CARI 2026 - 18th African Conference on Research in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics

CARI 2026, the 18th African Conference on Research in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, returns to West Africa at the University of Abomey-Calavi near Cotonou, Benin, from 21 to 24 October 2026. CARI is the flagship scientific event of the African Society in Digital Science (ASDS) and has been organised every two years since its first edition in Yaounde in 1992, making it one of the longest-running research conferences rooted on the continent. Its proceedings have historically appeared with Springer.

The conference is built around two main tracks — Computer Science and Applied Mathematics — that meet squarely on artificial intelligence. Listed topics include artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science alongside algorithms and optimisation, distributed systems, cloud computing, networking and security on the computing side, and the analysis of dynamical systems, partial differential equations, high-performance scientific computing and mathematical modelling on the mathematics side. This pairing is deliberate: much of the current wave of applied AI in Africa — from epidemiological forecasting to crop-disease detection — sits at exactly the intersection of statistical learning and mathematical modelling that CARI has convened for three decades.

CARI 2026 explicitly welcomes applied research addressing African contexts and challenges, with application domains spanning agriculture, healthcare, education, environmental systems, transportation and logistics. That framing matters for a region where AI deployment is constrained less by model availability than by data scarcity, infrastructure and locally relevant problem definitions; the conference is one of the few venues where African PhD students and faculty present this work to an international peer audience. The local organising effort is connected to Inria's EPITAG project team (epidemiological modelling and control for tropical agriculture), reflecting the conference's strong modelling-for-development orientation.

The programme features keynote talks, peer-reviewed technical sessions, poster presentations and panel discussions, preceded by a day of workshops and tutorials on 22 October 2026. For researchers and graduate students working on AI, machine learning and computational mathematics across francophone and anglophone Africa, CARI 2026 is a primary publication and networking venue. Registration is required; sessions run primarily in French with English contributions accepted. Verify the latest dates, call-for-papers deadlines and venue details on the official conference site before travelling.