IJCAI 2026: Dates, Speakers, Program & Registration Guide

TL;DR: IJCAI 2026, formally IJCAI-ECAI 2026, is the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held jointly with the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in Bremen, Germany, from August 15 to 21, 2026. Workshops and tutorials run August 15-17 on the University of Bremen campus, followed by the main technical program (990 accepted papers, three named award talks, and a free public AI lecture) August 18-21 at the Congress Centrum Bremen. This guide covers the verified dates, who is speaking, what the program actually contains, and what registration honestly costs.

Most AI conference guides you find online are written by content farms that never checked the source. One site I found while researching this piece claimed IJCAI 2026 workshops run in August at a venue that doesn’t match anything on the official schedule. That’s the kind of sloppiness that gets a PhD student booking the wrong flight.

I track AI events and conferences the same way I track AI tool deals: by checking primary sources before writing a word. For IJCAI-ECAI 2026 that meant cross-referencing the official conference site’s own venue and program pages against the University of Bremen’s press materials and the award announcements themselves, not a scraped summary of a summary.

This is not a trade-show style AI summit with vendor booths and lead-gen swag. IJCAI-ECAI is a peer-reviewed academic research conference, the kind where getting a paper accepted matters more than any badge scan. If you’re a researcher, PhD student, or applied ML engineer weighing whether this is worth the trip to Bremen, here’s what the conference actually offers, what it costs, and where the public information runs out.

Key Takeaways

• One week, two venues. IJCAI-ECAI 2026 runs August 15-21, 2026, in Bremen, Germany, split between workshops and tutorials (August 15-17, University of Bremen campus) and the main conference (August 18-21, Congress Centrum Bremen).
• This is a big research year. The program includes 990 accepted papers across all tracks, with 713 in the Main Track alone, plus special tracks in AI and Health, AI and Robotics, AI for Social Good, AI4Tech, and Human-Centred AI.
• Three named award talks, not vague “TBA keynotes.” Nicholas R. Jennings, David C. Parkes, and Jiajun Wu are confirmed to deliver the conference’s major award lectures, all verifiable against official award announcements.
• There’s a free public lecture, too. Professor Toby Walsh delivers the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 AI Lecture, a free, general-public talk on the societal implications of AI, opened by the University of Bremen’s president.
• Registration pricing is only partly public. IJCAI-ECAI 2026 publishes its registration deadlines, member discounts, and add-on ticket costs openly, but the actual base delegate fee amounts only appear inside the registration portal itself, not on the indexed pages.

An academic AI conference earns its ticket price with peer-reviewed research and named award talks, not with a bigger expo floor. IJCAI-ECAI 2026 is judged on the papers, not the swag.

What Is IJCAI-ECAI 2026?

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 is the 35th edition of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held jointly with the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), the flagship event of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). It runs August 15-21, 2026, in Bremen, Germany, at two connected venues: the University of Bremen campus for workshops and tutorials, then the Congress Centrum Bremen for the main technical program.

IJCAI is one of the oldest and most selective general AI research conferences in the world, alongside NeurIPS and AAAI. Joining forces with ECAI for this edition means the program pulls from both the global IJCAI community and Europe’s AI research base, which explains the scale: 990 accepted papers this year, with 713 landing in the Main Track and the remaining 277 spread across special tracks covering AI and Health, AI and Robotics, AI for Social Good, AI4Tech, Human-Centred AI, a Survey Track, Demonstrations, a Journal Track, Sister Conferences Best Papers, and an Early Career Spotlight, according to the official IJCAI-ECAI 2026 site.

Every accepted paper gets both an oral talk and a poster session, which matters if you’re deciding how to spend four days in a room with hundreds of parallel sessions. The posters are where most of the actual hallway-conversation value happens at a conference this size.

Unlike commercial AI summits built around product launches, IJCAI-ECAI’s entire structure exists to peer-review and present original research. There’s no vendor keynote slot to sit through. The tradeoff: it’s a denser, more technical event, and it assumes you already know why you’re there.

When and Where Is IJCAI-ECAI 2026?

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 takes place August 15-21, 2026, in Bremen, Germany, in two phases at two venues. Workshops and tutorials run August 15-17 on the University of Bremen campus, and the main conference, including the accepted-paper sessions and award talks, runs August 18-21 at the Congress Centrum Bremen (CCB), a central conference venue in the city. Bremen was officially confirmed as host city well ahead of the event, giving the local research community time to build outreach programming around it.

Bremen has its own airport with connections through major European hubs, and it sits on Germany’s ICE high-speed rail network, so travelers routing through Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or another European gateway can reach the city without a complicated last leg.

