Call for Papers
The 34th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS2026), the conference of the Artificial Intelligence Association of Ireland (AIAI), will be hosted in University College Dublin and supported by the Rinn AI Centre. The conference will take place in University College Dublin (UCD) from 15-16 October 2026. This year AICS2026 is recognized as an Associated Event of the Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2026, and will be held in parallel with the AI in Science Summit (AIS2026) also running in UCD. There will be a special Nectar Track poster session highlighting the best Irish AI and Cognitive Science research run in parallel with AIS2026. Alignment with AIS2026 requires a slightly accelerated review process.
With regular conferences dating back to 1988, the AICS has served as the premier platform for researchers in Ireland working in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and their applications. This year, we warmly invite and strongly encourage submissions from researchers worldwide, including those based outside of Ireland, to foster broader collaboration and knowledge exchange.
Topics
The Program Committee of AICS2026 invites both technical and experiential submissions in the broad areas of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Areas of interest include, but are not restricted to:
Technical Submissions
| Topic Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Symbolic AI and Knowledge Representation | Logic programming, reasoning, knowledge bases, ontologies, etc. |
| Machine Learning | Deep learning, neural networks, reinforcement learning, etc. |
| Machine Learning Testing | Safety, evaluation metrics, robustness etc. |
| Learning Theory | Optimisation, Bayesian Methods, Game Theory, Complexity Analysis etc. |
| Semantic Web | Knowledge Graphs, Social Network Analysis etc. |
| Applications | Computer Vision, speech/audio processing, natural language processing, ML for medicine, recommender systems etc. |
Application-focused Submissions
| Topic Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Applications of AI | Examples and experiences of using AI to solve real-world challenges |
| AI in Practice | Case studies detailing the deployment, integration, and operationalisation of AI systems |
| Responsible and Ethical AI Deployment | Fairness, transparency, accountability, and compliance |
| AI for Social Good | Addressing societal challenges, including low-resource settings, inclusion |
| Scalable and Sustainable AI Solutions | Scalable, energy-efficient, and maintainable in production |
| AI in Science | AI techniques designed to support the scientific process or to AI for specific scientific fields |
Important Dates
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Submission Date Full/Student Paper Track (EXTENDED) | |
| Submission Date NECTAR Track (EXTENDED) | |
| Acceptance Notification | 26 September 2026 |
| Final Paper Deadline | 8th November 2026 (after AICS2026) |
Organisation Committee
General Co-Chairs
Courtney Ford
University College Dublin
Giulio Gabrieli
Technological University Dublin
Brian Mac Namee
University College Dublin
Changhong Jin
University College Dublin
Location
AICS will take place in the O'Connor Centre for Learning, located in University College Dublin. Details about the room will follow soon.
Programme
The preliminary programme is available below. You can alternatively download the preliminary programme in PDF.
Day 1 - October 15, 2026
| Time | Event / Paper Details |
|---|---|
| Registration and Opening | |
| 09:00 - 10:00 | Welcome and Coffee |
| 10:00 - 10:15 | Opening |
| Session 1: Privacy, Security and Robustness [Student papers] | Chair: TBD | |
| 10:15 - 10:25 | When Adaptive Clipping Fails to Transfer: Adaptive Hyperparameter Optimisation for Differentially Private Vertical Federated Learning Dionysios Stolis and Ruairi O Reilly |
| 10:25 - 10:35 | In-Context Co-Evolution of Adversarial LLM Agents for Zero-Day Malware Detection on Windows Endpoints Julien Jessmon |
| 10:35 - 10:45 | Multi-Branch Deep Learning Framework for Real-Time QUIC Traffic Classification Parth Khajgiwale and Dr. Jawad Manzoor |
| 10:45 - 10:55 | Measuring and Balancing Utility, Fairness and Privacy in Synthetic Healthcare Data Generation Pradyumna Shee, Muhammad Asad, Ayushi Kashyap, Bairbre A. McNicholas and Michael G. Madden |
| 10:55 - 11:10 | Crop Disease Detection Under Realistic Environmental Distortions Using Synthetic Water Droplet Augmentation Aarti Bandgar and Priyanka Verma |
| Coffee Break | |
| 11:10 - 11:40 | Coffee Break |
| Session 2: Applications [Non-student papers] | Chair: TBD | |
| 11:40 - 11:55 | Observation-Calibrated Downscaling of Regional Particulate Matter Forecasts Qizhi Wang, Arun Sampath, Sen Yan, Emma Delemere, Shirley Coyle, David O'Connor and Mingming Liu |
