IDA 2026 PhD Forum

Call for papers
Leiden (Netherlands) April 22-24, 2026 (Wednesday – Friday)

https://ida2026.liacs.nl/

IDA is organizing the 2026 edition of the PhD Forum, aimed at PhD students.

This mentoring program aims to connect PhD students with senior scientists who share their experience to help advance the students’ research and academic careers. Meetings will be arranged during the conference to allow discussion between the students and mentors.

Objectives

The objectives of the PhD Forum are:

• to provide doctoral researchers with the opportunity to present their ongoing work and receive constructive feedback from experienced researchers (e.g., IDA Senior Program Committee members),

• to facilitate the establishment of contacts with research teams working in related areas,

• to provide insights into current research trends related to the students' research topics, thereby expanding the scope of their knowledge.

Submission

The PhD Forum welcomes original research in the field of Intelligent Data Analysis conducted by early-career researchers. Papers will be evaluated based on their relevance to the conference themes and the ability of the student to present:

• the research problem and why it is important to address it,

• the research objectives and questions,

• the planned approach and methods to tackle the problem,

• an outline of the current state of knowledge on the research problem,

• the expected outcomes of the research, such as overviews, algorithms, improved understanding of a concept, a pilot study, a model, or a system.

Short papers (2 pages, including references) must follow the general template provided by the IDA conference (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines).

Submissions will be handled through CMT:  https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IDA2026/

(Authors are requested to ensure that they select the IDA2026-PhDTrack).

The authors of accepted presentations will be required to prepare a poster and a presentation. The poster will serve as a basis for discussions during the conference, while the presentation will be used in the mentorship program. Authors of accepted presentations must register in order to participate in the mentorship program. All presentations and interactions will take place in person.

Reduced registration fees are available for students:

Early registration (Deadline: March 16): 249.00 € / Late registration: 399.00 €

The registration fees include:

• All sessions

• Coffee breaks

• Lunches

• Social events: opening reception, traditional social event.

Important dates

• Two-page paper submission deadline: February 23, 2026 AOE (Monday)

• Notification to authors: March 2, 2026 (Monday)

• Registration (for accepted submissions): March 16, 2026 (Monday)

• Conference dates:  April 22-24 2026

Contact

Christine Sinoquet – IDA 2026 PhD Forum Chair

Bracing for the Enshittification of Embodied AI and Robotics

New Keynote Speakers: Prof. Maja Matarić and Andra Keay!

Now Seeking Panel & Poster Submissions!

AAAI 2026 Spring Symposium: https://aaai.org/conference/spring-symposia/sss26 

• When: April 7-9, 2026

• Where: Hyatt Regency, San Francisco Airport, Burlingame, CA, USA

• Web: https://sites.google.com/view/bracing-for-enshittification

Panels & Posters:

We are seeking presenters to serve on panels and give poster presentations. To express your interest in being a panelist or poster presenter, please fill out this Google Form by Wednesday, February 25, AoE (Anywhere on Earth). You will need to provide your contact information, the title of your poster or short panel talk, and an abstract. You do not need to be a paper author to present on a panel or at a poster session. Panels will start with short talks introducing the thoughts of each panelist then a longer Q&A session.

Interest Form: https://forms.gle/Dv92KcaLgQxk36Nb7 

Keynote Speakers:

• Maja Matarić, Professor, University of Southern California

• Andra Keay, Founder and Managing Director, Silicon Valley Robotics

Additional speakers will be announced closer to the date of the symposium.

Please find the full CFP below:

Overview:

In November 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to viscerally describe the process by which two-sided marketplaces (i.e., platforms that connect buyers and sellers)  have tended to degrade over the past decades, leading users on both sides of the market to experience a worse product. In its most basic form, enshittification describes the intentional decline of platform quality over time. Robots intended for home consumer use are often social in nature and use social interaction and relationship norms to keep users engaged. Turning such robots into two-sided market platforms, where users and advertisers both become targets of monetization, poses unique and significant risks. Unlike static smart or connected devices, social robots actively engage users via gaze, gesture, language, and dialog, which makes them uniquely persuasive forms of technology. This raises unique potential risks related to deception and manipulation of end-users. This symposium will not focus on enumerating potential negative outcomes; instead, we will use these examples to motivate and support methods that AI researchers in particular can use to address enshittification before it takes over the embodied AI and robotics fields.

