Connectionists: IEEE CoG 2026 - Call for Special Sessions

[Diego Perez Liebana]

IEEE CoG 2026 - Call for Special Sessions

2026 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 1st - 4th September 2026
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
https://cog2026.fdi.ucm.es/


The annual IEEE Conference on Games (IEEE CoG) aims to be a leading venue for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and novel approaches to bring innovation in and through games. Games are a great domain to study and develop novel ideas in design, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, psychology, education, sociology, and creativity, as well as their applications in real-world problems.

IEEE CoG 2026 will take place at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.

Special sessions offer the opportunity to gather the games community around a particular topic, aiming to promote collaborations, discussions and exchanges between attendees. The topic of the special session must be narrower than that of the conference tracks. Examples of previous CoG special sessions are Games for Health and Wellbeing, Human-AI Interaction through Play, AI Uses in Designing and Playing RTS and MOBA Games, Games for Sustainable Development Goals, eSports Research and Matchmaking in Games.

Special session organizers should do their best to publicize and attract high-quality papers to their sessions, as well as serving as track chairs for the special session. Their work will be coordinated with the program chairs of the conference. Papers from special sessions will be peer-reviewed by a dedicated program committee proposed by the organiser. Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings.

Each special session proposal should include:

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Title for the special session.
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A description of the scope of the special session (no more than 500 words).
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Name, affiliations and email of the organizers. There should be at least 2 organizers, and only the first 2 listed will be asked to serve as track chairs for the special session.
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A list of research groups or institutions with interests within the scope of the session that will be contacted by the organisers to advertise the session.
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A list of (at least) 10 individuals who will serve as program committee for the special session to review the submissions. These individuals must have already accepted to be part of this PC by the time the proposal is submitted, as they will be added to the reviewing system if the proposal is accepted. Include full name, affiliation and contact email address.

Submit your proposals via email to the conference program chairs: Nuria Medina Medina (nmedina at ugr.es<mailto:nmedina at ugr.es>) and Diego Perez Liebana (diego.perez at qmul.ac.uk<mailto:diego.perez at qmul.ac.uk>). Please, include in the subject of the email “CoG 2026 Special Session Proposal”.

Relevant dates for this call are as follows:


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Submission of special session proposals: 9th January 2026.
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Notification of acceptance special sessions: 23rd January 2026.

Review timelines for the special session will match those of the full technical papers:


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Submission of full technical papers: 17th March 2026.
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Notification of acceptance of full technical papers: 1st May 2026.
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Submission of the camera-ready version of full technical papers: 28th May 2026.

Special session papers are 8-page long, maximum, two-column format, including references and appendices. All paper submissions should follow the recommended IEEE conference author guidelines. MS Word and LaTeX templates can be found at https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.

All deadlines are Anytime on Earth (AoE).


NONE OF THE SUBMISSION DEADLINES WILL BE EXTENDED.

We look forward to having you join us at CoG 2026 in Madrid.


Best regards,
The Organizing Committee of IEEE CoG 2026







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Diego Pérez Liébana

Senior Lecturer in Computer Games and Artificial Intelligence
Co-founder of Tabletop R&D<https://www.tabletoprnd.co.uk/>
Programme Director of the MSc Artificial Intelligence
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London
67-75 New Road, E1 1HH, London, UK
Office: Whitechapel Campus, Empire House (DERI), second floor.
Office hours: Wednesdays 9AM-11AM. Email me to arrange a meeting.
email: diego.perez at qmul.ac.uk<mailto:diego.perez at qmul.ac.uk>
web: http://www.diego-perez.net<http://www.diego-perez.net/>

Email notices:
1) You may have seen that I sometimes write emails outside (your) working hours. Please don't take this as an indication that I require an immediate response - we simply may be working at different times.
2) Because of the daily high load of emails, I may take some time to reply to you. If it's important, I may take even more time, because I want to provide an adequate response. If it's urgent, I'll try to reply quickly and maybe just with a very short email. No disrespect, just trying to be efficient - I'd understand if you did the same.

[cid:190e49a3-1157-4c8d-b417-2d65223ed084]
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