Mallory S. Graydon

Mallory is a Research Computer Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, USA. She has worked as a Software Design Engineer building software for medical devices and for test and measurement applications, as a Research Associate at the University of York (UK), and as a Researcher at Mälardalen University (Sweden). Mallory’s research on safety assurance for software-intensive systems has covered safety process planning, review of safety arguments, assurance of changes to legacy systems, safety cases for component-based systems, mixed-criticality hard real time scheduling, formal argumentation, and argument confidence.

Her work explores the efficacy and appropriateness of argument-based approaches to civil aviation safety assurance. She has contributed to several standards, including UL 4600, SAE ARP4754B, and SAE ARP4761A and is a member of SAE’s S-18 and G-32 committees.

Selected publications:

• Mallory S. Graydon and Sarah M. Lehman. Examining proposed uses of LLMs to produce or assess assurance arguments. Technical Memorandum NASA/TM-20250001849, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Hampton, VA, USA, March 2025. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20250001849.
• Mallory Graydon, Natasha Neogi, and Frank McCormick. Scoping, tailoring, and abstraction refinement in hazard assessment processes. In Proeedings of Vertical Flight Society Annual Fourm & Technology Display, May 2024. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20240004263.
• Frank McCormick, Mallory Graydon, Natasha Neogi, Paul Miner, and Jeffrey Maddalon. Safety expertise and the perils of novelty. In Proceedings of the Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), Barcelona, Spain, October 2023. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20230009299.
• Finlay McCardel, C. Michael Holloway, Kimberly Wasson, Neil McDonnell, Mallory Graydon, Abel Peña, and Sarah Lehman. Towards a coherent view of evidence in safety assurance. Technical Memorandum TM-20230003336, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Hampton, VA, USA, April 2023. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20230003336.
• Mallory S. Graydon. Towards efficacy hypotheses for safety cases. In Proceedings of the 16th European Dependable Computing Conference, Munich, Germany, September 2020. doi:10.1109/EDCC51268.2020.00018. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205006461.
• P. J. Graydon and C. M. Holloway. Why assurance argument research should be the province of the psychology/philosophy department. Presentation to the Safety Certification Consortium (SCC) Meeting, May 2018.
• P. J. Graydon and C. M. Holloway. An investigation of proposed techniques for quantifying confidence in assurance arguments. Safety Science, 92:53–65, February 2017. doi:10.1016/j.ssci.2016.09.
• P. J. Graydon and C. M. Holloway. An investigation of proposed techniques for quantifying confidence in assurance arguments. Technical Memorandum NASA/TM-2016-219195, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Hampton, VA, USA, May 2016. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20160006526.
• P. J. Graydon. Defining Baconian Probability for use in assurance argumentation. Technical Memorandum NASA/TM-2016-219341, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Hampton, VA, USA, October 2016. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20160013333.
• P. J. Graydon and C. M. Holloway. “Evidence” under a magnifying glass: Thoughts on safety argument epistemology. In Proceedings of the IET System Safety and Cyber Security Conference, pages 6–11, Bristol, UK, October 2015. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20160006505.
• P. J. Graydon and C. M. Holloway. Planning the unplanned experiment: Assessing the efficacy of standards for safety critical software. Technical Memorandum NASA/TM-2015-218804, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA, September 2015. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150018918.
• P. J. Graydon. Formal assurance arguments: A solution in search of a problem? In Proceedings of the 45th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, June 2015. URL: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20160006364.
• P. J. Graydon. Towards a clearer understanding of context and its role in assurance argument confidence. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security (SAFECOMP), pages 139–154, Florence, Italy, September 2014. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-10506-2_10.
• P. Graydon and J. Knight. Software process synthesis in assurance based development of dependable systems. In Proceedings of the 8th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC), pages 75–84, Valencia, Spain, April 2010. doi:10.1109/EDCC.2010.19.
• P. J. Graydon, J. C. Knight, and E. A. Strunk. Assurance based development of critical systems. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pages 347–357, Edinburgh, UK, June 2007.