Important Dates
Submission deadline: March 18, 2026 . We encourage proposers to submit early to give competition participants more time.
Notification: On a rolling basis within four weeks after you submit the proposal.
Competition sessions will be held on 15-21 August 2026.
(all times are 23:59 Anywhere On Earth, UTC-12)
Competitions and challenges have played a major role in the history of Artificial Intelligence. They motivate researchers to share knowledge with other researchers and the wider community, to enhance discussion with multidisciplinary fields inside and outside of Artificial Intelligence, and attract researchers to develop solutions to important Artificial Intelligence problems. Given this important role of competitions and challenges in Artificial Intelligence, we encourage the IJCAI community to propose challenging competitions with the goal of pushing the state-of-the-art in specific areas.
We invite proposals for Competitions and Challenges of IJCAI-ECAI 2026, the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Bremen, Germany, on 15–21 August 2026. Competitions and challenges can be on any topic of interest to the Artificial Intelligence community.
Proposal Submission
Each proposal must include the following information:
- Title of the competition
- The organizers’ names and email addresses (and optionally, websites).
- The overall goal of the challenge or competition and its relevance and significance to the AI community.
- If applicable, competition history including links to the previous editions of competition/challenge. If applicable, please also list similar competitions and how your competition differs from them.
- Timeline including expected release of Call for Participation, submission deadline and participant notification.
- Platforms and datasets to be used, any limitation on the computation resources per participant (e.g., whether participants run their code on their own machine or on a machine provided by the organizers) and evaluation criteria
- Whether the competition will be run online/in advance, or if you plan to run it live at IJCAI-ECAI.
- Brief summary of rules and guidelines for the competition/challenge.
- The number of expected teams and what kind of participants are expected (target group).
- If available, prizes and sponsorships for the competition.
- The expected duration of the competition/challenge and the resources needed (physical space, monitors, tables, chairs, electricity sockets and watts). The evaluation of the proposal will take into account the minimum requirements you provide. Once we accept the proposals we will allocate the resources as fairly as we can over all accepted competitions/challenges.
You may refer to the competitions accepted at IJCAI 2025. (https://2025.ijcai.org/competitions-and-challenges/) as examples.
One of the main goals of the competitions/challenges is to enable other researchers, and the society in general, to benefit from the competition/challenge. In particular, we expect the participants to share the source code of their participating systems.
Participation in the conference: At least one organiser of each accepted competition must participate in the conference in Bremen. We are looking forward to the community meeting in person.
Ethics policy and ethics statement: IJCAI is committed to the highest standards of research integrity. Submissions must adhere to fundamental ethical principles, including the responsible use of datasets (respecting privacy, copyright, and informed consent) and mitigating potential societal harms (such as risks to safety, and issues related to discrimination and bias). Organizers may include a statement of the potential broader impact of their competition, including its ethical aspects and future societal consequences. It is highly recommended for competitions working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks.
Consistent with the previous editions of the conference, IJCAI-ECAI 2026 will implement a streamlined ethics review policy. Reviewers will be asked to flag glaring violations of ethical principles. Such flagged submissions will be reviewed by the Ethics Chair. In rare situations, the Program Chair, advised by the Ethics Chair, reserves the right to reject a submission on ethical grounds. However, we anticipate that the primary approach to addressing ethical concerns will require competition organizers to revise their submissions to include a discussion that identifies these concerns and proposes strategies for their mitigation.
Proposals can include on the reference page, an ethics statement that addresses both ethical issues regarding the competition being conducted and the broader ethical impact of the competition. Note that such an ethics statement is not required, but we recommend that competitions working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks include such discussion.
Submission Process
Formatting guidelines: The updated LaTeX styles and Word template are available at https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit.
Submission Requirements
Proposal format: Proposals submitted to IJCAI-ECAI 2026 must be formatted according to the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 guidelines (link above). Organizers are required to submit their electronic proposals in PDF format. Submissions that violate the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 style (e.g., by decreasing margins or font sizes) will be rejected without review.
Proposals should be submitted at https://chairingtool.com/conferences/IJCAIECAI2026/competitions?role=author
Proposals must be submitted as PDF files (max two pages, excluding references) in the IJCAI format
Demo Paper at IJCAI 2027
Proposers of accepted competition/challenge proposals will be encouraged to submit a demo paper at IJCAI 2027 summarizing their experience at the 2026 conference.
Contact
The IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Competitions and Challenges Track chairs are:
- Reyhan Aydoğan, Özyeğin University, Türkiye
- Jochen Renz, Australian National University, Australia
Local coordinator: Felix Putze, Universität Bremen, Germany
Please send all inquiries to the chairs via: competitions@2026.ijcai.org.