinics of aivancity’s Grande École Programme, under the supervision of Dr Antoun Yaacoub, a professor at aivancity and Head of the MSc in Generative Artificial Intelligence.

An innovation at the heart of the challenges surrounding trust in AI

The paper presents X-SHIELD, an innovative ‘explainability-by-design’ approach dedicated to self-healing systems orchestrated by multi-agents.

The selected students will join aivancity’s Grande École Programme whilst benefiting from an enhanced curriculum comprising 200 hours of additional training per year.

Today, the most advanced artificial intelligence systems are capable of automatically detecting anomalies, correcting errors or modifying their behaviour without human intervention. However, these mechanisms often remain opaque to users and operators, turning the decisions made by AI into veritable ‘black boxes’.

Faced with this major challenge of transparency, aivancity students have developed a solution capable of instantly generating a structured and comprehensible explanation of the decisions made by the system.

X-SHIELD thus offers two levels of interpretation:

• a clear, educational summary aimed at non-technical users;
• a comprehensive and auditable technical history for engineers and experts.

This approach directly addresses the new challenges of governance, trust and explainability in autonomous systems.

International scientific recognition

This research has been officially published in the proceedings of the ENASE 2026 conference (Volume 1, pages 662–669, ISBN: 978-989-758-828-0), ensuring that the students’ work is firmly established in the international scientific literature.

The acceptance of the paper by ENASE, a recognised international conference classified as CORE B in software engineering and computer science, constitutes a significant validation of the project’s methodological and scientific quality.

In addition to the publication, the work has also been selected for an oral presentation at the conference, once again highlighting the excellence of the work produced.

Training experts capable of bridging AI, technology and governance

This project fully exemplifies aivancity’s educational approach: to train talented individuals capable of mastering cutting-edge technologies whilst taking into account the ethical, human and organisational challenges of artificial intelligence.

Through the AI Research Clinics, students on the Grande École Programme work on real-world problems combining data science, autonomous systems, AI governance and explainability.