The two-phase structure is worth planning around directly. If your budget or calendar only allows part of the week, workshops and tutorials on their own can be a legitimate reason to travel, since that’s where a lot of subfield-specific and hands-on content lives, separate from the main track’s paper sessions.

Quick facts:

Detail	Information
Event	IJCAI-ECAI 2026 (35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)
Dates	August 15-21, 2026
Workshops & tutorials	August 15-17, University of Bremen campus
Main conference	August 18-21, Congress Centrum Bremen (CCB)
Location	Bremen, Germany
Accepted papers	990 total (713 Main Track, 277 across special tracks)
Award talks	Nicholas R. Jennings, David C. Parkes, Jiajun Wu
Public lecture	Prof. Toby Walsh, free IJCAI-ECAI 2026 AI Lecture
Official site	2026.ijcai.org

Who Should Attend IJCAI-ECAI 2026?

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 is built for people doing original AI research, not enterprise buyers evaluating software. The core audience is AI and machine learning researchers, PhD students, postdocs, and applied ML engineers whose work touches the paper tracks on offer, from multi-agent systems and robotics to AI and health.

You’ll get real value here if you fit one of these profiles:

• PhD students and postdocs presenting or co-authoring a paper in the Main Track or a special track, where the poster session is often more useful for feedback than the oral slot.
• Applied ML engineers at research-forward companies who want direct exposure to work several years ahead of what shows up in production, especially in the AI and Robotics and AI4Tech tracks.
• Early-career researchers who want to hear the award talks and understand where senior figures in the field think the discipline is actually heading, not where hype coverage says it’s heading.
• Workshop organizers and tutorial instructors using the August 15-17 window to run focused, subfield-specific sessions outside the pressure of the main track.
• Academics evaluating collaboration or funding opportunities across the joint IJCAI and ECAI research communities, since this edition pulls from both.

The honest caveat: if you’re looking for vendor demos, product comparisons, or a general “AI trends” business briefing, this isn’t that event. It’s a peer-reviewed research conference first, and the program reflects that.

If your grant funding only covers a few days away from your lab rather than the full week, one workable option is to skip the main conference and fly in only for the August 15-17 workshop and tutorial window, where subfield-specific workshops run and you can get direct feedback on a paper still in progress. If a colleague or advisor makes the trip separately for the main track, to present a joint accepted paper and sit in on the award talks, splitting the week that way lets a lab cover both ends of the conference without doubling the travel budget.

Speakers and Award Talks at IJCAI-ECAI 2026

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 does not run a commercial-style keynote stage. Instead, its major talks are tied to named research awards, which is a meaningfully different (and more verifiable) format than an unnamed “industry keynote.”

Three award recipients are confirmed to deliver talks at the main conference:

• Nicholas R. Jennings, Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University, UK, receives the 2026 Award for Research Excellence for his contributions to multi-agent systems and agentic AI. His talk, “The Past, Present and Future of Agentic AI,” places the current agentic AI wave inside a much longer research history.
• David C. Parkes, John A. Paulson Dean and George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, receives the 2026 John McCarthy Award, confirmed by Harvard’s own announcement, for foundational work at the interface of AI and economics. His talk is titled “From Intelligent Agents to Agent Societies.”
• Jiajun Wu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Stanford University, receives the Computers and Thought Award for contributions across computer vision, generative AI, and robotics.

Separately, the conference runs a free public program: the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 AI Lecture, delivered by Professor Toby Walsh, one of the most publicly recognized AI researchers working today. The lecture is aimed at the general public rather than the research audience, covering the opportunities, limits, and societal implications of AI, and opens with remarks from the University of Bremen’s president. Admission is free, though registration is required.

If you’re deciding whether the trip is worth it purely for the speaker lineup, the honest answer is: this isn’t a lineup built to impress on a conference brochure. It’s built to reward people who already follow the specific research these award winners represent.

What Does the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Program Cover?

The IJCAI-ECAI 2026 program spans 990 accepted papers, split between 713 in the Main Track and 277 across special tracks, plus Demonstrations, a Journal Track, Sister Conferences Best Papers, and an Early Career Spotlight. Every paper gets both an oral talk and a poster session, so the schedule is genuinely dense across parallel rooms.

