Connectionists: Call for Papers: 1st Workshop on Explainability, Transparency, and Safety at KI2026, August 11-14, Bremen, Germany

[Benjamin Paassen]

Dear colleagues,

we cordially invite you to submit your papers to our workshop on 
Explainability, Transparency, and Safety at KI2026, August 11-14 in 
Bremen, Germany.

With the increasing deployment of AI systems in application scenarios 
that profoundly impact humans, demands on the trustworthiness of AI 
systems also increase, as exemplified prominently in the EU guidelines 
for trustworthy AI and the EU AI act. As key dimensions of 
trustworthiness, explainability, transparency, and safety (ExTraSafe) 
are particularly prominent and extensive AI research has focused on 
developing novel methods to enhance ExTraSafe properties of AI models 
and systems. The goal of this workshop is to engage in transdisciplinary 
discussion between AI research, human-AI interaction, AI practitioners, 
and law.

Key topics of interest are (but are not limited to):

- Legal regulation of AI systems, in particular papers on the legal 
compliance of AI systems in certain application domains and design 
implications of legal regulations.
- Practitioners' perspectives on ExTraSafe properties of AI systems in 
high-stakes application domains, e.g. automotive industry, industrial 
automation, healthcare, education, or agriculture.
- Analysis of ExTraSafe properties across the entire system lifecycle, 
especially with respect to architecture considerations, algorithm 
design, and evaluation practices.
- Approaches to social explainable artificial intelligence (sXAI), 
taking into account heterogeneous explanatory needs, social roles and 
contexts, incremental multi-step explanations, and/or multimodality.
- Novel approaches to the evaluation of ExTraSafe properties, especially 
in user and field studies.

Submission Formats

We invite two types of submissions:

- Research papers (up to 8 pages + references in Springer LNCS layout ; 
shorter papers are explicitly welcome), which will receive 10 min 
presentation time + 5 min discussion time in the workshop
- Discussion entries (up to 5000 characters of description directly in 
easy chair), which whil receive 5 min presentation (impulse) time + 10 
min discussion time in the workshop

Submission will be possible via easychair (link will soon be available 
on the workshop website): https://fb-ki.gi.de/extrasafe

For the research papers, we aim for a publication as workshop 
proceedings at CEUR.

Important Dates

- Submission Deadline: May 15, 2026
- Notification of Acceptance: May 29, 2026
- Early-Bird Registration Deadline: June 08, 2026
- Workshop Date: August 11 or 12 (tba), 2026

Best regards

Benjamin Paaßen (Bielefeld University; DFKI), 
bpaassen at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de (Main Contact Person)
Vera Schmitt (TU Berlin)
Thomas Kosch (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Julius Schöning (Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences)
Hanna Drimalla (Bielefeld University)
Florian Rabe (University Erlangen Nuremberg)
Tim Schrills (University of Lübeck)
Daniel Neider (TU Dortmund University; Research Center Trustworthy Data 
Science and Security; Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and 
Artificial Intelligence)
Peter Fettke (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI); 
Saarland University)

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

preferred pronouns: they/them

Office:  CITEC 1.220
Inspiration 1
33619 Bielefeld
Germany
Tel:     +49 521 106 87838
e-mail:  bpaassen at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
website: bpaassen.gitlab.io