KDD 2026: Dates, Keynote Speakers, Registration & Who Should Go
August 9-13, 2026
TL;DR: KDD 2026, the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, runs August 9-13, 2026 at the International Convention Center Jeju (ICC Jeju) in Jeju, South Korea. Workshops and tutorials fill...
TL;DR: KDD 2026, the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, runs August 9-13, 2026 at the International Convention Center Jeju (ICC Jeju) in Jeju, South Korea. Workshops and tutorials fill August 9-10, and the main conference with keynotes, oral sessions, and poster receptions runs August 11-13. Confirmed keynote speakers are Jeff Dean of Google, Jingren Zhou of Alibaba, and Regina Barzilay of MIT. Full conference registration ranges from $500 (student, early bird) to $1,750 (non-member, onsite), all in USD.
I track software and AI conferences because the research and tooling debated on academic stages tends to show up in production AI systems a year or two later. Most events I cover are commercial summits with vendor booths and a sales pitch buried in every keynote. KDD is different. It is the flagship research conference of ACM SIGKDD, running continuously since 1995, and it is where a meaningful chunk of the data mining and machine learning techniques your team already uses first got published as peer-reviewed papers.
That distinction matters for how you read this guide. KDD is not built around discount codes and ticket tiers designed to convert casual attendees. It runs a Research Track, an Applied Data Science Track, a Datasets and Benchmarks Track, an AI for Sciences Track, and a Blue Sky Ideas Track, plus a real industry presence alongside the academic program. Below: confirmed dates and venue, the keynote lineup, what the program covers, who genuinely benefits from attending, and the full registration pricing breakdown, all pulled from the official KDD 2026 site.
If you only need the short version: this is a legitimate, high-signal event for data scientists, ML researchers, and applied industry teams working on knowledge discovery problems. It is not built for casual AI enthusiasts, and the price reflects that.
Key Takeaways
- Five days on Jeju Island. KDD 2026 runs August 9-13, 2026, at the International Convention Center Jeju, with workshops and tutorials on the first two days and the main conference across the final three.
- Three confirmed keynotes from genuinely heavyweight names. Jeff Dean (Google Chief Scientist), Jingren Zhou (Alibaba’s Chief AI Architect), and Regina Barzilay (MIT) headline the 2026 program.
- Five submission tracks, not one. The Research Track sits alongside Applied Data Science, Datasets and Benchmarks, AI for Sciences, and Blue Sky Ideas, reflecting how far knowledge discovery research has spread beyond pure academia.
- Pricing is tiered by membership and career stage, not by a marketing funnel. Early-bird full registration runs $500 for students up to $1,250 for non-members, with SIGKDD and partner-society members paying less.
- No discount code exists for this conference, and I am not going to pretend one does. KDD does not run affiliate or reader-discount programs the way commercial SaaS conferences do. What you see on the official registration page is what everyone pays.
A conference that has run continuously since 1995 and still pulls Google’s chief scientist onto the keynote stage does not need gimmicks to prove it matters.
What Is KDD 2026?
KDD 2026 is the latest edition of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, the flagship research event of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The first KDD conference took place in Montreal in 1995, and it has run every year since, making it one of the longest-standing continuous research conferences in computer science.
What separates KDD from a typical industry AI summit is the peer-review backbone. Papers accepted into the 2026 program went through the Research Track, the Applied Data Science (ADS) Track, the Datasets and Benchmarks Track, the AI for Sciences Track, or the Blue Sky Ideas Track, each judged by its own review committee. On top of the paper tracks, the conference solicits tutorials, workshop proposals, KDD Cup competition proposals, undergraduate and PhD consortium contributions, artifact badging submissions, and an open call for reviewers.
The 2026 edition also carries forward KDD’s award program, including the SIGKDD Innovation, Service, and Rising Star Awards, the Dissertation Award, the Test of Time Awards, and Student Travel Awards, a concrete funding path most commercial conferences do not offer.
This is not a trade-show floor pitching a SaaS subscription between sessions. It is a working research conference where the applied industry track exists because knowledge discovery research now ships in production systems faster than academia alone can keep up with.
When and Where Is KDD 2026?
KDD 2026 runs August 9-13, 2026, at the International Convention Center Jeju (ICC Jeju) on Jeju Island, South Korea. Workshops and tutorials fill the first two days, and the core conference program, including all three keynotes, runs Tuesday through Thursday.
