IJCAI-ECAI 2026

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 is the joint edition of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the European Conference on AI — together the most prominent general AI research conference outside the machine-learning “big three.” Where NeurIPS and ICML centre on learning, IJCAI-ECAI spans the whole discipline, and its 2026 programme reflects how broad modern AI has become.

On the programme

Tracks cover machine learning alongside knowledge representation and reasoning, planning and search, multi-agent systems, constraint satisfaction, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, and AI ethics and societal impact. The format pairs the main technical programme with tutorials, workshops, a demos track, and invited talks — and IJCAI's longstanding emphasis on reasoning and agents gives it a distinctive angle on the moment.

Where it sits in today's AI

That angle matters in 2026, because the hottest direction in applied AI — agentic systems that plan, reason and coordinate — is exactly the territory IJCAI has cultivated for decades. As large language models are wired into tool-using agents and multi-agent workflows, the conference's classical strengths in planning, multi-agent coordination and knowledge representation are being rediscovered and fused with deep learning. The result is a venue where symbolic and neural approaches meet, and where questions of trustworthy, explainable and governable AI get serious technical treatment rather than slogans. It draws academics, students and a growing contingent of industry researchers building the next layer of autonomous systems.