Organizers:

• Paul Robinette (UMass Lowell)

• Alan Wagner (Penn State University)

• Ross Mead (Semio)

• Samantha Reig (UMass Lowell)

Topics:

Potential topics include but are not limited to: 

• Case studies of dual-sided AI deployments

• Privacy-aware AI

• Ensuring trustworthy behavior of AI systems

• AI Ethics/Responsible Computing

• Discussion of societal impacts of robots that enshittify.

• Consideration of the inequities caused by devices that advertise relentlessly.

• Discussion of a research agenda to anticipate and prevent the enshittification of robots that provide services (e.g., in public, in homes).

• Affective manipulation by consumer products and AI driven technologies

Format:

The symposium will combine invited talks, panels, lightning talks, poster sessions, discussion sessions, and working sessions. Attendance is open to all who are interested. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to attend. 

Papers:

Submissions should be to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sss26 by February 13, 2026. Papers should be 2–4 pages in length and use the two-column AAAI format. Selected papers will be asked to present as a lightning talk, panel discussion, and/or poster. Check the website for more information.

Paper Submission Deadline: Feb 13, 2026 (EXTENDED)

Paper Submission Site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sss26

More Information:

Please direct questions to enshittification2026aaai@gmail.com.

Symposium website: https://sites.google.com/view/bracing-for-enshittification

–

The Organizing Committee

* Paul Robinette (UMass Lowell)

* Alan Wagner (Penn State University)

* Ross Mead (Semio)

* Samantha Reig (UMass Lowell)

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    Call for Papers

    38th EUROMICRO Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 26)

    July 7-10, 2026 | Lund, Sweden | www.ecrts.org

    Submission deadline: February 26, 2026 (23:59AoE)

    Submission website: https://ecrts26.hotcrp.com/

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ECRTS is the premier European venue in the area of real-time systems and, alongside RTSS and RTAS, ranks as one of the top three international conferences on this topic. ECRTS has a rich history, with the first edition held in 1989 and this year’s edition being the 38th run of this annual event. As in previous editions, ECRTS attracts researchers from both academia and industry whose work tackles foundational and practical challenges at the intersection of real-time scheduling, time-critical systems, real-time operating systems, hardware/software co-design, security in time-sensitive systems, real-time networking, AI and machine learning methods for real-time systems, and more. 

ECRTS 2026 will be held as a physical conference on July 7-10, 2026 in Lund, Sweden

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    IMPORTANT DATES (All Deadlines are AoE)

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Submission Deadline:             Thursday, February 26, 2026

Notification of Acceptance:     Monday, April 20, 2026

Camera-ready Deadline:        Tuesday, May 05, 2026

Conference:                            July 7–10, 2026

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    SCOPE AND TOPICS OF INTEREST

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Papers on all aspects of timing requirements in computer systems are welcome. Systems of interest include not only hard real-time systems but also time-sensitive systems in general (e.g., systems with soft requirements expressed in terms of tail latency, latency SLAs, QoS expectations, etc.). Typical applications are found not only in classical embedded and cyber-physical systems, but also increasingly in cloud or edge computing contexts and often stem from domains such as automotive, avionics, telecommunications, healthcare, robotics, and space systems, among others.

To be in scope, papers must address some form of timing requirement, broadly construed. Prospective first-time authors are encouraged to familiarize themselves with works accepted in past editions of the conference, which are publicly available at  drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/conference/ECRTS

NEW FOR 2026: TWO TRACKS

ECRTS welcomes both theoretical and practical contributions (including tools, benchmarks, and case studies) to the state of the art in the design, implementation, verification, and validation of time-sensitive systems:

1. Foundations & Theory track: This track welcomes contributions advancing the theory, methodology, and formal analysis of real-time and time-sensitive systems.