Jeju is an island south of the Korean mainland, best known internationally as a resort destination rather than a conference hub, a notable departure from recent KDD host cities like Toronto (2025). Most international attendees will connect through Seoul’s Incheon International Airport to a short domestic flight into Jeju, though a smaller number of direct international routes into Jeju exist from other parts of Asia. The official KDD 2026 site links out to hotel, visa, and travel guidance for both cities, worth reading closely if you need a visa to enter South Korea.
Quick facts:
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Event | KDD 2026 (ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) |
| Dates | August 9-13, 2026 |
| Venue | International Convention Center Jeju (ICC Jeju), Jeju, South Korea |
| Format | In-person, workshops/tutorials Aug 9-10, main conference Aug 11-13 |
| Tracks | Research, Applied Data Science, Datasets and Benchmarks, AI for Sciences, Blue Sky Ideas |
| Keynotes | Jeff Dean (Google), Jingren Zhou (Alibaba), Regina Barzilay (MIT) |
| Official site | kdd2026.kdd.org |
Who Should Attend KDD 2026?
KDD 2026 is built for people who work directly with data mining, machine learning, and applied AI research, not for generalist marketers or executives chasing a trend briefing. The five submission tracks tell you exactly who the organizers are pitching this to: researchers and PhD students, applied scientists on industry data teams, and domain scientists at the intersection of AI and other fields.
You will get real value from KDD 2026 if you fit one of these profiles:
- PhD students and academic researchers in data mining, machine learning, or knowledge discovery who want to present work, attend the doctoral consortium, or compete for a Student Travel Award.
- Applied scientists and ML engineers at large tech and finance companies who want to see how peers at Google, Alibaba, and similar organizations ship knowledge discovery techniques into production.
- Data scientists on industry teams evaluating whether a technique from a Special Day track (Finance, Health, Education) has matured enough to bring back to their own stack.
- AI-for-science researchers working at the intersection of machine learning and another scientific domain, given the dedicated AI for Sciences Track and the recurring BIOKDD workshop.
- Anyone weighing a tutorial or workshop day who wants a structured, expert-led session on a specific subfield rather than a scattershot conference talk.
Here is the honest caveat. If you are not working directly in data mining, ML research, or applied data science, most Research Track content will be dense and assumes you can read a peer-reviewed paper without a glossary. This is not an entry-level “AI for beginners” event, and the price reflects a research-conference audience, not a consumer one.
If you are weighing whether to send your team, the deciding factor usually is not the keynotes. It is whether the Applied Data Science Track has accepted papers relevant to your specific problem, say graph-based fraud detection, since that track exists specifically for work with proven, deployed impact rather than pure novelty. One efficient approach is to send one engineer to present a submitted case study and budget a second seat for the relevant Special Day, such as the Finance Special Day, rather than paying for a full team to sit through Research Track sessions that would not directly apply to your work.
KDD 2026 Keynote Speakers and Program
The confirmed KDD 2026 keynote lineup includes three speakers working at the center of applied AI research right now. Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google, opens the conference Tuesday, August 11 on major trends in AI: how the field got here, what practitioners can do now, and what will matter next. Jingren Zhou, Senior Vice President and Chief AI Architect at Alibaba, speaks Wednesday, August 12 on the agentic data stack, covering how large language models are reshaping data engineering and orchestration. Regina Barzilay, a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor at MIT, delivers the closing keynote Thursday, August 13 on rethinking disease diagnosis and treatment with AI.
That lineup signals where KDD sees the field heading. A search-and-infrastructure keynote from Google, an agentic-AI keynote from Alibaba, and an AI-for-medicine keynote from MIT cover three very different applied surfaces, matching how broadly the five submission tracks already stretch the definition of “knowledge discovery.”
Beyond the keynote stage, the program includes peer-reviewed oral and poster sessions across all five tracks, in-depth tutorials led by domain experts, and workshops on specialized subfields. Confirmed 2026 workshops include the 12th Mining and Learning from Time Series workshop (MILETS) and the 25th International Workshop on Data Mining in Bioinformatics (BIOKDD), alongside newer workshops covering graph machine learning, enterprise AI agents, and scientific foundation models. The conference also runs a KDD Cup competition track and undergraduate and PhD consortium programs for students specifically.
What Does the KDD 2026 Agenda Cover?
The KDD 2026 schedule splits into two phases. Sunday, August 9 and Monday, August 10 are dedicated to workshops and tutorials, with Monday also hosting a Finance Special Day and the opening session and awards ceremony in the early evening. Tuesday, August 11 through Thursday, August 13 make up the main conference, each day opening with a keynote between 8:00 a.m. and roughly 9:30 a.m., followed by oral sessions, poster receptions, and additional Special Days covering Korea Day, Data Day, Health, Education, and Reasoning.
