ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems – ACM CAIS 2026

Registration has reached capacity. Join the waitlist

CAIS hotel room block & rates available until April 26 May 15

DoubleTree by Hilton San Jose

2050 Gateway Place, San Jose, CA 95110

Complimentary shuttle to/from San Jose International Airport (SJC) •

Discounted parking $10/day

Group Rate: $159/night + tax

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Keynote Speakers

Hear from leaders shaping the future of AI and agentic systems.

Andy Konwinski

Co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI · Founder of Laude Institute

Laude's "Ship Your Research" mission funds open-source AI research through its Moonshots, Slingshots, and Open Frontier programs. Terminal-Bench, a Laude-backed agent benchmark, has become an industry-wide standard for measuring command line performance.

Thariq Shihipar

Member of Technical Staff, Claude Code · Anthropic

Thariq is a core builder of Claude Code, the agentic coding tool that has become one of the most widely adopted developer interfaces for working with LLMs. His technical writing on prompt caching, tool design, and "unhobbling" has shaped how practitioners think about building reliable agentic systems.

Percy Liang

Professor at Stanford · Co-founder of Together AI and Simile AI · Creator of Marin

Percy Liang is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, co-founder of Together AI and Simile AI, and the creator of Marin, which aims to build frontier models fully in the open. He has made a number of contributions in AI, including the SQuAD question answering dataset, the HELM benchmarking framework, generative agents, prefix tuning, and coining the term "foundation models".

The 2026 Program

Four days in San Jose, May 26–29. One day of workshops and tutorials, followed by three days of peer-reviewed research papers, system demonstrations, and keynotes.

Tue, May 26

5 Workshops & Tutorials

Day-long programs on agent skills, agentic software engineering, RL environments, discovery agents, and more.

Browse Workshops

Wed–Fri, May 27–29

63 Research Papers

Peer-reviewed contributions on architecture, optimization, evaluation, security, and engineering of AI and agentic systems.

Browse Papers

Wed–Fri, May 27–29

46 System Demos

Working implementations of AI systems and agent systems, presented live by their authors.

Browse Demos

Participating Institutions

CAIS 2026 papers and demos come from 115+ institutions across academia and industry, including:

Adobe Allen Institute for AI Amazon Bar Ilan University Bosch Carnegie Mellon University Cisco Cornell University Dartmouth College Databricks Duke University EPFL Georgia Tech Google Harvard University IBM Imperial College London Johns Hopkins University KAUST LinkedIn MBZUAI Megagon Labs Meta Microsoft MIT Navan Northeastern University NVIDIA NYU OpenAI Oracle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Princeton University Purdue University Red Hat Replit Salesforce ServiceNow Stanford University UC Berkeley University of Cambridge University of Chicago University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University of Maryland University of Michigan University of Notre Dame University of Pennsylvania University of Texas at Austin University of Toronto University of Washington USC + 65 more

At a Glance

Tue, May 26 Workshops & Tutorials

Wed, May 27 Main Conference — Day 1 (papers, demos, keynote)

Thu, May 28 Main Conference — Day 2 (papers, demos, keynote)

Fri, May 29 Main Conference — Day 3 (papers, demos, keynote)

View full schedule

CAIS × AI Engineer World's Fair

ACM CAIS 2026 has partnered with the AI Engineer World's Fair (June 29–July 2, Moscone West, San Francisco). Accepted CAIS papers that earn an Industry Spotlight or Operational Experience designation will be invited to present at both venues — giving authors peer review through ACM plus a stage in front of 6,000+ practicing engineers.

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Become a sponsor

ACM CAIS 2026 Sponsors

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Our Sponsors Are Hiring

CAIS sponsors are looking for researchers and engineers to build the next generation of AI and agentic systems. Explore open roles from companies shaping this space.

View Open Positions

What is ACM CAIS?

A high-signal forum for rigorous, reproducible research on agentic and AI systems—architectures that shift the Pareto frontier through principled composition of multiple system components, smart inference-time scaling strategies, and systematic verification methods for reliable deployment.

Architectural Patterns & Composition

Networks of Networks and inference-time scaling architectures. Verifier-based systems leveraging generation/verification asymmetry. RAG, multi-agent, and tool-augmented designs.

System Optimization & Efficiency

End-to-end optimization of non-differentiable pipelines. Cost-performance trade-offs, resource allocation across components, and automated architecture search for compound systems at scale.

Engineering & Operations

MLOps for compound AI. Monitoring, debugging, observability, and specifications. Security and safety in multi-component systems. Production deployment case studies.

Evaluation & Benchmarking

Metrics for compound system performance. Reproducibility frameworks and artifact standards. Comparative evaluation methodologies and real-world impact assessment.

Conference Leadership

ACM CAIS is guided by leading researchers who defined the compound AI systems paradigm—scholars and practitioners from MIT, Stanford, Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research, and beyond.

Steering Committee

Graham Neubig

Carnegie Mellon University & All Hands AI

Lingjiao Chen

Microsoft Research

Jeff Dean

Google DeepMind

Omar Khattab

MIT EECS & CSAIL

Monica Lam

Stanford University

Thang Luong

Google DeepMind

Michele Catasta

Replit

Chris Potts

Stanford & Bigspin AI

Naveen Rao

Unconventional AI

Dawn Song

UC Berkeley

Ion Stoica

UC Berkeley

Organizing Committee

Lingjiao Chen

Microsoft Research

Jared Quincy Davis

Mithril AI

Heather Miller

CMU & Two Sigma

Avi Sil

Oracle

Omar Khattab

MIT EECS & CSAIL

Deepti Raghavan

Brown University

Bogdan Stoica

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Josh Quicksall

cmpnd

Matei Zaharia

UC Berkeley & Databricks

View Full Committee

Be part of the inaugural ACM CAIS

Join us May 26–29, 2026 in San Jose. Registration is at capacity, but you can join the waitlist.

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