| 11:55 - 12:10 | A Preliminary Investigation on Cross-Corpus and Cross-Lingual Evaluation of Acoustic Vocal Biomarkers for Cognitive Decline Detection Giulio Gabrieli, Damon Berry, Harish Kambampati, Patricia Lucha Farina, Emma Murphy, Jonathan Turner and Dympna O'Sullivan |
| 12:10 - 12:25 | Evaluating Auditory Transduction Features for Polyphonic Audio-to-Score Eoin Cummins, Cathal Ó Faoláin and Andrew Hines |
| 12:25 - 12:40 | costream: A Streaming Evaluation Protocol for Wearable Fall Detection Timilehin Aderinola, Ilaria D'Ascanio, Luca Palmerini, Lorenzo Chiari, Jochen Klenk, Clemens Becker, Brian Caulfield and Georgiana Ifrim |
| 12:40 - 12:55 | Context-Aware LLM Forecasting of Infant Chest X-Ray Share: Applying Context-is-Key to Clinical Time Series Prateek Mathur, Simon Clifford, Aonghus Lawlor and Brendan Kelly |
| Lunch | |
| 13:00 - 14:00 | Lunch |
| Session 3: Explainable AI and Fairness [Student papers] | Chair: TBD | |
| 14:00 - 14:10 | SHAP–LIME Explanation Concordance Across a Model Opacity Ladder Matthew Houston, Raymond Bond, Huiru Zheng and Jun Liu |
| 14:10 - 14:20 | What Subjective Ratings Miss: A Between-Subjects Study of Adaptive XAI in Credit Decisions Debora Sormin |
| 14:20 - 14:30 | A Model-Agnostic Pipeline for Systematic Fairness Evaluation and Mitigation in High-Stakes Decision Domains Shubin Li, Lamaan Kayum Shaikh and Tai Tan Mai |
| 14:30 - 14:40 | Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Face Generation for Ethnic Groups : A Fairness evaluation using soft-biometrics Sukrit Roy Chowdhury, Mark Daly and Niall Murray |
| 14:40 - 15:10 | DermaXplain: Evaluating Explainable AI Methods Against Clinically Structured Pseudo-Concepts in Skin Lesion Classification Thierry Beliere, Janavi Ravi and Suzanne Little |
| Coffee Break and Poster Session | |
| 15:10 - 16:10 | Poster Session |
| Keynote Lecture | |
| 16:10 - 17:30 | Nitesh Chawla, University of Notre Dame, and Georgiana Ifrim, University College Dublin |
| Dinner | |
| 17:30 - 19:00 | Reception [Details TBD] |
Day 2 - October 16, 2026
| Time | Event / Paper Details |
|---|---|
| Registration and Opening | |
| 09:00 - 09:15 | Opening |
| Session 1: Explainable AI and Cognition [Non-student] | Chair: TBD | |
| 09:15 - 09:30 | Evaluating Cross-Video Transfer in ECG-Based Affect Recognition Zachary Dair, Samantha Dockray and Ruairi O'Reilly |
| 09:30 - 09:45 | Relating Feature Complexity and Understanding in Machine Learning Nicola Rossberg, Barry O'Sullivan, Luca Longo and Andrea Visentin |
| 09:45 - 10:00 | EfficientNetV2S with XAI and LLM-Assisted Reporting for Eight-Class Retinal OCT Diagnosis Avinash Vadlamudi and Muhammad Salman Pathan |
| 10:00 - 10:15 | Temporal Dynamics and Latent-Space Interpretability of Generative EEG Microstate Segmentation Saheed Faremi, Andrea Visentin and Luca Longo |
| 10:15 - 10:35 | When Ensembles Beat Items: Conditional Aggregate Dominance in Ensemble Perception Joss Armstrong |
| Coffee Break | |
| 10:35 - 11:05 | Coffee Break |
| Session 2: Applications [Student] | Chair: TBD | |
| 11:05 - 11:15 | Investigating Controllable Synthetic Pathological Speech in English with Italian Cross-Lingual Analysis Kesego Mokgosi, Milad Dadgar, Cathy Ennis and Robert Ross |
| 11:15 - 11:25 | Domain Adaptation for Real-Time Traversability Estimation in Legged Robots Threvikram Janardhanan, Naveen Prakash Ramesh, Yanzhi Wang and Nazre Batool |
| 11:25 - 11:35 | Sparse, Dense, and Hybrid Retrieval for EU Climate Statutes: A Leakage-Controlled Evaluation Rameez Shafat Wani, Ananya Warior and Mohammed Amine Togou |
| 11:35 - 11:45 | Swarm Based Meta Heuristics for Multi Objective Route Optimisation in Micromobility Systems Ben Crane, Hemandh Babu Babu and Suzanne Little |
| 11:45 - 12:00 | On-Device Driving Style Classification Using Standardised OBD-II Parameters: A Novel Labelled Dataset and Machine Learning Evaluation Kristian Ratnikov and Frank Glavin |
| Lunch | |
| 12:00 - 13:00 | Lunch |
| Session 3: Trustworthy AI & AI Ethics [Non-student] | Chair: TBD | |
| 13:00 - 13:15 | Knowledge-Generated Test Suites for LLM Components: Specification-Derived Targets with Human-Certified Stimuli Gareth McConomy, Raymond Bond, David H. Glass, Jun Liu and Holly Toner |
| 13:15 - 13:30 | Fairness Robustness in Criminal Justice AI: A Decision Support Framework for Fairness-Aware Recidivism Risk Prediction Michael Mayowa Farayola, Malika Bendechache, Takfarinas Saber, Regina Connolly and Irina Tal |
| 13:30 - 13:45 | The Generative AI Conformity Card: A Self-Administered Assessment Tool for SMEs under the EU AI Act Ipek Edis and Alireza Dehghani |
| 13:45 - 14:00 | Privacy-Preserving Violence Detection with Compressed-Sensing Measurement Matrices Ashmaan Balan Shaikh, Arun Sankar, Oisin Cawley and Rejwanul Haque |
| 14:00 - 14:20 | Co-Designing an LLM-Based Child Grooming Signposting Agent: A Thematic Analysis of Professional Stakeholder Insights Lin Yuan Chong, Malik Awais Khan, Dylan Schouten, Matt Bowden and Christina Thorpe |
| AICS Closing and AIAI Steering Committee | |
| 14:20 - 14:35 | Closing Remarks |
| 14:35 - 14:50 | AIAI Steering Committee |