The special tracks give a clear read on where the field’s institutional attention is right now: AI and Health (AI methods for healthcare, biomedicine, and population health, explicitly pushing beyond straightforward applications), AI and Robotics (foundational AI for robot agents, at the intersection of generative AI and structured reasoning), AI for Social Good, AI4Tech (AI enabling critical technologies), and Human-Centred AI (the social, cultural, and ethico-legal dimensions of AI development alongside the technical ones). A Survey Track collects synthesis papers rather than only novel results, useful if you want a state-of-the-field primer on a subarea rather than one narrow result.

Workshops and tutorials run first, August 15-17, ahead of the main track. That ordering matters practically: it gives attendees a chance to go deep on a specific subfield or tool before the broader main-track sessions start, rather than bolting workshops onto the end of an already packed week.

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Registration: What’s Actually Public

Registration for IJCAI-ECAI 2026 runs on a three-tier schedule: early registration (May 15 to June 15, 2026, 23:59 Anywhere on Earth), late registration (June 16 to July 15, 2026, 23:59 AoE), and onsite registration (July 16 through August 21, 2026, noon CEST). If you’re reading this on or before July 15, 2026, late-registration pricing is still active for a few more hours; after that, rates shift to the onsite tier for the rest of the event.

Here’s the honest gap in the public information: IJCAI-ECAI 2026 does not publish its base delegate registration fee amounts, in dollars or euros, on the pages search engines can index. Those figures only appear once you start a registration inside the official registration system. What is confirmed publicly:

Category	What’s Confirmed
Member discount	IJCAI or EurAI members pay $50 USD less than the non-member fee on any main conference registration
Membership cost	$100 USD for 3 years (regular, discounted from $150) or $50 USD for 3 years (student, discounted from $75), purchasable during registration
Full delegate registration includes	Opening reception ticket, banquet ticket, free tutorials
Student registration includes	Opening reception ticket, student reception ticket, free tutorials
Banquet add-on (August 19)	$150 USD
Opening reception add-on (August 17)	$120 USD
Student reception add-on (August 20)	$90 USD
Payment method	Credit card only

Base delegate and student registration fee amounts were not published on generally accessible pages at the time of writing. Check the official registration page directly for the current numbers before budgeting.

One practical note that’s easy to miss: if the gap between the member and non-member fee is close to $100, buying a 3-year IJCAI or EurAI membership at registration can pay for itself in the same transaction, especially for anyone likely to attend again.

Discounts and Group Pricing

I did not find a stacking discount code, sponsorship arrangement, or reader-specific offer published anywhere for IJCAI-ECAI 2026, and I’m not going to invent one. The genuine savings mechanisms here are the ones listed above: register during the early or late window instead of onsite, and join IJCAI or EurAI as a member if you expect to attend again, since the $50 per-conference discount plus the discounted multi-year membership rate can offset the membership cost within one or two events.

There’s also a separate, unrelated fee worth flagging so you don’t confuse it with attendee registration: IJCAI’s Primary Paper Initiative charges authors $100 USD per non-primary paper submission, intended to fund reviewer compensation. That’s an author-side submission fee, not something attendees pay to walk in the door.

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Getting to Bremen: Visa Rules, Hotels, and the In-Person Requirement

Dates, speakers, and cost are only half the decision. For an international academic conference, the logistics are what actually decide whether you make it to Bremen, so here’s the practical travel side, verified against the official conference pages.

Do you need a visa for IJCAI-ECAI 2026?

It depends on your passport. EU nationals and citizens of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland can enter Germany on a national ID card for stays under three months. Nationals of Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and the USA also do not need a visa for stays of up to three months. Everyone else needs a Schengen visa, and the official visa page is specific about what that requires.

• A completed visa application form, valid passport, and a biometric passport photo
• Proof of health insurance valid in the Schengen area, plus travel insurance covering a minimum of €30,000
• Proof of financial means and proof of intention to return (e.g. an employment contract or certificate of enrollment)
• Outbound and return flight reservations and proof of accommodation
• An invitation letter to the conference, which is provided with your registration

The invitation letter is the one piece IJCAI controls directly: you request it inside the registration system by filling out the visa form under “Options” (you can only complete that form once, so have your passport ready), then download it. Questions go to the official visa information page and the visa-helpdesk email listed there. Honest warning: Schengen processing times can run into weeks, and with the conference roughly three weeks out from this writing, anyone who still needs a visa is already cutting it close.

Where to stay in Bremen

The most convenient option is the Maritim Hotel Bremen, which is directly connected to the Congress Centrum Bremen where the main conference runs, so you cannot get closer to the venue. Beyond that, several hotels sit within walking distance of Bremen Central Station, which puts you near the city centre and on the transport connections out to the conference venues. The official travelling page and the conference’s hotel-booking page list the current options and directions.