2. Practical Systems & Tools track: This track highlights tools, implementations, and real-world experience, including tools supporting analysis, scheduling, or design of time-sensitive systems, implementations and prototypes, industrial case studies and lessons learned from real deployments.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– all elements of time-sensitive  SOFTWARE SYSTEMS, including operating systems, hypervisors, middlewares and frameworks, programming languages and compilers, runtime environments, networks and communication protocols, etc.;

– COMPUTER HARDWARE design and hardware/software integration for embedded systems, including time-predictable hardware architecture, GPU and accelerators, FPGA prototyping, SoC design, novel memory architectures, hardware/software co-design, etc.;

– REAL-TIME NETWORKS: including wired and wireless sensor and actuator networks, Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN), industrial IoT, Software Defined Network (SDN), 5G, end-to-end latency analysis, etc.;

– REAL-TIME APPLICATIONS, including modeling, design, simulation, testing, debugging, and evaluation in domains such as automotive, avionics, control systems, industrial automation, robotics, space, railways telecommunications, multimedia, etc.;

– foundational SCHEDULING and PREDICTABILITY questions, including schedulability analysis, algorithm design, synchronization protocols, computational complexity, temporal isolation, probabilistic guarantees, multi-core scheduling, resource co-scheduling, etc.;

– static and dynamic techniques for RESOURCE DEMAND ESTIMATION, including stochastic and classic worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis, analyses to bound memory and bandwidth needs, and methods for determining the energy, power, or thermal footprint of real-time applications, etc.;

– MACHINE LEARNING techniques in safety-critical systems, including explainable AI, the application of machine learning to the design and optimization of real-time systems, methods for real-time AI computing, etc.;

– FORMAL METHODS for the verification and validation of real-time systems, including model checking, computer-assisted proofs, and runtime monitoring systems, etc.;

– SECURITY aspects of real-time systems, including techniques to strengthen security guarantees, concerns that affect the operation of safety-critical systems, privacy-enhancing techniques, methodologies to protect the temporal envelope of critical software against malicious threats, etc.;

– the interplay of timing predictability and other NON-FUNCTIONAL QUALITIES such as reliability, quality of control, energy/power consumption, environmental impact, testability, scalability, etc.

The above list of topics is intended only as a coarse summary of recent proceedings and should not be understood as an exclusive list of interests. On the contrary, papers breaking new ground, departing from established subfields, or challenging the status quo are most welcome and highly encouraged.

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    OPEN ACCESS

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The ECRTS organizers and community strongly believe that a conference best serves the research community and the public when results are accessible to the largest audience without restrictions. In line with this belief, all accepted papers will be published again this year as open-access proceedings in collaboration with LIPIcs (Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics). Once published, the proceedings of ECRTS 2026 will be publicly accessible at drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/conference/ECRTS where the previous proceedings since 2017 are available.

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    PAPER SUBMISSION

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Submitted manuscripts are limited to 20 pages of technical content, excluding the bibliography. Every accepted paper must be presented by one of the authors at the conference.

ECRTS papers follow the Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics paper template. You can download the LIPIcs template and see the typesetting instructions here: https://submission.dagstuhl.de/series/details/5#author

To submit a paper to ECRTS, please carefully review and follow the submission instructions and guidelines: https://www.ecrts.org/submission-instructions/

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    DOUBLE-BLIND PEER REVIEWING

===============================================================

In the interest of maximizing fairness and the meritocratic nature of the evaluation process, ECRTS will follow a double-blind peer reviewing process. Authors will submit blinded manuscripts (that do not reveal author identity or affiliation), and reviewers will not be made aware of author identities.

See the double-blind submission policy for more details: https://www.ecrts.org/double-blind-submission/

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    ARTIFACT EVALUATION

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To improve the results' reproducibility and encourage reuse, authors of accepted papers with a computational component will be invited to submit their code and/or their data to an optional artifact evaluation process: https://www.ecrts.org/artifact-evaluation/

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    LEARN MORE

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To receive more information about ECRTS, please subscribe to the ecrts-info mailing list at: https://www.ecrts.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ecrts-info

You can also follow the official ECRTS announcements on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/euromicro-conference-on-real-time-systems/  or on Instagram at instagram.com/ecrts_conference/