That Special Day structure matters more than it looks on a schedule grid. Rather than scattering industry-relevant content across the general program, KDD groups it into focused, single-topic days, so a data scientist who only cares about finance applications can build a schedule around the Finance Special Day and the overlapping Applied Data Science sessions, without wading through unrelated Research Track content.
The exhibit hall runs alongside the main conference with sponsor talks, and the program closes with an offsite excursion Thursday evening, worth noting if you are planning a return flight. Full session and track details, along with the accepted paper list, are published through the conference’s OpenReview pages.
KDD 2026 Registration Pricing
Registration for KDD 2026 is tiered by both timing and affiliation, and every price below comes directly from the official registration page. All prices are quoted in USD.
| Ticket Type | Non-Member | SIGKDD Member | SIGMOD/AAAI/ACM Member | Student |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early Bird (ends June 17, AoE) | $1,250 | $1,000 | $1,000 | $500 |
| Standard (ends August 8, AoE) | $1,500 | $1,250 | $1,250 | $600 |
| Onsite (from August 9) | $1,750 | $1,500 | $1,500 | $700 |
| One-Day (any registration type) | $600 | $600 | $600 | $600 |
Confirm current pricing directly on the official KDD 2026 registration page before booking, since research conference pricing can shift as deadlines approach.
A quick reality check on this pricing structure. The gap between the early-bird non-member rate ($1,250) and the onsite non-member rate ($1,750) is $500, a real incentive to register before June 17. Student pricing is genuinely accessible relative to commercial AI conferences: $500 early bird for a five-day research conference with a Google Chief Scientist keynote is a fair deal if your institution can cover it, especially paired with a Student Travel Award application. Membership in SIGKDD or a partner society (SIGMOD, AAAI, or general ACM membership) knocks $250 off every tier.
KDD 2026 Key Dates and Registration Deadlines
If you are landing here in the final weeks before the conference, the paper submission deadlines are already behind us. The Research, Applied Data Science, Datasets and Benchmarks, and AI for Sciences tracks all closed their early-2026 cycles months ago, so there is no paper to submit now. What still matters is the registration clock.
- Early-bird registration: ended June 17, 2026 (AoE).
- Standard registration: open now, ends August 8, 2026 (AoE) - this is the rate you lock in by registering before you fly.
- Onsite registration: begins August 9, 2026, at the top price tier.
- Conference dates: August 9-13, 2026, at ICC Jeju.
Registration is live through the conference’s official registration page. As of late July you are inside the standard window, so register before August 8 to avoid the onsite surcharge, which adds a flat $250 per tier over the standard rate. That is a real, avoidable cost, not a marketing scare tactic.
What Is the KDD Cup 2026?
The KDD Cup is the data-mining competition that runs alongside the main conference, and it is one reason practitioners who never submit a paper still show up. It has run since 1997, making it the longest-standing competition of its kind in the field. Each year’s KDD Cup runs for roughly three months in the lead-up to the conference, and winning teams are honored at the conference and present their solutions at a dedicated KDD Cup workshop.
For 2026, the competition was built from proposals submitted in February, opened around March 1, and notified its winners on July 15, 2026. Prize pools for recent KDD Cups have typically sat around $30,000 per organizing track. On the official schedule, KDD Cup sessions run Wednesday, August 12. For the specific 2026 challenge and final leaderboard, go to the official KDD 2026 site - I am not going to guess at standings before they are posted.
Where to Find the KDD 2026 Accepted Papers
This is one of the most-searched things about the event that the promotional pages bury: the accepted paper list. KDD 2026 publishes its accepted papers on the official Papers page, and the peer review ran through OpenReview. If you are deciding whether the program justifies a flight to Jeju, that list is the honest signal - read the titles in your own subfield before you read a single keynote bio.
Go straight to the official KDD 2026 Papers page for the full accepted-paper list rather than relying on secondhand roundups, which lag the official source by weeks and occasionally get the tracks wrong.
Getting to Jeju: Hotels, Visas, and Travel
One blunt logistics warning: the room-night blocks in all four official KDD 2026 conference hotels have already sold out. The organizers have published a list of additional nearby hotels, but you will pay regular rates, and Jeju books up in August because it is a domestic holiday destination as much as a conference host. Sort accommodation before anything else on your list.
On entry, most international attendees route through Seoul’s Incheon International Airport and connect to a short domestic flight into Jeju. Whether you need a visa or a K-ETA travel authorization depends on your nationality, and KDD runs a dedicated Visa Information and Jeju Travel page for exactly this. Sort your paperwork early, because Korean entry approval is not something to leave to the final week before travel.