One rule that catches people out

There is no virtual or hybrid attendance. IJCAI-ECAI 2026 states plainly that if none of a paper’s authors can attend in Bremen to present, the paper is removed from the conference proceedings. If you have an accepted paper, someone physically has to be in the room. Two more things worth knowing while you budget: there is an Industry Day on Wednesday, August 19 (a US$150 add-on ticket), and student authors who cannot cover the cost can apply to the conference Grants program or the Volunteers’ program rather than absorbing the full fee. Confirm all of this on the official registration page before you commit travel money.

Is IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Worth It? My Honest Take

For active AI researchers, PhD students with an accepted paper, and applied ML engineers who want direct exposure to peer-reviewed work ahead of the trend cycle, IJCAI-ECAI 2026 is one of the strongest general AI research conferences on the calendar this year, purely on scale and selectivity: 990 accepted papers and named award talks from researchers at Loughborough, Harvard, and Stanford are not small claims.

The honest caveats are about fit, not quality. This is not a trade show. There’s no product floor, no vendor keynote, and the program assumes you already have a reason to be in a room full of specialists in your subfield. If you’re an enterprise buyer or a generalist looking for a broad “state of AI in business” briefing, you will not find that here, and a commercial AI summit will serve you better. And on cost: the base registration price isn’t public until you start the process, which makes it harder to budget confidently months in advance than a conference with a published price list.

Here’s my framing. Go if you have a paper accepted, a workshop presentation, or a specific research question the program directly addresses. The workshop-and-tutorial window (August 15-17) is a reasonable standalone trip if the full week doesn’t fit your calendar or budget. Skip it, or send a colleague instead, if you’re evaluating this purely as a networking or business-development event; that’s not what this conference is optimized for.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where is IJCAI-ECAI 2026?

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 runs August 15-21, 2026, in Bremen, Germany. Workshops and tutorials take place August 15-17 on the University of Bremen campus, and the main conference runs August 18-21 at the Congress Centrum Bremen.

What is the difference between IJCAI and ECAI?

IJCAI is the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, one of the oldest global AI research conferences. ECAI is the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, run by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). The 2026 edition combines both into a single joint conference in Bremen.

How much does it cost to attend IJCAI 2026?

The base delegate and student registration fee amounts are not published on publicly indexed pages; they appear inside the official registration system. What is confirmed: members save $50 USD versus non-members, 3-year membership costs $100 USD (regular) or $50 USD (student), and social event add-ons range from $90 to $150 USD. Check the official registration page for current base pricing.

Who is speaking at IJCAI-ECAI 2026?

The confirmed award talks are from Nicholas R. Jennings (2026 Award for Research Excellence), David C. Parkes (2026 John McCarthy Award), and Jiajun Wu (Computers and Thought Award). Professor Toby Walsh delivers a separate, free public lecture on AI’s societal implications.

How many papers were accepted to IJCAI-ECAI 2026?

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 accepted 990 papers across all tracks: 713 in the Main Track and 277 spread across special tracks including AI and Health, AI and Robotics, AI for Social Good, AI4Tech, and Human-Centred AI, plus Demonstrations, the Journal Track, Sister Conferences Best Papers, and the Early Career Spotlight.

Is IJCAI-ECAI 2026 a good fit for PhD students?

Yes, if you have an accepted paper or a workshop presentation. The poster sessions attached to every accepted paper tend to deliver more direct feedback than the oral slots, and the August 15-17 workshop and tutorial window is a lower-cost way to attend if the full week isn’t feasible on a student budget.

The Bottom Line

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 is exactly what a flagship academic AI conference should be: dense with peer-reviewed research, backed by named award recipients whose work you can verify independently, and honest about the fact that it isn’t trying to be a trade show. Between the 990 accepted papers, the joint IJCAI-ECAI research base, and award talks from researchers at Loughborough, Harvard, and Stanford, this is a conference built for people who do the research, not people evaluating whether to buy something.

The one thing worth remembering before you book: the registration base fee isn’t public until you’re inside the system, so confirm the current price directly before you commit travel money, and if your budget or calendar is tight, the August 15-17 workshop and tutorial window is a legitimate way to attend part of the event without the full week’s cost.

Your next step for IJCAI 2026: check the official IJCAI-ECAI 2026 site for your specific registration category and current pricing, and confirm any paper or workshop deadlines directly against the program pages before you plan travel. While you’re at it, browse the AI tools I’ve tested for research and technical workflows if you want practical software to pair with whatever you bring back from Bremen.