PAAISS 2026: Pan-African/Caribbean AI and Smart Systems Conference, Kingston

PAAISS 2026 is the 5th edition of the Pan-African/Caribbean Artificial Intelligence and Smart Systems Conference, held at the University of Technology in Kingston, Jamaica from 14-16 October 2026 as a hybrid event. It is a direct AI conference rather than a general-tech gathering, and it is unusual in deliberately bridging African and Caribbean AI communities.

The call for papers spans generative AI and large language models, agentic systems, edge AI and TinyML, MLOps, quantum machine learning, and AI ethics and governance, alongside applied themes such as climate and disaster management, healthcare, agriculture and tourism. A co-located African Natural Language Processing (ANLP) Symposium works toward a common foundation for African native-language processing. Award categories recognise the best papers on AI applications to Caribbean and African problems.

For attendees, the island setting is part of the value: it frames AI around the concrete constraints of small developing economies rather than generic model hype, and it offers a networking route into a research community that mainland conferences rarely surface. Key dates: paper submission 15 June 2026, notification 30 August 2026, camera-ready 20 September 2026.