Connectionists: Invitation to ESANN2026 Special Session: Beyond Performance: Comprehensive Evaluation Strategies for Impactful Machine Learning

[Benjamin Paassen]

Dear colleagues,

we invite you to submit your work to our special session Beyond 
Performance: Comprehensive Evaluation Strategies for Impactful Machine 
Learning at the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, 
Computational Intelligence, and Machine Learning (ESANN 2026). We focus 
on how we evaluate machine learning systems in ways that go beyond 
predictive accuracy. With the growing importance of responsible AI and 
the requirements of the European AI Act, evaluation must consider 
safety, robustness, fairness, transparency, and explainability. Many of 
these aspects require interdisciplinary approaches.

We are particularly interested in contributions on:
- Fairness, bias mitigation, trust, and robustness evaluation
- User study frameworks for interpretability, usability, and practical 
impact
- Human-centered and participatory evaluation methods
- Evaluation in dynamic, distributed, or real-world environments
- Benchmarks, reproducibility, and regulatory compliance
- Evaluation of large language models and user cognition

More session details are available here: 
https://www.esann.org/special-sessions#session3 . The paper length is 
limited to 6 pages for all paper types (full talk, poster).

Important dates for the conference:

Submission deadline: 19 November 2025
Decisions: 23 January 2026
Conference: 22-24 April 2026

We are looking forward to your submissions!

Kind regards,


Benjamin Paaßen (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Valerie Vaquet (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Ulrike Kuhl (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Saša Brdnik (University of Maribor, Slovenia)

-- 
Jun. Prof. Benjamin Paaßen
Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning
Faculty of Technology
Bielefeld University

preferred pronouns: they/them

Office:  CITEC 1.220
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33619 Bielefeld
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Tel:     +49 521 106 87838
e-mail:  bpaassen at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
website: bpaassen.gitlab.io