Are There Discounts or Group Rates for KDD 2026?
No discount codes, referral programs, or group rates are published on the official KDD 2026 registration page as of this writing, and I am not going to invent one to make this guide look more useful than it is. The only real levers to lower cost are already built into the pricing structure: register before the June 17 early-bird deadline, hold or acquire a SIGKDD or partner-society membership, and apply for a Student Travel Award if you are a graduate student presenting work.
If your organization is sending more than one person, email registration@kdd.org directly to ask whether an informal group arrangement exists, since academic conferences often handle this case by case rather than publishing a formal group rate. Do not assume one exists until you get it in writing.
If you want to be alerted the next time a genuine discount or early-access window opens for an AI or data science event, subscribe for AI deal and event alerts and I will flag it when it is real.
Is KDD 2026 Worth It? My Honest Take
For working data scientists, ML researchers, and applied industry teams doing knowledge discovery work, KDD 2026 is one of the more legitimate research conferences you can attend this year, mainly because of the peer-review process behind everything on the program. A keynote lineup with Google’s Chief Scientist, Alibaba’s Chief AI Architect, and an MIT professor working on AI-driven disease diagnosis is not built with a marketing budget. It is built on 30-plus years of research credibility.
The honest caveats are about cost and fit, not quality. Full registration at $1,250 to $1,750 for non-members is a serious line item if your employer is not covering it, and Jeju is a genuinely inconvenient trip for most attendees outside East Asia, usually requiring a connection through Seoul. Neither is a flaw in the conference. They are simply reasons this event suits some teams better than others.
My buy-or-skip framing, the same one I apply to AI tools I test for technical teams: attend if you or your team have a paper, a case study, or a genuine research question that fits the Research Track, the Applied Data Science Track, or one of the Special Days. Send one person to scout if budget is tight and you want a read on where applied AI research is heading before committing more. Skip it if your interest in AI is general rather than research-grade. There are plenty of commercial AI events built for that audience, and KDD is not trying to be one of them.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where is KDD 2026?
KDD 2026 runs August 9-13, 2026, at the International Convention Center Jeju (ICC Jeju) in Jeju, South Korea. Workshops and tutorials run August 9-10, and the main conference with keynotes runs August 11-13.
How much does KDD 2026 registration cost?
Early-bird full conference registration (through June 17, AoE) ranges from $500 for students to $1,250 for non-members, with SIGKDD and partner-society members paying $1,000. Standard and onsite pricing rise from there, topping out at $1,750 for non-members registering onsite.
Who are the KDD 2026 keynote speakers?
Confirmed keynote speakers are Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google (Tuesday, August 11), Jingren Zhou, Chief AI Architect at Alibaba (Wednesday, August 12), and Regina Barzilay, a Distinguished Professor at MIT (Thursday, August 13, closing keynote).
Is there a KDD 2026 discount code?
No. KDD does not publish a discount code or referral program on its official registration page. The only real ways to reduce cost are registering before the early-bird deadline, holding a SIGKDD or partner-society membership, and applying for a Student Travel Award.
Is KDD good for industry practitioners or only academics?
Both. The Applied Data Science Track exists specifically for industry teams presenting deployed, real-world work, and Special Days on Finance, Health, and Education group industry-relevant sessions together, alongside the academic Research Track.
What tracks can I submit to at KDD 2026?
KDD 2026 accepts submissions across the Research Track, Applied Data Science (ADS) Track, Datasets and Benchmarks Track, AI for Sciences Track, and Blue Sky Ideas Track, plus tutorials, workshops, KDD Cup proposals, and undergraduate and PhD consortium contributions.
The Bottom Line
KDD 2026 is doing what a conference with 30-plus years of continuous history should do: bringing genuinely senior voices, Google’s Chief Scientist, Alibaba’s Chief AI Architect, and an MIT AI-for-medicine researcher, onto one stage, backed by peer review across five distinct submission tracks. This is not a conference built to upsell you at every turn. It has a real, growing industry track for teams shipping knowledge discovery work in production.
The insight worth taking with you: the Applied Data Science Track and the Special Days (Finance, Health, Education) are where industry practitioners get the most direct return, not the keynote stage alone. Anyone can watch a keynote recording later. The applied sessions built around your specific domain are the part worth flying to Jeju for.
Your concrete next step for KDD 2026: check the official KDD 2026 site, lock in the early-bird registration rate before June 17 if you are attending, and confirm whether a SIGKDD or partner-society membership saves you money. While you are researching the agentic-AI sessions on the program, browse the AI tools I have tested for technical teams so the applied AI talks land with more context once you are in the room.